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As a parent of three adolescents I enjoy the fact that I can reach my kids whenever and Find My Friends allows me to confirm that they made it to school safely
by davidgh 9y ago
As a parent of three adolescents I enjoy the fact that I can reach my kids whenever and Find My Friends allows me to confirm that they made it to school safely on a snowy day, for example.
However.
I did some volunteer teaching for a couple of years at my son’s school. Interestingly, I didn’t seem to observe students reaching in and initiating engagement with their phone very often. It was almost always in response to the “buzz”. It was so clear. They are there taking notes, looking at you, or even just staring at the floor. And I would see the small “snap” bodily response that happens when the phone buzzes with whatever. And mentally they might as well have jumped up and walked straight out of class. They were gone. Not “half paying attention while looking at this thing” but completely transported to a different sphere.
Having every student disable all push notifications during class time would have solved nearly all the problems I witnessed. They developed “driving mode”, would sure be nice if they did an easy-to-access “class mode” where every notification of any type except a text or call from mom or dad was suppressed. Sure, some would refuse to enable class mode but with the students I taught, if I reminded at the beginning of class to turn it on, I suspect a fair amount of my students would have done it voluntarily.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago>Having every student disable all push notifications during class time would have solved nearly all the problems I witnessed. Back in highschool IT would heavily rate-limit sites that were doing real time updates (basically just Facebook) because our pipe was small enough that 50% of people having Facebook open in a tab was a big enough amount of traffic to care about. We also implemented network level ad-block and really aggressive caching. I'm sure there's similar things being done on a piecemeal basis in schools located where cell service is terrible enough that you want to be connected to wifi at all times. Most kids don't text much anymore so traffic goes through resources the school control. Dropping some arbitrary amount (say 95%) of facebook messanger, snapchat, etc. traffic on the student subnet/vlan except during the time slots between classes would be easy and everyone would just assume that the wifi sucks.
- baldfat 9y agoWhy in the world would a school have public access wifi for phones? That is about the worst network policy I have heard of. Also bottle necking WiFi will not make people think the WiFi sucks but that the IT Department sucks by both students and staff.
- brewdad 9y agoWhy wouldn't a school have wifi available? I've visited a half dozen schools across multiple districts this year for my son's activities. All of them had unsecured public wifi available. It's just expected in 2017.
- StudentStuff 9y agoYou might enjoy an Orwellian access to your child's location, but as they grow it tends to suffocate the child's development. Many friends of mine who had been chained like this during middle school and high school proceeded to go to college and fall flat on their face in various ways (as their parents weren't there to strictly mind over them). Kids can walk home on their own just fine. I used to walk a mile to school in Portland, OR and I was far from being in a safe neighborhood like I'm in here in Seattle. But, despite that I never had an issue during those years. Instant reachability and the expectations surrounding it can easily snuff out personal development of children, at least one of my friends never left home, dated, etc, mainly due to his mother's incessant calls (80+ times if he didn't pick up, totally insane).
- upvotinglurker 9y agoChecking on a kid's whereabouts during an unusual event (snowy day) is hardly tantamount to "chaining" them or calling them 80 times a day.