Chronicle Summer 2024

22 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Screen Time Digital Technology and Schools By David Flower, Sub-Warden Academic, and Charles Wallendahl, Head of Theology, Philosophy and Ethics

rather than enhancing them. At St Edward’s we always avoid a ‘Google it’ or ‘ask AI’ approach. Where tech has been most useful, it has been through the impact of the same apps that make most of our lives easier – our familiarity with Teams and OneNote allowed us to flip to online learning in the pandemic and eases the dissemination of notices and documents every day, just like they do in workplaces all over the world. Likewise, we make use of lots of testing and quizzing tools like Seneca, Carousel and Forms – the benefits of retrieval practice have been proved beyond doubt and these apps offer many stimulating ways for pupils to test their knowledge. Winkleman cites a UCL study that found pupils did worse at PISA reading, maths and science assessments done on a computer rather than on paper. At Teddies, most assessments are still paper-based and whilst some exam boards such as AQA are trialling digital assessments, most assessments will probably continue to be handwritten. There are some benefits to digital assessments, and the Pathways and Perspectives courses make use of a digital portfolio approach to showcase music, jewellery, art and design. During the pandemic, many universities moved away from traditional exams, but with the rise of AI, many have returned to assessments under more tightly controlled conditions to increase fairness and validity. Winkleman refers to a Valencian study that concluded reading from paper improves depth of understanding. Such studies are not isolated and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found a correlation between students who read books more often on paper, versus reading on devices, with higher reading performance and greater self-reported enjoyment of reading. Reading on a screen leads to more skimming and worse comprehension. Teddies introduced ‘Time to Read’ in 2022, a drop-

Winkleman echoes the calls for a screen-free childhood, most famously

The issue of how digital technology should be used in schools is very much an educational hot topic. Many educationalists argue that children need to be exposed to the technology that they will have to interact with in their adult lives and that the benefits of early exposure are self-evident in the digital literacy they acquire. Critics, however, rail against liberal mobile phone policies and the haphazard introduction of devices like iPads into classrooms before any educational benefit has been proved. Sophie Winkleman recently made a celebrated attack on technology in schools in the Telegraph , putting forward four main arguments, each of which we will consider here.

advocated by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation . Here at St Edward’s we introduced centrally managed Surface devices and banned mobile phones from classrooms until the Sixth Form in 2022, thus mitigating many of the risks that Winkleman and Haidt are rightly concerned by. Having kept abreast of the research, we have introduced further restrictions since, and our own survey data suggests that the school is an even happier place for it. A blanket ban, however, of the sort suggested in Winkleman’s article strikes us as rather dogmatic. Our Pathways and Perspectives and IB courses harness

technology and encourage pupils to become skilled in ways of working that will be a feature of their future lives whether they might be a designer working in CAD or a solicitor redrafting a contract. It’s hard to hit a sweet spot, but at St Edward’s we think we have done just that. Winkleman worries that EdTech products are unproven, have not been subjected to randomised controlled trials and have, in many cases, only been embraced for the sake of it, or for schools to appear ‘cool.’ We agree! Lots of EdTech products, like smartboards, attempt to solve a problem that did not exist. Daisy Christodoulou, a seasoned writer on educational topics, has pointed out in her excellent blog posts, that EdTech can be outright dangerous if it jeopardises memory and skill development,

Callum McPhail in a Computer Science class