Distractions caused by digital devices in the classroom, which have a detrimental impact on students’ educational development, is an issue Chinook’s Edge School Division is well aware of.
However, instead of instituting a sweeping and potentially overreaching division-wide ban, the school division's superintendent said the approach to date has been to allow individual schools along with input from communities, to develop their own policies to address the 21st century dilemma.
“We’ve left it to the discretion of our teachers to come up with strategies,” said Kurt Sacher.
“We like trusting the professional judgment of our teachers.”
While there have been many discussions around creating processes to limit student access to cellphones in Chinook's Edge schools, those conversations have not included considering a large scale, division-wide ban, he said last week during a phone interview.
“Classrooms in our schools have a variety of different ways to respond with cellphones,” he said, citing as an example that in some instances, students are asked to turn in their devices at the start of the class and then get them back when the bell rings.
“Cellphones are put on park when learning needs to happen.”
In one school, student access to digital devices was significantly limited following an effort to work with that community to create a policy, he said.
“As a jurisdiction, we like to work with each community independently to develop plans.”
Kurt Sacher, Chinook’s Edge School Division superintendent, said teachers, in coordination with feedback from communities, should develop digital device policies. File photo
In his experience as an administrator in education, Sacher said digital devices like cellphones can create a challenge for many students and their families.
“It certainly is a concern out there,” he said.
“We’ve had more challenges at that middle school age level,” he said, adding those students on average seem to be more prone than their peers to be distracted by the prevalent presence of social media.
The grades 5-8 range is where the school division has found that students need the most help and support when it comes to dealing with the fallout of social media interactions that occur off of school property, but nevertheless often end up trickling into classrooms and causing distractions, he said.
But despite the irrefutable drawbacks and challenges posed by digital devices, the technology also presents a potential to play a positive role in a student’s education, he said.
“That’s the dilemma,” he said.
“That’s where a school jurisdiction would hesitate to put a division-wide ban in place.”
There are certain contexts in which cellphones are not a distraction, but rather an important tool that substantially facilitates a student’s ability to quickly access information online to conduct research for a project or assignment to actually support learning in the classroom, he said.
“The other issue to be aware of, is parents wanting to be able to contact their children,” he said.
“There are a lot of considerations in a rural school community.”
When asked about the news that Ontario’s government is moving forward with a provincewide ban on cellphones, he said such decisions are made based largely on a particularly localized political issue.
“We need to look at our context in Alberta,” he said, when asked the followup question of whether this province, which has no such plans in place, should follow suit.
“It would never hurt to re-examine the impact cellphones are having on young people,” not just on their education and development but also their mental health, he said.
“We’re fairly convinced it’s having an impact outside the school as well. So taking a closer look at that wouldn’t hurt.”
But any government response, he added, should be carefully measured and reasoned. A ban should not be instituted from the top down just because another provincial government is doing it or due to localized political pressure, he said.
On average, teens get more than three hours of screen time a day, which includes a combination of cellphones, tablets, televisions and computers, according to Health Canada, and during school time, portable devices cause major distractions.
The Ontario government has, according to press reports, said that more distractions lead to lower test scores.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Alberta, media have reported the Elk Island Public School Division initiated a ban on cellphones when students returned to class last week. This includes schools in Vegreville, Fort Saskatchewan and Sherwood Park.
