"...screen time often comes at the expense of that vital face-to-face time"

NPR, 30-Sep-2014

Please take time to listen to this recent podcast about creative ways to balance teaching tech to kids. I find this same concern when I teach. For example, I'm very outdoorsy and often feel the irony of being a tech role model who wishes I could be teaching 20 kids I have inside staring at screens on a beautiful day like this morning outside! I know myself, at that age, if you'd given me the choice, I would have picked being outside and over time, I learned a lot of life lessons in that environment, with others, that the confines of a classroom just didn't inspire. And the good news, is that more and more, wifi hotspots and handheld devices are giving us that flexibility. However, given that we're still at the point where technology is largely "nailed down" to a classroom, I make sure I pair kids up to peer program (even if they don't really hit it off, that's a lesson in and of itself), control the log ins (as in, I give them the log ins so they don't automatically jump to the screen at the start of class), I make sure to interrupt the class at least every 20 minutes for class/small group discussion.

"Think about how dangerous it was when cars first hit the road... no traffic lights or street signs. That's were we are now ... with kids and all this technology at their fingertips... It's here to stay ... at some point you have to teach kids how to drive responsibly."

~Brad Zacuto, teacher, Westside Neighborhood School