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Digital Awareness
 
Photo by Mr Jurgen Muller

Digital Awareness

Mr Jurgen Muller —

Digital Awareness

I spent the day with John Parsons when he was here last week. A surprising message that he emphasised to me throughout the day was the impacts of screen time on sleep. Here is an article about this: ‘Catastrophic’ lack of sleep in modern society is killing us, warns leading sleep scientist 

Our first session was with the year 9 cohort. As John was talking to them it became apparent that some of our students were struggling to stay awake or stay focused. This was at 11 am and during what I would consider to be a fairly engaging presentation. John stopped talking and asked the students to keep their hands up as he went through what time they had gone to sleep the previous night (a Sunday). Some of the students still had their hands up at 12:30 am! He did not ask the boys why they had gone to sleep so late but suggested to me afterwards that it was probably because they were on a screen of some sort.

Here is some research on the topic: Youth Screen Time and Behavioral Health Problems: The Role of Sleep Duration and Disturbances. A key conclusion is this:

“The current findings suggest that excessive screen time is associated with reduced sleep duration in the preadolescent years and sleep disturbances in three age groups ranging from 3 to 17 years. In turn, sleep disturbances, and to a lesser extent duration, are associated with behavioural health problems. Effective interventions to decrease screen time need to be developed and tested for their effects on these negative outcomes.”

And to end, here an interesting video on breaking our dependence on technology: Tech Control