Instead, her son Max wanted to talk about technology.
He’d played on the PBSKids app during his technology class, watched Super Why! — a show about reading-powered superheroes — with his classmates while waiting in line for his turn to wash his hands and already reached level 12 on his DreamBox math app.
Sanford was taken aback.
At home, her family had limited screens for their son. She expected at least some exposure once he moved into the public school system: As a substitute teacher, she’d seen firsthand how technology had been integrated into the classroom, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.
“But it makes me sad that during snack and storytime and breaks, a screen is used for every single aspect,” Sanford said. “And there’s not a lot of transparency about it.”
Phones wielded by middle and high schoolers were once the biggest bugaboo in the school technology battles. But since Oregon banned phones during the school day, attention has shifted to how much class time is spent on school-issued iPads and laptops, starting as early as kindergarten.
The impacts of screen time on children are well documented. Research suggests that, used judiciously, screens can provide some educational benefits to children and tweens. The American Academy of Pediatrics says specific, relevant use of technology, from learning to code to graphic design, can be beneficial for students; passive consumption of content or gamified digital worksheets are not. And the organization warns against the use of screen time to help quell chaotic behavioral outbursts.
Excessive screen time for minors also has negative effects on their cognitive, physical, social-emotional and linguistic development, research shows.
Family medicine physician Holly Milne, who is involved in efforts to cut screen use during class at Portland Public Schools’ Access Academy program, said she sees the impacts of screen-saturated childhoods play out in real-time in her practice.
“I have watched childhood obesity increase and watched mental health be the No. 1 thing I see kids for now,” Milne said. “People cannot get off their screens, even adults. This is a societal problem and it will take structural change to address it. When kids get on screens, they can’t control themselves.”
In classrooms these days, student assignments are most likely to be available to them not via old-fashioned paper syllabi, but via online platforms that come pre-loaded onto district-issued laptops. Pencils have been replaced by keyboards and students complete their work via apps like the classroom management system Canvas, which lets teachers leave online feedback and grades and upload videos and links to articles that are relevant to coursework.
It’s not as though there was no tech available in pre-pandemic classrooms, teachers and school leaders say. But issuing a device to each student and allowing them to take it home with them at night is much more widespread now than it was even six or seven years ago.
“Students got pretty used to being on devices during COVID,” said Megan Clifford, assistant principal of Cedar Park Middle School in Beaverton. “Everyone got used to delivering instruction and posting everything on Canvas, and students got used to turning things in on Canvas. That really seems like the turning point.”
In response to growing unease about students’ steady diet of screen time, some Oregon teachers, schools and districts are cutting back.
The Lake Oswego School District has said that starting next fall, elementary school students can no longer bring school-issued Chromebooks home with them. In Beaverton, the school district has launched a well-publicized push to give parents more control over what websites their students can — and cannot — access on district-issued devices and to allow them to monitor what children are clicking on during the school day.
Many Oregon districts have installed software that allows teachers to monitor what students are looking at during class, and whether they are on task, though teachers and parents say such programs can be evaded by tech-savvy students and take up time teachers could otherwise spend interacting with their class.
Beaverton has also restricted elementary and middle school students from being able to access popular sites for streaming, shopping and banking, as well as limiting what students can see on YouTube from Chromebooks. Pranks and comedy shorts are now off-limits, though a district spokesperson said technology staff are kept on their toes by students searching for workarounds.
At Terra Linda Elementary in Beaverton, fourth grade teacher Megan Klemens and her students went cold turkey on screens for all of January. It was her favorite month of the year to date. Instead of gamified learning apps, her students were playing math games, and interacting with each other, she said.
When she first started teaching elementary school, Klemens said, teachers would sign their students up for time in the computer lab and use that resource as needed, perhaps for research purposes or typing practices.
“I’m not sure you need much more than that,” she said. “(Technology) can be used as a crutch. I get on myself about that, and try to hold myself accountable. You don’t have to show up as prepared for a lesson if you can just tell the kids to go on DreamBox to fill up that 10 minutes of time you didn’t expect.”
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When the bell rings or computer time is finished, the computers go back onto the carts.
Two-thirds of the way through the school year, Clifford and Principal Paul Hanson said the results are promising, and some lessons have been learned.
For one thing, there’s far less damage to the Chromebooks, which cuts down on the expense of fixing the laptops and makes them last longer. Teachers report that once students don’t feel personal ownership over a device — or maybe, once they know that others can see the tabs they’ve left open and their search histories — they are less likely to seek out surreptitious online games or try to sneak onto YouTube during class. And because Chromebook carts have built in chargers, less precious class time is lost to dead batteries and searching for a free outlet.
Feedback from a parent survey was overwhelmingly positive, Clifford and Hanson said, with parents grateful for an end to at-home battles over Chromebook use; there are accommodations made for special education students who need a device to communicate or for whom a device is part of an individual education plan.
Heidi Vandenhooff, a sixth grade science teacher at Cedar Park, said that for much of her two decades in middle school education, she was a technology true believer and early adopter, even working for a spell as a teacher on special assignment to help other educators figure out how to integrate technology into their daily routines. As a science teacher, she’s relied on laptops to help power lessons on engineering, robotics and coding.
“But over the last several years, I just kind of stepped back and became more of an observer of it,” Vandenhooff said. “Like, wait, what is going on? Why are our students disengaged? Why are they not turning in their work? Why are they not learning?”
By this year, Vandenhooff said she was ready to sign on to the Chromebook cart experiment. She said she saw an immediate difference when students didn’t have their own laptops, but instead pulled them from the shared cart as needed.
“The students, they are super engaged,” Vandenhooff said. “They are participating. They are talking to each other. They are talking to me. It’s just made a huge difference.”
It shows up in their academic outcomes too, she said.
“I did just one assignment this year where they had the choice to use technology to complete the assignment, just one,” Vandenhooff said. “I’m never doing that again. The disengagement, the lack of follow-through, the did-not-complete rate.”
She followed that up with an assignment on subcellular structures and banned the use of laptops for research: Students could go to the library to seek out sources, or use their textbooks or her printed handouts. Notes had to be written by hand in a notebook, and their final work was on posterboard, not on the Canvas app.
“I think 95 percent of them turned it in with accuracy, they were fully engaged, and I only gave them two days to do it,” Vandenhooff said.
During a recent class period at Cedar Park, sixth graders said they were mostly resigned to not being assigned their own Chromebook to take home.
“You’re only supposed to use a Chromebook if you finish all the work you’re supposed to do and you have time left over,” said Angelo Lopez, 12. There are exceptions, he said — in his language arts class that week, Chromebook use was permitted to type out an essay — but this year, “things are stricter” than they were during his fifth grade year at William Walker Elementary School.
“We mostly use pencil and paper,” classmate Kate Longfield, 12, concurred. “It’s different for every class, but some classes really don’t use (computers) a lot. I don’t mind. It’s one less thing that I have to carry around.”
There are logistical challenges, said Hanson, the Cedar Park principal. The school needed to purchase more Chromebooks than it has students to ensure each classroom is fully stocked. (Pushing carts between classrooms is time-consuming and tricky in a middle school with short passing periods and crowded hallways, Hanson said.)
And not every student has a device at home they can use for homework, let alone one that is loaded with Canvas, where homework is posted; the school has some computers available for checkout.
Cedar Park has decided to stick with its no-personal-Chromebooks policy for next year’s sixth graders, Hanson said, and is considering expanding it to the seventh grade too.
Sanford, the kindergarten parent, said she loves her son’s school community, the friends he has made and how much he’s learned, but that she’s still navigating the reliance on technology in his classroom.
She’d prefer fewer videos during so-called “brain breaks” and for stories to always be read aloud by the teacher, never played via video.
Sanford is working with a coalition of other Beaverton parents to push for change. The group is seeking screen time limits during school hours for kindergarten through third grade, classroom-only Chromebooks for middle schoolers districtwide and explicit consent from parents before their students are allowed to sign up for AI tools.
Shellie Bailey-Shah, a spokesperson for the Beaverton school district says leaders there are continuing to refine and adjust district policies and practices, as they weigh feedback from parent surveys and staff workgroups alike.
“Our world is a dumpster fire, but this feels like a problem we can solve,” Sanford said. “It feels positive and optimistic. There are small changes we can make, and I think we have made progress.”
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