I have Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, group text messages, an iPhone and an Apple Watch. I might not be Gen Z like our students, but I have empathy for them. I know what it is like to text during a high school class.
Last week I came across a Twitter “retweet” of the picture below. The teacher, for one class period had students turn their phone “ringers” on and instructed students to tally every time they received a notification and this was the result.
I decided to try the experiment with my junior classes. On Monday, in a 45 minute class, I was ready to go. Instead of students getting up from their seats to tally, I just had them call out what classification of notification they received and I made the marks.
I felt/learned/observed 3 things from this experiment…
1. I feel badly for our students and their level of notifications.
2. I would guess about half of the students in each period never yelled out a single notification.
3. Students need to learn HOW to MANAGE their cell phones since it doesn’t seem to be something that is disappearing from their lives any time soon.
Period 3
Period 1
P.S. the circled numbers in the above photo are from group messages of three students… the three students told their friends to flood their group message…and they thought I didn’t know it…except I did….and then other students of mine later on in the day told me “hey _ told me to text them over and over”
