Screens in schools

[Calpolinator]

Can I ask how people manage this? My daughter is young primary school age and they have started to use apps for homework and apps for competitions between each other (reading quizzes and maths etc.)

We aren't completely screen free at home but do try to be intentional and haven't introduced any handheld devices, many of my daughter's friends seem to be getting tablets now with the understanding that this is for homework but we made a decision early to delay smart devices and this seems much easier if they just aren't available at home.

How do people feel about screens in schools? I know a lot of professionals are campaigning against this currently. Has anyone chosen to request paper homework and ignored the apps? Do you have family devices and if so how are these managed? I'd love to know

The evidence suggests that homework isn’t useful in primary schools so you could ask to opt out but I don’t think you should add to the teacher’s workload by asking for paper homework.

How much homework is there? I have a y8 and a y5 and neither had much in infants. Some TTRS (10m a day was suggested I think?) my y5 now has some century tech to do every week but that doesn’t take long. All my y8’s homework is online.

I’d have a chat with the teacher and see what’s expected. Neither of mine would have needed their own tablet/ laptop in primary as it was minimal but in secondary it’s very useful.

So I think there are two things here: screens in schools and screens at home for homework.

In my experience, most schools cannot afford enough screens to use them all that often at school. My dc use screens at school only for computer science/technology lessons. Same as I did back in the 80s! That’s about twice a week. Otherwise, everything is paper based. This is true even for my secondary age one. I think they could actually do with using computers more in secondary! But they just don’t have enough of them.

For my primary age one, the only thing we do regularly is reading. And that’s in an actual book. We do spelling and that’s also written on paper. There is maths practice to do and that’s on an app, but I only do that maybe once a week. It takes 5 minutes. So 5 minutes of screen time for homework is fine. It’s certainly less screen time than he has for non-homework activities.

The immediate response, particularly for maths facts, is being shown to be much more useful in terms of homework than paper homework. I presume an adult in the household has a phone / tablet / laptop? Allow that to be used for homework only and sit with them.

We have told the school that we are not using screens for homework and DD gets worksheets instead. Stand your ground! It is not necessary at primary level at all.

DD(7) just has a maths app as her only screen based school work.

I’m pretty strict on screens but it doesn’t really bother me. We put it on an old iPad that used to belong to my mum. My DD doesn’t know the code to unlock it, and it only has the maths app on it anyway. It’s also not “her” iPad. I don’t really mind how much time she spends on it doing maths - she’ll happily spend half an hour doing it, sometimes coming to me if she gets stuck. She’s getting through a lot more questions than if they gave her worksheets to bring home.
It helps that she loves maths and last academic year when they didn’t have this app she’d ask me to buy her kids’ maths workbooks, like the kind you get at WHSmith, to do in the school holidays.

This is interesting, could I see where you've read about this? Thanks!

Ah see my daughter's school does have enough iPads to provide enough for each year group, I don't think they are sat doing lessons on them but in 'my learning time' they have access to them to do maths or reading quizzes and I'm just not sure how I feel about it!

Weekly homework! So quite significant

But how much per week? My year 5 gets weekly homework but it literally takes 5 minutes, it’s about 3 questions. Have you looked at what they’re asking for?

When printed out it's 2 sheets of phonics and a sheet of maths. I'm happy to print these so completing it isn't really an issue and printing it is certainly one solution. I'm wondering how other families manage it if they are keen to delay the use of smart devices, or devices that connect to the internet.

Also keen to be directed to info on the benefits of learning on screens! I have heard the opposite from professionals I've engaged with but I'm wary of living in an echo chamber!

The benefits of computer-generated feedback for mathematics problem solving published in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology is a well respected study if you are interested in reading more. It lays out the benefits and potential pitfalls.

I imagine it depends on the nature of the screen learning.

The app my DD’s school uses is endless, she can do a many (or as few) questions as she wants. There’s an instant response whether she’s right or wrong, and it adjusts the next set of questions based on ones she’s got wrong. So if she does a batch of, say, time related questions and struggles, it will focus on that, but if she got them all right, it would do harder time questions next time.
She also does it with a pen and paper next to her, so when the question is something like 376 + 848, she still has to practice the written out way of doing it.

I’m pretty strict on screen time compared to other parents I know, but I’ve not got a problem with this.

So it's probably a 45 min computing lesson, a few 10 min reading quizzes and maybe half an hour of a maths app. Which isn't loads over the course of a week really. And maybe watching the odd 10 mins of newsround in the classroom. The year 4 times table check is on a screen which is one of the reasons schools push times table rocks tars etc.