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@Emilynn yes I absolutely heard him on CBC radio and I was hooked
@Emilynn as a teacher I'm interested to know how you navigate all of this especially when the school systems are giving kids iPads and everything... Any words of wisdom I'm open to. It's a messy topic especially with the whole controversial screen time and whatnot and kids being glued to the phone. My son watches Miss Rachel and I can see he's very hooked to the television... But thankfully I can divert him since he's still so young and I could think about what's important to be now because I just want to help guide him through all of this...
Definitely! So I haven't really had to navigate this as a parent yet (my kiddo is just 13 months old so I still have some time before I need to worry about social media/ having access to personal electronic devices), but navigating it as a teacher with my students has honestly been very difficult. At my school, we don't give students laptops or tablets (except in very special cases), but I teach in a computer lab, and pretty much all of my students have at least one phone, ear buds, smart watches, etc. Most of them have a very hard time with self-control and self-discipline when it comes to their devices. Our school does have a no-personal-electronics-during-class policy (new this year), but honestly I've been having a very hard time implementing it. I will tell students to zip their phones in their bookbag (instead of in their pocket where they can absent-mindedly grab it), and 5 minutes later it will be in their hands again.
The amount of control these devices have over them is honestly so concerning, and it's ruining their focus, as well as their ability to persevere through hard things (like a difficult problem in class). I'm not sure what the best way to avoid this would be, as a parent, but I'd think that having designated device-free time on a regular basis would help. In the last section of the book, the author gives advice on what parents can do, but I haven't gotten there yet :p
@Emilynn omggggg
@Emilynn I read everything you wrote and thank you for sharing. It is such a stressful topic. But you're doing great showing care and thoughtfulness about all of this and being honest about the stress. To be honest with you it's a crazy thing to try to avoid so maybe the right thing to do is not avoid at all together but teach them how to use technology. It's like those methadone clinics where people teach addicts how to use the needle as opposed to telling them to not use them at all.
@Emilynn This is such a stressful difficult topic and I'm very glad to hear your experience with it specifically as a teacher and parent. All I can say and I know you didn't ask for advice or feedback but you're a mom you're a boss and a leader and a teacher and you have the magic in you to empower and guide these students whether they have things in their hands or not I know it's so hard because the policy even though it's great that it was introduced this year I'm very happy to hear that we still have to learn to work with it right. And I would venture a guess that empowering the kids and teaching them in some way it'll be very hard but knowing that they are in control and powered might give them that locus of control so that they know that they're the boss not that technology is the boss. Sorry girl a lot of run-on sentences as this is audio transcribe. But I hope that I am clear in some way.
@Emilynn I think like anything else that's addictive and keeps us in a state of being passive or a victim or being controlled or brainwashed etc etc etc I wonder if it would help to empower the kids abilities and skills even while they are using the phone and everything else, sorry I should just speak for myself, I think the approach I will take is to go with the flow but kind of try to disarm and build detachment between them and technology so that they are empowered and it's intact within them as opposed to attach to technology but if it is attached to technology then maybe try to reach them. I don't know all that wise teacher stuff that we do, it's to empower them as persons. Am I right? Happy to keep talking about this. I have seen horrific things when technology is taken away from The Young generation they go nuts
I'm a high school teacher, with a tech background, and I don't have any course recommendations, but I will recommend the book "The Anxious Generation" by Jonathan Haidt. It was published quite recently, and some of my coworkers read it as a book club last year. I'm finding it to be quite informative (still working my way through it)