A teacher’s guide to equipping students to strike a balance with social media and tech after summer break
With summer in full swing, students (and teachers!) are enjoying a well-deserved break from their demanding school year schedules. As educators, we often find ourselves facing a common question: How will we make sure our students smoothly transition back to the school year without being overwhelmed by digital distractions?
It’s a good question – especially with students spending 8.3 hours a day on screen media, a number that is sure to spike over the summer months with the extra free time. The answer? Make sure you are prepared with a game plan that will empower your students to set (and stick to) high standards when it comes to using social media and technology over the summer.
It’s never too early to start planning for a successful transition back into school, so let’s dive into what that game plan can look like to ease students back into the school year this fall and balance screen time in healthy and positive ways.
Striking a Balance and Setting Standards
To equip our students with the tools they need to balance their time with social media and technology, we first have to understand one important fact: social media is how students are social these days. From connecting with school friends who they may not get to see over the summer months, to finding online communities with similar interests – social media is a powerful tool for connection, communication, and exploration.
This is not to downplay the challenges of screen addiction or doom scrolling that many students face with social media and tech. But, when we understand both sides of social media’s story and the integral role it plays in our students’ lives, educators are better prepared to collaboratively set high standards and create a plan for managing screen time with students. Establishing clear guidelines in the classroom, such as agreeing on technology and phone policies and determining how to navigate social media in the classroom is important. But where do we start?
We can start by empowering students to know that not all screen time is equal. While passive viewing, such as scrolling on social media, is one form of technology use, there are many more invigorating and beneficial ways students are navigating social media. This is represented in TSI’s Screen Time Pyramid. Technology can serve as a platform for shared experiences, active socializing, active learning, and content creation. By emphasizing these forms of technology integration over passive viewing, students can strike a healthier balance.
Playbook for a Classroom Huddle
To foster open discussions and come up with social media and technology standards in the classroom everyone can agree on, consider these strategies when huddling with your students:
- Map out screen time through our #WinAtSocial Screen Time Challenge
- Challenge your students (and yourself) to map out their time spent on technology. When it comes to navigating screens and teens, Dr. Jessica Anderson, Child Psychologist and Dean of Students at Mason Preparatory School says, “Students know tech is part of their lives and that it is impacting what they do. But, they don’t always know how much it impacts them.” Download the challenge and find out what else Dr. Anderson had to say in our webinar about effective ways to avoid digital distractions.
- Use tech for good to manage digital distractions
- Staying on task while managing distractions is not easy, but there is good news! There are plenty of apps that help to manage digital distractions. We huddled up with students to find out what platforms they recommend. Equip your students next school with these popular tools students told us they use to stay focused: Flora App, Forest App, and Do Not Disturb Feature.
- Rather than enforce rules, establish standards. Join in with your students and create a classroom tech agreement
- In The Social Institute’s Classroom Technology Policy, huddle with your students to brainstorm the standards you will have for technology in your classroom. Collaboratively, you and your students can set standards for everything, from when you will use phones or devices to how often. Huddling as a class encourages an engaging learning environment and for everyone to be on the same page when it comes to how you will navigate social media and tech positively as a group.
Social media is here to stay, making it essential to empower students with the necessary tools to navigate their social worlds effectively, especially during the first days of school after the summer break. Huddle together with your students to create strategies like setting up screen time limits, creating standards for the whole classroom, and distinguishing between enriching and passive screen time. This is an opportunity to empower students to navigate social media and technology for personal growth, creative expression, and meaningful connections.
Together, we can create a culture that embraces the positive aspects of students’ social worlds, both online and offline, and equips them with the resilience and skills they need all year long.
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