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Talk to high school students today and it's almost unimaginable. What would happen if for a week laptops in the classroom disappeared? When I first found out about it, I kind of went into shock. I was a bit worried and scared about how it was going to work. It's very full on just like a whole week without laptops. That's exactly what Luther College, a private school in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs, did. A whole week without laptops for years 7, 8, and 9. Because it is device-free week, what I would like you to do, please, is open up your workbooks. For this week, pen, pencil, and paper were back in a big way. Tech devices like laptops were out.
I know that some of you were what's the point? Well, the point is that we need to be able to think without our devices. On day one, some of these students were not optimistic. I'm worried about how I'm going to stay on top of things. Also, how I'm going to like write things down by handwriting because sometimes it can get a bit messy and hard to read. Here at Luther, we have a lot of time on laptops. Everything's stored there. We do a lot of our projects and assessments there.
Afternoon, everybody. Luther College principal, Jackie Layfield, said taking laptops out of the classroom was a big disruption. That was the point. This week was about bringing students back to basics, having them really uh be cognizant around what it's like to not have the laptop and to then start the conversation about well, when should we use it? How does it actually leverage learning? And where is it a deficit? Where does it actually impact negatively on the way that we learn? So, we asked students Hamish, Jack, and Jenny, "Did it work?" So, you've had a week without laptops.
Was it a success? It was a real eye-opening experience for us to realize how much we rely on our laptops and what we can do without them. A lot of time on our laptops, we're just looking at the screen and just concentrating on that other than like engaging and having fun. We were doing a lot of handwriting. It was quite Yeah, it really made me realize I probably should brush that up a bit because um yeah, everything was just all done in handwriting. So, you really had to make sure that it was good enough.
At Central Queensland University, Professor Ken Purnell is one of the country's leading experts in education neuroscience. He studied the impact devices like laptops are having in schools. There's sufficient enough robust evidence these days to suggest that if you over rely on uh such digital devices, then you're going to outsource the learning. The only one that's going to learn is the machine, if anything, rather than the human brain. And so, there's a bunch of research which says, "Yes, it's better to take your own notes. You recall what they look like." And all sorts of things like that as opposed to just tapping something onto a screen.
Over-reliance on laptops, Professor Purnell says, may explain Australia's declining results in the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA test. It measures the performance of 15-year-olds in subjects such as math, science, and reading in 91 countries. At the end of the day, there's more than enough studies within Australia and of course in other parts of Europe and the United States to strongly suggest that overuse of digital devices is contributing to that downfall, if you like, in results. If you talk to teachers, you'll hear the same thing when it comes to screen time in schools.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare says it's time for a digital detox in schools across the country. Well, I think any parent with kids at home knows the impact that screens are having on our kids. We've seen the impact that it can have on concentration, how it fries attention spans. There's a building body of evidence that says too much screen time in school can lead to results going backwards. He says daily limits on laptop and device classroom usage, which begin in New South Wales and Victoria government schools next year, are a good start. If the evidence tells us that it's having an impact on literacy and numeracy,
then we've got to look at what action we can take to help here. And New South Wales and Victoria making the decision to set limits here is going to help give us the evidence we need to make sure that what we do right across the country works. Are there any subject you don't use this for? Nearly two decades ago, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made school laptops a key election pitch, promoting Labor's digital education revolution. That is part of the vision for the nation's future, to use computers in the classroom, mainstreaming the teaching of all the core subjects in the curriculum.
Now, Dr. Rudd says the policy, a laptop for every student, was a success. This was not an argument to for those technology platforms to replace pen and paper. It was to supplement learning, to supplement pedagogical outcomes, to ensure that no kids were going to get left behind. Remember this, back then, the ratio of providing computers in any form to kids in the secondary school classroom was at best nationwide a one device for every two kids. And in the 1,000 poorest schools across Australia, uh there was something like one device for every eight kids. But the former Prime Minister agrees devices such as laptops are now too prominent in modern classrooms. When people like Jason Clare, the education minister, says we need a digital detox,
I'm on that side of the argument in terms of just drawing boundaries about this. It's an educational tool. It's a device through which you obtain information and improve your analytical skills. It's not a substitute, therefore. Back at Luther College, the students notice something else about a laptop-free classroom. There was a lot more social activity, people talking to each other, not only just about the work, but I think it was really good to talk and just be more social this week. It was a bit louder, and there were definitely more reminders from the teacher to keep it down, but I reckon it's better for the um more noise, cuz we're engaging instead of us just looking at screens and having no noise.
Luther College says feedback about its digital detox will be factored into the curriculum for next year, when students and teachers will likely be spending a lot less time on laptops in class.
