It takes 20 minutes to refocus kids after they have been on electronics. Even if they are sprinkled throughout the day, they are a huge waste of time. They are also a massive waste of money because they require so much staff to keep them functioning properly.

When fcps introduced “bring your own device” to elementary school when my kids were in ES, I was shocked. That was the beginning. It is so obviously bad for elementary and even middle school kids to have screens at school.

Everyday, I have to say lids down multiple times per class while circling the room. Even then I have several students per class who won't until I physically close the lid to break their zombie-like stupor. I have to police games, tiktok, YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail messages, etc. every day every class.

Half the class will sneak games during online activities. Even if you block them, there are ways around it.

I go paper as much as possible. But it's still difficult since most of our activities, hw, and calc is online. We need to go back to paper and pencil. Save the laptops for highschool!

The irony of this is that we knew it all along. Sometime in the 1990's, there was a study in Peru where they gave every kid a laptop. Rather than becoming tech geniuses, the kids stopped caring about school, helped out less at home and spent a lot of time playing video games. Despite that study, American schools went all in on one-to-one devices and are now surprised that kids can't read as well, their math skills are worse and social skills are rock bottom. (For the person who is thinking, but my kid is doing great with his laptop on all day, your kid is very much the exception.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-19/michael-bloomberg-kids-are-spending-too-much-class-time-on-laptops

Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions of taxpayer dollars equipping classrooms with laptops and other devices in hopes of preparing kids for a digital future. The result? Students have fallen further behind on the skills they most need to succeed in careers: the three R’s plus a fourth — relationships.

Today, about 90% of schools provide laptops or tablets to their students. Yet as students spend more time than ever on screens, social skills are deteriorating and test scores are near historic lows.

Just 28% of eighth graders are proficient in math and 30% in reading. For 12th graders, the numbers are similarly dismal (24% in math and 37% in reading, according to the most recently available scores). And US students have also fallen further behind their peers in other countries.

The push for laptops in classrooms came from technologists, think tanks and government officials, who imagined that the devices would allow for curricula to be tailored around student needs, empowering them to learn at their own pace and raising achievement levels. It hasn’t worked.