Restler asks about Chromebook access and tracking for students without devices
Restler asks how DOE tracks screen time for kids who don't have Chromebooks at home and how parents can restrict screen time. Giunta and Randy Asher describe device distribution, LTE connectivity, and parent resources for managing screen time.
My follow-up question is that what about kids that don't have Chromebooks?
How do you track their screen time?
Like to bring home, like I know kids who bring Chromebooks home.
And my question is how do you track screen time for kids who do not have their own Chromebooks?
So we have made available that all of our children have access to devices, especially for our remote instruction days.
Some schools have one-to-one devices available in school and a second set for home.
Other schools, children are traveling back and forth with their Chromebook.
But if a child doesn't have a Chromebook and would need it for instruction, our schools will work with that child and family to make sure that they have a device at home.
But if that is not a belief of a school, because some of our schools are not, they're only using that for a remote day.
They are not using laptops outside of the school day.
So then a child wouldn't be expected to use it for homework or count as minutes.
My follow-up question is, how would parents effectively restrict the screen time for kids at home?
Because I myself know I can configure a router and say, oh, turn on the internet only from 7 to 9, but what do you have a general advice to parents how to restrict screen time for the kids once they get home?
I believe that if at home you have a screen limit for your child and you as parent want to take that device away, I know that that is not going to be easy as Council Member Krishnan shared.
But in the home, we would rely on your amazing parenting to decide if the device needs to be pulled away from the child or not.
And if you feel at the school level the homework is requiring more device use than you want to personally allow in the house, that is a wonderful conversation for you to have with the school.
Yeah, and I also want to, to the ordinary parent, they do not know how to configure their routers or their devices, so the internet gets turned off.
But it seemed to me this is clearly a necessity, because when parents see kids using the computers at home, oh, they're doing their homework.
Or they tell the parents that, oh, I'm doing my homework.
They're not.