Toronto school board’s Chromebook fixation will damage student ability to learn

Ontario politicians, trustees and school administrators have finally realized that smartphones don’t belong in schools. And it’s about time. When kids go back to school next week, students in kindergarten to Grade 6 will not be allowed to use their phones during the school day. Grades 7-12 students may use their phones during breaks but must turn them off during class time. Other provinces have enacted similar restrictions as public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for banning phones in schools.

However, Ontario’s education system still has a huge blind spot. While school boards have finally started to restrict phone use in classrooms, many school boards are spending millions of dollars buying Chromebooks and tablets as if students can’t learn without using an electronic device.

For example, in 2021 the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) launched its 1:1 Student Device Program. Every year, this program provides all grades 5 and 9 students with a personal Chromebook, with the goal of ensuring that all students beginning in Grade 5 have their own Chromebook. According to the TDSB website, this device “will stay with them [the students] over a four-year period, 24/7.” In other words, even while they aren’t at school.

While the TDSB installed filters on each Chromebook to block inappropriate websites, tech-savvy students have already figured out how to circumvent the restrictions. Consequently, instead of being distracted by their phones, students will be distracted by their board-issued Chromebooks.

Indeed, according to the latest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests, there’s a strong association between poor math scores and distraction from electronic devices including tablets and laptops.

While this problem has been building for years, the pandemic accelerated the technology craze. During mandated school closures, school boards rushed to get tablets, iPads and Chromebooks into the hands of as many students as possible. While remote learning might have been a temporary necessity in the early days of COVID, it clearly was not a substitute for in-person learning. Many skills are learned better without electronic devices.

For example, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, which compared the brain activity of children while writing by hand with children who were typing, found that writing produced far more brain activity than typing. In other words, handwriting engages a person’s thinking in much more complex ways than typing on a keyboard.

Dr. Hetty Roessingh, a professor emerita at the University of Calgary and an expert in language and literacy, also conducted extensive research in this field and found that handwriting helps young students recognize letter shapes and plays a fundamental role in their development as readers. No amount of time spent on a tablet can make up for this valuable learning experience.

Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that technology is prohibitively expensive. Considering how often school boards complain about insufficient funding, it’s peculiar they would embark on such costly technology programs. While there might be a reasonable case for providing high school students with Chromebooks, the same cannot be said for younger students.

Smartphone restrictions are a good start. Now we should start weaning students, particularly in younger grades, off their Chromebooks, tablets and iPads. Too much technology in the classroom damages their ability to learn.