Is your child better off wired, or unplugged?

These are two Washington area private schools, separated only by a 20-minute drive. Each has a Nina studying in Grade 5 but the two Ninas may as well exist on different planets. They are growing up on opposite sides of an educational divide formed not by the usual school fissures of economics and race. Theirs is a division wrought by technology. The experiences of the children of these schools offer touchstones for parents and educators unsure about the promises of learning through technology for this ultra-connected generation. Amid a sweeping fancy for mobile devices, Americans are wrestling to understand how technology is shaping their lives. And nowhere is that more evident than in the debate over how much we should expose our children to technology. For parents, there are no definitive answers. Academic research seems to provide contradictory findings. Both Ninas are on a track to succeed, if the academic performance of their schools is any measure. Seniors at Washington Waldorf and Flint Hill score in the mid to high 600s on each part of the SAT. Both the schools’ students are going to elite colleges such as Stanford, Yale and the University of Virginia — which is not uncommon in the highly educated Washington region. Flint Hill School Philosophy: “Tech is like oxygen. It’s all around us, so why wouldn’t we try to get our children started early?” Shannan Schuster, Flint Hill’s dean of faculty. Fee: Up to $31,000 (Dh114,000) for a year of high school. The fees come with the Apple laptop. Student strength: 1,100 students on two campuses totaling 50 acres. Approach: Children are given a lot of independence, use their laptops to send emails or instant messages even when a teacher is lecturing. Students can re-watch lectures on their teacher’s YouTube channel. Test grades are immediately posted online for parents to see. Dictionaries are online. Card catalogues are long gone. The sixth-graders are lighting up the room with their MacBook Airs, flipped open to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube for a physics assignment. Their classroom is decked out with touch-screen whiteboards, tablets and powerful WiFi connections able to handle a school full of children online at once. The Flint Hill School in Oakton, Virginia, is ultra-wired. Apple hails it as a model for its embrace of devices. Teachers here believe technology immersion will make their students more excited about learning and better prepared for college and careers. So they’ve given each child a device — starting with an iPad for every pre-schooler and MacBook Airs starting in the fifth grade. Nina’s world: By 8 am, when Nina Jenkins, 11, enters the front doors of her school, she has had access to a dizzying array of devices. She has a mobile phone and laptop. “Cool!” Nina Jenkins says, opening links to websites that take her deeper into the study of acoustics. She’s making a small drum by hand and will record herself playing it on iMovie. At the end, she’ll write her reflections in 140 characters or less — in a tweet. At home, she shares a family computer, Wii and XBox game consoles, and a Kindle Fire tablet. At Nina’s 11th-birthday party, her mum confiscated mobile phones because Nina and her friends were spending too much time texting. “We are laid-back and trust our children,” Rebecca Jenkins said. “But there are definitely times when I have to stay on top of them.” Nina Jenkins can’t remember the last time she wrote more than two paragraphs by hand. Washington Waldorf School Philosophy: “We want our students to focus on one topic at a time, to fully engage and learn patience.” Natalie Adams, school’s faculty chair. Fee: $23,000 (Dh85,000) for a year. Student strength: 240. Approach: Classrooms look more traditional, with desks arranged in neat rows, each supplied with a ruler and coloured pencils. The Washington Waldorf School in Bethesda, Maryland, is trying to stay unplugged. The only technology learning is in a small lab of about a dozen computers. The hallways are quieter and have less bustle than Flint Hill. Its teachers think technology is a distraction and over-hyped. They believe children are better taught through real-world experiences in the school’s vegetable garden and woodwork shop. Educators here fear that the immediate gratification of texts and Wikipedia threatens face-to-face communication and original thinking, so they ban mobile phones, laptops and tablets and require students to hand-write papers until high school. The only tools being used in Waldorf school are spoons and forks tied together with purple yarn. The students listen to the clang of utensils change pitch as the yarn is shortened and lengthened. Nina Auslander-Padgham’s eyes widen with the discovery, and she rushes back to her wooden desk to write her reflections on the blank pages of a red hardcover journal. “What is the rush?” says Natalie Adams, Washington Waldorf’s faculty chair. “There is a time and a place for technology, but children need to first relate to the physical world around them.” Nina’s world: Her exposure to tech is limited to the car radio. Two years ago, on an unusually warm winter afternoon, Nina Auslander-Padgham and her younger brother were battling over the family laptop. They were irritable and moody. The sun was shining, and neither had stepped foot outside into their back yard, despite the trampoline and large wooden play set. It was an epiphany for her parents, Bonnie and Jon. All technology had to go. Their decision has put them in the minority. The Auslander-Padghams sometimes struggle to keep technology out of their kids’ lives. When Nina turned 12 in March, she begged for an iPhone, something many of her friends had already. Her parents compromised with a purple digital music player that doesn’t connect to the internet. “There is definitely leakage,” her father said. “We know we can’t resist forever.” Nina said she was annoyed at first with her family’s aversion to technology. “Now I’m used to it and find other things to do,” she said. Those other things include lots of reading and more time on the violin, her parents say. But there are times when she feels the need to get on the web. She still wants an iPhone. And her favourite arts and science magazine, Muse, has a website promoted on the back cover she’s eager to explore. “I guess I just wonder what’s on the site, what I’m missing,” she said. Nina says she can’t relate to the idea of crowd-sourcing on the web and has never practised the skill of distilling a complicated thought into a tweet. She doesn’t know how to type on a computer. “I’ll have to learn keyboarding at some point,” she says. What do policy makers and experts say?
“We have to stop and think if we are embracing technology just because it is there and new or if it is the best tool for what we want to accomplish,” said Michael Rich, director of the Center on Child Media and Health at Harvard University. “Sometimes the answer is that an iPad is great, but does it really do a better job than a hunk of clay orpaper?” Recent studies show children are being exposed to far more media than any previous generation, largely because of the explosion of smartphones and tablets in the home. But is this healthy for their development? Some research shows that software programs such as smartphone applications help improve kids’ vocabulary and maths. Children aged three to seven who used an app called Martha Speaks increased their vocabulary by as much as 31 per cent in two weeks, according to a 2010 study commissioned by PBS. Some educators say technology allows them to personalise teaching plans and offer free online tutoring, a way to break free from cookie-cutter lessons that don’t resonate with every student. On the other hand, child development experts say children are developing shorter attention spans and multi-tasking too much online — habits that will become more ingrained over time. Technology is changing the way kids learn, too; ideas aren’t as original when cobbled together through Google searches and recycled from opinion blogs, teachers at Waldorf say. And students are increasingly skipping over basic disciplines such as spelling and handwriting — practises that have diminished in importance in the workplace but are still key to wiring the young brain, some child-development experts say. In February, the Education Department, along with the Federal Communications Commission, called for all American classrooms to adopt digital textbooks by 2017. The goal was inspired by South Korea — which is now rethinking the merits of the online books over paper textbooks. At the same time, the department has found that past investments in educational technology have not paid off. In a 2009 report, it found that students who used math and reading software over a one-year period scored the same on tests as peers who did not use the programs. From gulfnews