Falls Church, Va., school board weighs $1 million for wireless Apple tablets, alarming Wi-Fi health advocates who want a wired computer, mouse and keyboard and powerful classroom routers shut down.
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There’s hardly a discouraging word in the front page story in the Falls Church News Press Jan. 26-Feb. 1 written by newspaper owner and editor Nicholas Benton.
“It is our energy,” school board tech advisor Steve Knight says. Math teacher Jennifer Jayson talks at length on the need for “technology-literate citizens,” saying teachers are “creating rich, engaging content that students can access at home and school.”
Each student would get an Apple Macbook Air which retails for about $900.
A citizen asked the school board why can’t the students use their own computers and was told that this would create “device inequality.” Another citizen suggested getting Google Chromebooks which retail for $149. He was told the Chromebook “only works when connected to the internet” and that teachers and students would have to be “trained” on the “unfamiliar device.”
The HP Pavillion Chromebook has a built-in Ethernet connection and other models can fitted with a USB Ethernet adapter. The wired connection is said to be not only safer than wireless, but faster and more secure.
Hickey Knocks Tech Invasion
The wireless Macbook Air computers worry health advocates who say they will be served by powerful, industrial-level routers in the classrooms.
Diane King Hickey, co-founder of the National Assn. for Children and Safe Technology, says the traditional teacher/student relationship is being replaced by a “device/student” relationship that is “based on unfounded claims that contradict what is known about technology/screen use and learning.”
She quotes from the book Reset Your Child’s Brain by Dr. Victoria Dunckley, adolescent psychiatrist, who says the use of computers in school work has been shown to have “a neutral or negative educational outcome.”
Hickey Posts on News-Press Story
03 June 2014
Scientific American
A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes With a Laptop
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Little Things
10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Give A Child A Smartphone Or Tablet
Independent.ie | Life
Daniel Levitin: How Information Overload is Making Us Stupid
The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin warns that rapidly switching between tasks on digital media damages our concentration.
Levitin says each time we dispatch an email, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something.
When we look at a Twitter or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones.
As Levitin puts it, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex.
Levitin says the modern emphasis on multitasking effectively rewards the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new - like the shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies and kittens.
05 October 2015
Science World Report
Kathleen Lees
Smartphone: Compulsive Texting In Teenage Girls Lowers Academic Performance
Kadaras Warns of Addiction
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Nicholas Kadaras says in Glow Kids—How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids, that children who spend from 10-12 hours a day on one screen or another are over-stimulating the “fight or flight” part of their brains to the detriment of the thinking part. He says school tech is a $60 billion market for computer makers.
The over stimulation, he said, has resulted in Attention Deficit disorders afflicting six million children or 10% of the total of 60 million. Also skyrocketing, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is autism in children. One in 66 is now so afflicted when it used to be one in a thousand, says CDCP.
Some health advocates connect the dozen or more vaccinations that children receive and the increase in pulsed radiation in the environment with the growing incidence of autism. The advocates say there are chemicals in the vaccines that enable the radiation to break down the blood/brain barrier, resulting in numerous symptoms including hyperactivity and autism.
New Work Blasts WHO Inaction
Health advocate Olga Sheean has authored World Health Organization—Setting the Standard for a Wireless World of Harm.
It says WHO is “failing the Earth’s citizens in the most blatant, destructive manner. In December 2016, a VOTE of NO CONFIDENCE in WHO and its EMF Project was initiated in response to the growing concerns among the millions of global citizens being harmed by radiofrequency/microwave radiation. A petition has been signed by thousands of individuals worldwide, with more adding their vote every day as they become aware of how WHO’s denial of the proven dangers has stripped them of their health, rights, livelihood, productivity and protection from their own governments.”
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