To ignite a debate, nothing better than a good spicy question: for or against cell phones in the classroom? Around a table, you will have, on one side, followers convinced that a telephone is necessary to guarantee the safety of the student and ensure his family interconnection at all times; on the other, there will be diehards wishing to exclude any digital device from the sacred space of the school. Inflamed debate, did we say?
The question invariably resurfaces in the news. Each time, it triggers passions. At the end of May, a motion presented by the Parti Québécois to the National Assembly and asking for the supervision of cell phones in the classroom was blocked by the CAQ government. Presented by MP Pascal Bérubé, the motion invoked the negative effects of the telephone on the motivation and concentration of students. To enlist the support of Québec solidaire and the independent Marie-Claude Nichols, the PQ had to change the word “prohibit” for the word “frame” – less definitive – in the wording of its motion.
This shows how much we evolve in delicate terrain. Yet, isn’t it obvious that the telephone must remain outside the classroom so that periods of teaching and learning are clearly distinguished from spaces for play and socialization? But the ban is no longer popular, it seems. And in front of young people dressed in digital clothes since their earliest childhood, we no longer know how to preserve spaces without distraction from the sacred act of education.
In a survey to which nearly 7,000 teachers responded this spring, the Federation of Teachers’ Unions (FSE-CSQ) understood that 92% of respondents hope that cell phones will be banned from classes. The president of the FSE, Josée Scalabrini, spoke about it effectively in Quebec newspaper “It’s a fight. There were years when the fight was the cap in class or the gum in the mouth, now it’s the cell phone. »
Teachers compete for a child’s attention with a screen. In addition, a sign of the times, they claim to fear that a student will take the tool out of his pocket and become a budding cameraman, filming the teacher’s every move. It happened.
The question of the cell phone seems very easy to settle next to this elephant in the room: has the incursion of digital technology in the classroom given beneficial results on student success? To this burning question, there are few answers in truth. Without of course questioning the merits of a connected school and of its time, one can nevertheless wonder: has the tablet in class, imposed by schools, especially private ones, made it possible to improve the fate of students? Studies have shown that technology and digital can have pedagogical virtues and serve their subject, but if there had been a revolution causing a jump in performance, we would have known. On July 26, a long-awaited UNESCO report on the positive and negative effects of technology in schools will be released.
By way of appetizer, the team specifies that “the perception of the role of technology is often the subject of deep divisions”. In this era of extreme polarization, we thus find governments, such as Sweden and its Minister of Education, Lotta Edholm, who announced last May that they wanted to back down on the national strategy for implementing digital technology in schools. Advocating the return of the textbook rather than the screen, the Minister had already very clearly expressed her extreme reluctance about the “experimental” nature of digital technology in schools.
These radical all-on-screen or all-by-manual postures do not seem to be the way to go. Balance would be the key word here: a measured, well-framed use of digital technology, the pedagogical benefits of which would have been established. If the pandemic has shown one thing, it is that schools were not equal in the availability of digital tools nor in the ease of using them. In the 2023 edition of his Portrait of digital uses in Quebec schoolsUniversité Laval’s Digital Transformation Academy reports, after surveying school principals, that “while 69% of teachers in private schools spend an average of 4 hours or more per week using digital class, 29% of public school teachers do the same”.
Questions about the effects of digital technology on students’ learning conditions, and their results, are crucial. At a time when artificial intelligence is about to enter our schools with the most virtuous intentions, we should not repeat an unhealthy reflex which, alas, is widespread in the practices of the education network, namely that of plunging into the unknown without prior validation or guarantee of a concrete benefit on success.