(2025-01-06) ZviM Childhood And Education #8 Dealing With The Internet

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education #8: Dealing with the Internet. It’s rough out there. In this post, I’ll cover the latest arguments that smartphones should be banned in schools, including simply because the notifications are too distracting (and if you don’t care much about that, why are the kids in school at all?), problems with kids on social media including many negative interactions, and also the new phenomenon called sextortion.

Table of Contents

• How Many Notifications?.
• Ban Smartphones in Schools.
• Antisocial Media.
• Screen Time.
• Cyberbullying.
• Sextortion.

How Many Notifications?

Tanagra Beast reruns the experiment of having a class tally their phone notifications. Some had over 100 notifications in 1 period

What if you asked only about notifications that would actually distract?
There was even more concentration at the top. The more notifications you got, the more likely you were to be distracted by each one.

Which apps dominate? Instagram and Snapchat were nearly tied, and together accounted for 46% of all notifications. With vanilla text messages accounting for an additional 35%

The two top recipients, with their rate of 450 notifications per hour (!), or about one every eight seconds, had interesting stories to tell. One of these students had a job after school, and about half their messages (but only half) were work-related. The other was part of a large group chat, and additionally had a friend at home sick who was peltering them with a continuous rant about everything and nothing, three words at time.

Official school business is a significant contributor to student notification loads. At least 4% of all notifications were directly attributable to school apps, and I would guess the indirect total (through standard texts, for example) might be closer to 10-15%. For students who get very few notifications, 30-50% of their notifications might be school-related. Our school’s gradebook app is the biggest offender, in part because it’s poorly configured and sends way more notifications than anyone wants.

Ban Smartphones in Schools