iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

The debate over screen time is typically accompanied by a good deal of finger-wagging: The digital experience is a ruinous habit, akin to binge-eating curly fries, gambling on cock fights or drinking whiskey with breakfast.

Meanwhile, social scientists who are trying to study the actual psychological effects of screen time are left in a bind. For one thing, good luck finding a “control group” of people living the nondigital life or anything close to it. Children pick up devices early, and by their teens are spending six hours a day and more on screens — with phones, laptops and iPads, guzzling from the spigot of Netflix, Hulu and YouTube.

Moreover, standard measures such as “average daily Facebook usage” are now practically meaningless. Consider what a person can do in just the time it takes to wait for a bus: text, watch a comedy skit, play a video game, buy concert tickets, take five selfies, each with a different set of cartoon ears.

Learning how that behavior shapes an individual’s life experience requires an entirely new approach, one that recognizes that screen time is no mere habit but now a way of life. So argued a consortium of social and data scientists recently in the journal Human-Computer Interaction. The phrase “screen time,” they noted, is too broad to be scientifically helpful; it cannot remotely capture the fragmented, ever-shifting torrent of images that constitutes digital experience.

“It’s very counterintuitive to say at this stage, but the fact is, no one really knows what the heck people are seeing on their screens,” said Byron Reeves, a professor of communications at Stanford and an author on the paper. “To understand what’s happening, we need to know what exactly that is.”

THE ARRIVAL OF iOS 12 means you can now use Apple's long-awaited suite of Screen Time tools. The new features, which appear under Settings > Screen Time, are designed to give you a better idea of how you're spending time on your phone and limit the time you spend on certain apps.

It’s all part of a greater push by tech companies to mitigate the ways personal devices are engineered to be addictive, by creating all kinds of new “digital wellness” features. Similar features showed up on Facebook and Instagram this summer, and Android’s own set of screen time tools are currently in beta on Android Pie.

Looking to use your phone less? Scroll down—mindfully and purposefully!—to find out how to get the most out of Apple's Screen Time tools.

Before having kids, tech entrepreneur Nirav Tolia spent hours online each day catching up on his favorite sports teams, doing research, or scrolling through social media.

Now the father of three young sons, Tolia, the co-founder and chief executive of neighborhood-based social network Nextdoor, goes out of his way to put his smartphone down so he and his wife can lead by example for their kids.

“Our real priority is getting them out of the house and experiencing the world,” Tolia, who lives in San Francisco, said. “We have a no-phone policy when we’re with our children. That doesn’t mean we don’t have our phones with us — but we’re not watching YouTube out of the corner of our eyes.”

Are today’s students spending too much time in front of computer screens? The more important question is: are students engaged in powerful learning experiences and, whenever possible, given voice and choice in what, how, and when they learn? Digital technology can powerfully facilitate this process, if thoughtful adults deploy it wisely. Otherwise, it can be mind-numbing, or worse.

The emerging generation of educational technology has the power to accelerate learning productivity in ways we can scarcely imagine. If we can ensure that students are connected to it through the help of teachers, a natural balance between online and offline experiences will develop.

Emotional outbursts. Lost sleep. These are signs that your kids are spending too much time with digital devices. Here's what you can do about it.

The Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) released new guidelines today for digital media use and screen time for kids aged five to 19. Today’s guidelines follow recommendations set out in 2017 that focused on kids aged zero to five. But while those guidelines targeted screen time limits for kids in that age group (no screens at all for infants and toddlers under two, and less than an hour a day for kids two to five), the guidelines for kids and teens focus more on how and when screens are used rather than how long. “We really wanted to highlight that content, context and kids’ individual traits are as important as specific screen time limits,” says Michelle Ponti, chair of the CPS Digital Health Task Force and lead author on the statement.

54% of U.S. teens say they spend too much time on their cellphones, and two-thirds of parents express concern over their teen's screen time. But parents face their own challenges of device-related distraction

Parents today struggle to set screen time guidelines.

One big reason is a lack of role models. Grandma doesn't have any tried-and-true sayings about iPad time. This stuff is just too new.

But many experts on kids and media are also parents themselves. So when I was interviewing dozens of them for my book The Art of Screen Time, I asked them how they made screen time rules at home.

None of them held themselves up as paragons, but it was interesting to see how the priorities they focused on in their own research corresponded with the priorities they set at home.