One White County elementary school encouraged its students to unplug and tune-in to hands-on instruction with a tech-free school day on Oct. 25.
The day was the first of four at Jack P. Nix Elementary School, and allowed students to take a break from their school-issued laptops for the entire school day. Counselor Erica Owens advocated to implement the tech-free days into the school year. She shared with AccessWDUN the initiative was inspired by her own choice to go low-tech after reading “12 Ways Your Cell Phone is Changing You” by Tony Reinke.
“After reading that book, I just really became more aware of people's cell phone use, including my own,” Owens recalled. “... I just felt a strong conviction to go backwards in time and go to the local Verizon store and get a flip phone… Over the seven years that I've had a flip phone, it's just kind of evolved, and I've just become more interested in how we can make kids’ childhoods more interactive with adults, and just find a balance between technology and hands-on interaction with adults and other kids.”
School administration decided to test Owens’ idea by gradually implementing days throughout the 2024-25 school year. After collaborating with teachers to create lessons for the day, Owens said she noticed engagement with students as they stepped away from their screens.
“We all participated in a different way, but the coolest thing that I liked was seeing the kids so excited,” Owens said. “ I went into every classroom and took pictures with a Polaroid camera, and the kids were just so excited to tell me what they were doing.”
JPN Principal Laura Hall highlighted that while the school does have many online programs they find beneficial to instruction, administration believes a combination of technology and hands-on activities makes for an enriched education.
“Our goal is for kids to be engaged, and if they're spending too much time on technology, they become less and less engaged,” Hall explained. “... having that one-on-one conversation, those opportunities to work in small groups, opportunities to talk to one another and just be able to work on team building and things like that, are so valuable that you don't get from technology. Technology is amazing… We're able to expose kids to so many more things in a shorter amount of time than we ever have been before, and we can collect some really valuable data through technology. It's a great thing, but we just have to make sure that we find that balance.”
Robin Chisolm teaches first grade at Jack P. Nix Elementary School. She shared that her students embraced the initiative in her classroom.
“[My students] loved the tech free day,” Chisolm said.“They asked, ‘when are we going to do this again?’ They enjoyed just being up, interacting with each other and the games we played.”
Aside from advocating for occasional tech-free instruction, Owens is also a part of the “Wait Until 8th” movement, which encourages parents to delay giving their children a smartphone until at least the 8th grade. The nationwide project has a group of 10 parents within a school pledge to delay smartphones in order to hold each other accountable. The movement aims to remove the peer-pressure associated with children and smartphone use. Nearly 82,000 parents have joined the initiative throughout the country. So far, the elementary school has one active group, but Owens plans to promote the movement more. She said she anticipates less-tech in the classroom to have a positive impact beyond lesson plans.
“Students want the attention of adults,” Owens said. “Kids want the attention of their parents. So, whenever they're fully engaged and they know that the adult in the room is right there with them and engaged with them, I feel like the student engagement increases, their confidence increases, and so it was just so cool and so beautiful to see them be 100% present with their teachers on that day.”
