Social Media Wellness by Ana Homayoun

Author:Ana Homayoun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2017-12-12T17:16:09.225224+00:00

5 Academic Wellness Organization, Compartmentalization, and Energy Management in the Age of Distractions

The high school’s information technology (IT) specialist looked at me with a mixture of amusement and bewilderment. He was a somewhat reserved gentleman, with a distinguished stature and the efficiency of someone who had spent years in corporate America. Now, in semi-retirement, he had become the person in charge of managing IT at a local high school that had recently decided to implement a one-to-one tablet program.

The school he worked at was about to start the second year of the program, and his most recent task was to refurbish the 1,500 or so tablets that had been turned in after the first year. The school essentially owned all the tablets, and students turned them in at the end of the year, much the way a student in past years would have returned textbooks. As anyone working with high school students can attest, there is normally significant wear and tear on any item after a full year’s use.

By the end of the summer, after several hundred hours of work, the IT specialist had refurbished all the tablets, making sure they were updated with the latest software, so that on registration day (also known as school picture day), students could pick up the slim, lightweight tablets that would now house most of their textbooks and note-taking applications.

“What was the most surprising thing you found when you went through all the tablets?” I asked, expecting that most of his time was spent fixing broken screens and replacing missing covers.

“Well,” he said slowly, “when I went through all the tablets, some were in far better shape than others. But, one thing that surprised me was that some of the students, and I went back and figured out they were mostly freshman boys, had tablet screens completely covered with documents. It was as if they just saved everything to the home screen of their tablet for the entire year.”

In other words, these students had never learned or appreciated the simple genius of digital folders.

He went on to describe the overall physical condition of these tablets—they were also, unsurprisingly, somewhat of a mess. It didn’t take long for me to realize the scope of this newfound problem: For years, I dealt with students’ crumpled papers, usually discovered at the bottom of backpacks or spilling out of binders. Now, those crumpled papers were digital, quietly hidden within the confines of a sleek tablet that itself might be stuffed at the bottom of a backpack. When the school principal had called me a few weeks earlier, she noted that there had been an overall drop in students’ grades during the first year of the one-to-one tablet program, and they were trying to figure out why. The lack of physical signs of disorganization was one reason many teachers and administrators were unaware of the root cause of the problem. Another reason, I would find out later, was that students using tablets were typically much quieter in class,

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