Digital Devices

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a Wisconsin school district is seeking a village ordinance to issue citations to students who violate its cellphone policy a third time. Across the country, school districts have a mix of policies that include outright bans on campus to allowing phones in the classroom for schoolwork on a classroom by classroom basis. What policy does you school district follow? Do you and your kids think a policy like being given a ticket and facing a fine would be successful in curbing cellphones at school?

It has been a while since Google Glasses have been in the news. While they never quite made out to become the newest social trend, they are helping some children with autism better understand facial expressions, according to findings published in npj Digital Medicine. Children use a smartphone app that works with the Google Glass headset and it gives the wearer information on what emotions other people are expressing. Researchers say the social skills of study participants improved after about 10 weeks of treatment.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that too much screen time may boost teens' risk of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, according to a study of 2,587 10th-graders in Los Angeles. Findings show that students in the study who were high frequency users of 7 or 14 digital media platforms were more than twice as likely to develop ADHD symptoms as students who didn't have a high frequency use rate of any of the online social activities.

Been having trouble typing on an iPad recently with different characters than the ones you thought you pressed showing up? Apple’s current iOS 11 update for the iPad includes a new feature in the system’s built-in software keyboard called Key Flicks — which may be inadvertently disrupting your text entry. With Key Flicks enabled, most of the onscreen keys can enter different characters depending on how your fingers touch the glass.

The alternate characters for each key are shown in gray above the larger black standard letter or punctuation marks. If you tap the T key normally, you get the letter T. However, if you tap the T key and your finger happens to linger and slide down a bit, the Key Flicks software will use the alternate character for that key — which is the number 5.

Want to turn it off and return to what it was like before? Go to the iPad’s home screen and open the Settings app. Tap General, and on the General screen tap Keyboard. In the list of settings, find Enable Key Flicks and tap the button to the right of it to disable the feature and go back to using the multiple keyboard levels to insert numbers and other characters.

With kids getting cell phones at younger and younger ages (10 is now the average), schools are struggling to catch up on establishing proactive policies about when and how the devices can be used. If your school is working on these policies, or if you are interested in how teachers are handling the situation in other schools, check out 3 Tips for Managing Phone Use in Class. While this article is written for teachers, parents may also find it useful in setting up a policy for home, using the questions posed for starting a dialogue about cell phone use.

A recent online survey conducted by McAfee has found that about 62% of teenagers in the US say they have seen or heard of another student using technology to cheat in school. The firm surveyed about 3,902 high-school students in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK. Students say it is easy to take a cell phone photo of notes or test answers, then peek at it surreptitiously while taking a test. Many respondents did note, however, that vigilant teachers will be on the lookout for those wayward glances.

According to a study of college students, chemicals in the brain associated with anxiety may be contributing to the increasing amount of time individuals spend on social media. Researchers looked at how often college students check their smartphones, and found that feelings of anxiety emerge from chemicals that are released the longer they go without checking in on social media. Notifications popping up on the screen when messages arrive, and even the small numbers next to an app on the screen, also drive anxiety.