The question put to me was "How do you get students to put down an iPad when it is time?" As I searched for an appropriate response to this parent I thought about how much our questions reveal about us. This one revealed more than I was comfortable with. Laid bare in this simple question was a history of fights and fits about screen time. It was a plea for a solution, for an inspired answer to end this problem. I stood there, once again without the answer they wanted, trying to craft the answer they needed to hear. What we were talking about was crafting a meaningful context for using devices.
The wider question is how do you get anyone to stop doing what they want to do and move on to something else?
How do you compete with a device and an app built on an economy of screen time? You don't. This is a force you have to guide and direct, but not oppose. When I started learning about integrating technology into education I was working as a high school English teacher. My struggle was getting my students to unplug from their devices and tune in to Homer. Sadly, most days it seemed that the song of the ancient bard could not win when pitted head to head against Beyoncé. So I pivoted. I resolved that if I had to crawl into my students' world through their ear buds, I would.
Perhaps my first advice to this parent should have been "If you can't get your kids off YouTube, launch your own YouTube channel. (I wonder how many parents have done this already, I think it is actually a pretty good idea.)
I am not making light of the very real challenges of parenting in the age of the ubiquitous screen, but controlling screen time at home and at school are very different things. When I decided to bring technology into my classes, I did introduce a management challenge. Like other management challenges, the answer was not in making rules, but in building an environment of active engagement.
As I was still standing in front of a parent who was clearly asking for help, I struggled to quickly assemble my experience into some scraps of advice they could actually use. Of course there is more difference in our contexts than they may immediately see. At school I have 24 students at a time and often the will of one can be directed by the others. When time is called, even the student who does not want to stop sees all the other students turning off the device and putting them away. That is not to say I don't wrestle with the students' wills and wants, but it is usually at the beginning of the class. As they come in they ask what we are doing and call out for their favorite apps. They hope out loud for robots. Sometimes I forget to block suggested videos at then end of one of my embedded video lessons and they shout for the ones they want to see as soon as they pop up. I don't respond to every question or plea shouted out, I transition into what we are doing. This was the first piece of advice I gave -Set a clearly defined goal.
I know it also helps when you focus iPad time on on creating rather than consuming. If you are trying to get someone to stop playing a game you are competing with everyone who designed that game for the player's attention. any well-designed game has a primary purpose of keeping the player in the game. Most of the games, the free ones especially, can only measure success by the amount of time the player spends looking at the screen. This holds true for Youtube, have you seen their playlists in action? One video now dovetails into the next, allowing the viewer to be washed away on a sea of ads and videos without making a conscious choice between stopping and continuing. How do we avoid this malicious attention trap? -Focus screen time on creating rather than consuming. If the expectation is to make a video rather than watching 20 of them the user knows when they are done and they will have something they want to share with you at the end of it, bringing them back out of the screen-based world and back in to face to face time.
The end of tech time in school is less challenging than at home because of the nature of school itself. We are always moving on to something else. The advice this becomes is -Always have something awesome to move on to. Of course there are times when all of these strategies fail, so what can you do? In my case I bring out the puppet, and Wokka tells the students to pack up the iPads. If someone isn't listening, maybe he kisses their cheek or bites their head to get their attention. (Don't worry he doesn't have any teeth.) I use the puppet as a way to avoid becoming frustrated, the puppet is much more patient than I am.
In the end I can't say I know anything about parenting, and I try to avoid situations where I am telling parents what to do. When I am asked my advice I can only speak to what I do in the classroom content and the factors present that I think contribute to my success. This, as best I can figure, is what compassion looks like.
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