To be put off school by tablet use?

Sounds like this chain @RamblingFar -

"....interactive digital experiences. For example, the Trust uses Teams to bring the schools together in large, virtual classrooms to teach a core, shared curriculum or experience a guest lecture."

"For instance, in a class of 30 students, spending just five minutes with each child on reading practice daily would consume most of the teacher’s time. But with Reading Progress layered with Reading Coach, students get ample, interactive practice, and teachers can optimize assistance. Digital assessments track both progress and barriers to learning, giving teachers a data-driven approach"

They seem to think it's great but it makes me shudder.

I would be really interested in longer term studies showing attainment and education and employment outcomes for children who have had this level of digital interaction all the way through vs those who don't. Anecdotally the screen heavy schools round us don't seem to have any beneficial impact into secondary and further education at all.

I'm a primary supply teacher. There's several academy chains near me that use them almost exclusively in class from year 1 upwards. The children don't have any exercise books, everything is done on the iPads. There doesn't seem to be any advantage to learning and it seems like a ton of extra work for the teachers to me - but equally I don't think it's been embedded for enough years yet to see whether it does work long term.

You can definitely find schools that don’t rely on tablets to keep the students entertained and quiet.
Look around a few more. I wouldn’t want this for my child either.

I can't say for sure, but at my son's school they have app based homework for maths and spelling, and some time during the school day for them to do it if they don't do it at home. There are some parents who don't do any screen time so those children I assume get prioritised for using the tablets in school? There is no reason they can't be done on a PC though. My son doesn't have a tablet but he uses my phone for his app homework. This year my son's school have dropped the spelling app and gone back to paper spellings, and I find it a nightmare, as the sheet never comes home on the right day and we can never find it when we have any time. So I do prefer the app based homework, although I share concerns with screen time. It is unmonitored, age inappropriate addictive gaming and short form content that is damaging imo, not 10 minutes of times tables on an app.

In my DC well rated and probably relatively well off state school (IE it's not just a funding decision) they do play maths games on Chrome books to practice addition, times tables etc but it's 1 or 2 times a week at most. I think this balance is ok and doesn't particularly encourage obsessive screen time. We have access to the same games to practice at home but that's optional. However in y1 and y2 there is sometimes more TV time than I expected (but I expected none !)

I think they need to ask the school for slightly more information about quantity of tablet use and the nature. I think some screen time will be the case everywhere but the extent will vary.

Its a no from me
Same with the ones that showed them shit tv (we are not talking cbeebies, we are talking asmr nonsense) everytime it rains...

I've commented on this elsewhere but near us is an Academy chain that is obsessed with screen time and the children use screens for everything, including reading. It's apparently Ofsted Outstanding.

I absolutely did not want my dc to go there and have given them a low tech and screen limited primary school experience.

They have not in anyway suffered academically and indeed have won awards for coding and IT in high school, so not being given an iPad early does not in anyway influence your tech ability later on.

Really? Our local council supply all high school students with iPads at no cost to parents. I think it's being rolled out to primary school pupils as well.

I don’t think it is standard to be using them that often. My DS’s primary school had tablet (and, separately, laptop) time but it was infrequent enough - perhaps 1-2x a week for an hour, more as an optional reward - that the kids were excited about it. Consequently he’d always mention when they had had it. What may affect this is that his school did not have enough for everyone, so there was probably a rota for each year’s usage. To be honest I wished he had more laptop/IT time as I felt they didn’t learn enough about how to properly use computers etc.

I think there is a balance. I don’t think infants should be using them in lessons unless ict but my year 5 child has moved to a new school and has been given an iPad and it works quite well as lesson notes are on there and homework is set via google classroom. The first week it was a massive novelty but as the weeks have gone on it’s now a tool to facilitate learning and homework which is often done electronically and it’s not used all the time in every lesson.

Interestingly though the new school is quite old school about some things like spelling and that is working much better for her. At her old school (with no iPads) spellings were just done on the spelling shed app and she developed no muscle memory for actually writing those words. She is expected to write the spellings every day, use them in sentences etc. You have to look at how they are actually used and not default to ‘iPad school will always be on a screen’.

I would avoid that school.

Not really. It professional here. Device usage is a skill that can be acquired later in life in record time with no loss by design.
The best prep is to train young brains screen free, or almost screen free.
Fortunately not all schools are requesting tablet-based homework. The best ones are focused on paper-based work.

I guess it depends on use. In the school where I work we use tablets for ICT lessons, so not weekly but for a few weeks per term, in our ICT curriculum we have done basic programing/coding on them in Scratch, they have use them to make and design posters (graphic design skills) and recently we used them to make Kandinsky vector art. Screens are here to stay and although I absolutely agree that over reliance on them in a classroom setting is definitely not good, they can have their place in a modern classroom and are able to be used to teach skills that can be very useful.

most of our local schools are run by the same academy trust and all children year 1 upwards were issued with an iPad each. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages. It levels the playing field for the less advantaged children but the safeguarding has recently been called in to question. My year 3 child avoids his school iPad at all costs when he’s at home!

It’s normal in our school but is used in a much more structured way and each child has a very limited time to use the tablet. It hasn’t led to requests for a tablet at home and my seven year olds still don’t have regular TV time, let alone access to any other device. Most other families are the same. It’s a private school that goes up to 18 and it’s typical for 16 year olds at the school not to have smartphones.

It's normal. It's also necessary in a world where every job involves using technology. Holding back on a child developing their IT skills is on par with holding them back on learning to write.

Not normal in our school and would put me off. I wish we could go back to separate ICT lessons and remove all the gameification of education. Theres little evidence that using tablets etc is beneficial for kids, it’s progress without much of an evidence base.

I think that as long as there is plenty of time not on any kind of screen that the opportunities that tech is giving children can make learning engaging and productive. At our school, we use iPads for a lot of maths lessons. Not for the whole lesson- which is a mixture of teacher input, children using concrete resources and guided practice etc. But 3 times a week or so the independent work is on this particular educational app.

its actually amazing. The programme is intuitive so if the child is getting lots of a certain type of question wrong, it will give them more practice on this question type. The teacher’s laptop is connected to all the children’s iPads so if a lot of them are getting one particular question wrong, you can freeze everyone’s iPad and give more input. There is space for children to draw diagrams or models to work out the answers. It’s been brilliant and really improved results. I’m fairly technophobic but have struggled to see a downside.

Not all screen time is equal. There are some fantastic learning opportunities on the internet. Computers are part of life nowadays and it’s right that children should learn about them.

So, I teach year 6 and we just did two very successful lessons on the iPads. Today we read newspaper articles on the newsround website and used another website called seesaw to copy and paste features of newspaper articles onto it. The children got a lot out of this. Yesterday we looked at evolution and searched on Google for animal adaptations, then summarised how these helped them survive. With both of these lessons, before the iPads, I would have had to print information off for the kids and they wouldn’t have had the same independence over their own learning.

i have been teaching for ten years and have gone from no iPads to a class iPad to children having an iPad trolly across the school
we can access. Used effectively they are very good for teaching and learning. The class also use them effectively to help them, need to see something on the board closer? Take a picture. Check a calculation? It’s a calculator. Google an interesting fact? It’s there! They even used the google translate tool to talk to the new boy who only speaks Portuguese. They learn a lot of times tables from playing TTrockstars too.

I say this as a mum of a 4 year old and 1 year old who have no screen time at all at our house (they watch a bit of telly at granny’s house twice a week and that is honestly it).

I’m happy for my daughter to learn how to use the iPads in school, as it helps her fit in and they are a good teaching tool (used effectively).

I think the complete opposite and would not want my own children to go to a school that was using iPads in most of the lessons. I’ve been a primary school teacher for thirty years. We have iPads and we have laptops but we don’t use them in most lessons by any stretch. Probably twice a week.

Interesting. From yr1 two years ago mine had computer lessons which was going to computer room, typing/tinkering on keyboard, learning basics about staying safe online, using google canvas to draw their portraits. This was built upon last year and continues this year. Since term started they have done more about thinking up and using passwords, logging in and out. My son is keen on hacking 😁. They use chrome books and are not necessarily a well resourced school.

Eta: they are not allowed free rein and I don't think computer lessons are daily.

Mine too.

We have enough Chromebooks for 50 per cent of children in school to use one at once. Like most primaries, we use them for Computing lessons, some maths games and not much else. Without doubt, at least 3 days a week children don't use them at all and on the days they do it is rarely for more than 45 mins total (and often less than half that). There's no online homework. I don't think that's unusual at all.

It’s in no way standard.

Yes, schools have iPads, which are used on occasion but not for the majority or lessons.

One of my friends dc went to an iPad reliant primary school and it was a load of shit frankly.

I’ve never once heard of a secondary school where parents have to buy an iPad. Even if that is a thing m the OP’s child is three so it’s not relevant. iPads might be obsolete in eight years for a start.