During the 2024-25 school year, the Sewanhaka Central High School District instituted a “No Tech Tuesday” policy: a ban on the use of iPads during all classes once a week. This policy was put in place to discourage distraction and dependence upon technology throughout the school day. However, No Tech Tuesday has proven to be an ineffective way of advocating for screen time management for students due to its interruption of routine learning in various classes. Student iPads and the use of technology have been proven to be a necessity in several learning environments at NHP.
The iPads that are provided to students within the district have allowed for students to engage with their material through Google Classroom, digital note taking, graphing calculators and virtual tutoring. The iPads also provide immediate access to the internet for research and other educational purposes. Technology use has been heavily implemented in nearly all classes, with many teachers even utilizing other digital learning tools such as Pear Deck, Kahoot and Gimkit.
The increased use of technology during school hours has presented its own challenges. For instance, the use of iPads can be distracting for students. Rather than lending their full attention to the instructor, students may be watching YouTube, playing games or even completing assignments for other classes without their teacher taking notice.
However, the institution of No Tech Tuesday has not ameliorated the situation. Rather, it has created new disruptions to learning. Classes that are based upon the assumption that students will have access to technology, such as Photographic Arts and AP Computer Science, have experienced challenges with the restriction of the use of technology on Tuesdays. In Photographic Arts class, students are expected to take photographs with their phones or iPads and all photo editing software is accessed through iPads or school MacBooks. The inability to use these resources has delayed lessons, and even prevented them from occurring at all.
Similarly, general education classes still have a need for iPads. Students in AP Research need to have access to the internet and the web to accurately complete tasks, and many students in English classes who are given time to work during classes need access to Google Docs.
Teachers have also expressed similar concerns with delays and staying on track with their classes when “No Tech Tuesday” prevents them from continuing with their scheduled plans or assignments. This roadblock for learning has forced many teachers to assign “busy work” that is unproductive or unrelated from the curricula. Some teachers have even begun to ignore the policy as a whole when it is proving to be a disservice to their students.
No Tech Tuesday is also not an effective means of decreasing dependency on technology. Since students are reliant upon their technology for the majority of the week, a single day without using their iPads in the classroom does not help build or maintain a long term healthy relationship with technology. Students may also then spend extra time on devices during the rest of the week to make up for lost time on assignments or studying.
Many teachers have already taken measures to promote attentiveness in class without the need for a weekly day separate from electronics. For example, various math teachers have begun collecting phones at the beginning of each period in order to prevent students from becoming distracted during the lesson.
Since the daily use of technology is an immense part of modern society, increments of scheduled tech-free time are not significant enough to nurture real change in the classroom environment. Rather than creating a more balanced school environment, the No Tech Tuesday initiative disrupts the workflow of students and teachers alike. To spark real change, it would be necessary to establish a more gradual phase-out of technology in the classroom, which would likely prove to be too difficult in classes related to technology.
In the meantime, an adjustment to the policy is necessary to improve the scheduling and workflow of classrooms. There could be a mandate for teachers to abide by one tech-free day per week, but teachers could be given the choice to select the day of the week that would most benefit their students, based on lesson plans or otherwise. Although this may not solve the problem in largely technology-dependent classes, it would stop the delay of vital deadlines and allow for it to be much easier for a teacher to arrange their schedules as they feel fit, rather than having to abide by guidelines if the students are close to a deadline.
