To be put off school by tablet use?

[Monuy]

Would love to know if this is normal.

We went to view our closest primary school and the one we want to go for. Noticed the children in year 2 were clustered around tablets, in an unstructured fashion. Teacher had a few more and gave them out to children who asked.

Apparently tablets with educational games are used frequently in lessons, and homework is set requiring a tablet or phone to complete it. This starts from reception. I was a bit taken back. We were hoping to hold off on tablets for as long as possible. DS watches television in the family room and we aren't too bothered about restricting that, but in terms of devices has only ever had 10-15 minutes or so playing on a game on a phone maybe once a month. We are not keen to encourage this- feel it's a slippery slope which will need constant boundary setting and monitoring. They have free rein of Disney plus and children's iPlayer - nothing else. I've genuinely never felt the need yet to purchase a tablet. I don't want to moralise about it, just not keen.

The staff were very enthusiastic about this. Am I just out of touch? This has made me genuinely doubt sending him there.

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.

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 would avoid that school.

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 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.

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'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.

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...

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.

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.

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'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.

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.