Tech addiction takes a tremendous toll on schools. It compromises students’ classroom behavior, academic performance, and emotional and physical health. It also corrodes the school’s social environment.
It’s imperative that we address tech addiction immediately --- but how? Smartphones are ubiquitous, and a very strong majority of students use the most addictive applications continuously throughout the day, and for a great number of hours. Applying simplistic, one-time, quick-fixes won’t work. Instead, we must address tech addiction by changing school culture.
In this talk Mercier leverages the unique insights his organization’s research has generated to present his multi-faceted road map for schools to address tech addiction by forging a digital wellness school culture.
He first addresses the challenge of getting all school stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, and administrators) on-board with the goal of creating a digital wellness culture at their school.
He next addresses the need to educate all stakeholders to ensure they intellectually grasp the deeper nature of the problem of tech addiction, and the implications for how to address it.
He then lays out an approach to integrating into the school’s existing value system the virtue of spending substantially less time using screens recreationally, and more time engaging in non-screen activities.
And he demonstrates why we must complement these approaches with a set of restrictions on recreational tech use at school, including the need for impactful consequences and consistent enforcement.
This talk can be geared to audiences of just one individual stakeholder group of teachers, administrators, students or parents, or, to a mixed audience that includes two or more of these stakeholder groups.