Dealing with Distraction

Illustration by Alicia Toldi via thecollegevoice.org

Parents understandably commonly complain that one of the particular challenges faced as parent in the 21st century is that of supporting homework in an age where increasingly and understandably more and more [home]work requires a screen, usually a laptop. In the 'good old days' of exercise and text books, a parent could at least be fairly confident that when their child was gazing intently at the relevant page, it was their work they were doing, and not perusing a peer comment on a social platform, or a YouTube video, or playing a game, or, well you get the idea. As a parent of two middle school kids, and as an assistant parent in one of our our boarding houses with students from G7 to G12 I have plenty of personal experience of this!

Before you get all nostalgic on me, it is worth noting why it makes sense to do homework on a laptop as well as at school, the main one being that this allows homework, to be, well, just work, ie, a continuation of the task they are already engaged in at school, as opposed to an isolated activity that is related to their work in school. Often now, the work you see your child engaged in at home is their work at school, continued.

Now if your work life as an adult involves screens this should sound familiar. If we're honest, even as adults, what will also feel familiar is the temptation for distraction, in this regard at least, this is a temptation you should be able to relate to, in fact many of the tips below, may actually be useful to you in your work as well... ;o)

Now I'm conscious that our teachers are possibly more au fait with strategies for ensuring that students in their classrooms are using their screens for the task at hand, and not for expanding their social capital, but parents are often not quite as aware, a fact that many kids are quick to exploit...

Hence this post.

Our Head of Campus, Frazer Cairns, has written a newsletter dealing with this topic, well worth a read if you haven't already, and this blog post in many ways serves as an addendum to that; some simple tips to help you to help your child to deal with distraction more effectively. More to the point, these tips are designed to empower you to feel more capable of telling when they are, and more importantly are NOT 'on task'.

You can find many of these tips included in the TutorTech Slide Deck that I manage and update regularly that we use with Middle School Tutor Groups, a slide deck that your child should be familiar with already, if not, they will be very soon...

So here for your delight and delectation are some simple strategies and deft devices for helping you, to help your child stay on task:

Don't Just Close it, Quit it

Students need to get out of the habit of leaving applications running in the background, as these have a habit of bouncing up and down like a jackrabbit on coke*—very distracting. Clicking the red icon just closes or hides the application, it’s actually still running in the background, to kill it you need to QUIT it. 

Deal with the Dock

Command Q or right click on the dock. If you can see a little black dot, that app is still running. 

Be on the lookout for Apps running in the dock that most likely have nothing to do with school work, or the assignment they are currently working on, Apps like Skype, Steam, Minecraft, et cetera:

Do Not Disturb

Click those lines at the top right corner of the screen on the Mac (the notification centre) and pull down, this activates a very handy but under utilised function built into every Mac.

Check Notifications Settings

Maybe people have no idea these even exist, but they do, and check them you should. You can even automatically activate 'Do not Disturb' automatically during certain hours.

Kill Chrome Notifications as well...

We advise our students to use the Chrome browser for work, and Safari (or another browser) for play/socialising, then quit that social browser while working, as mentioned above. With that in mind they should turn off the notifications Chrome generates from sites like Facebook et al, unfortunately it is a little buried... the following should help you dig it out though, click to enlarge the images:

Click to enlarge

Fill the Screen

Make the most of the limited screen space, hit that green button and use the whole screen whenever you can. (Esc key to exit). This encourages 'single-tasking', ie one thing at a time, rather than the notoriously inefficient 'multi-tasking'. If they need to use more than one app, eg browser and a word processor, with both fullscreen they can swipe between them using the 'Four finger swipe' (see below), if they're running Sierra or later they could even utilise the split view feature, so they can focus on just two related things on one screen.

F3 'The All Seeing Key' & The 4 Finger Swipe

This is extremely useful, and also extremely devious, depending on the way this is used! This is one of the powerful features built into track pads on the Mac, that makes switching between full screen apps very easy; great if you're working between apps, not if you're child is using it to hide what they're really doing... 

F3: The all seeing key via jandpbiz

Fortunately these swiping gestures are easy to spot (see below). An easy way to check to see if their swiping is justified is to press the F3 key (Mission Control) on the Mac, this displays all open windows/spaces at once, allowing you to see at a glance what's going on. If there's a lot of apps on display, they probably need to quit the ones they don't need, see my point above!

Be Aware of Behaviour

There are many uses for screens, but the ones that are the least likely to be associated with, shall we say 'modes of reflection/writing/response' typical of [home]work are very different to those you would expect when interacting in real time with peers, or/and playing games. So, if your child is giggling away to him/herself, or intensely hammering the keys/frantically twitching the trackpad, chances are they are not working... 

If in doubt—hit the all seeing F3 key—Mission Control.

Use the Room

Many teachers have find this to be a particularly useful strategy in the classroom; make sure your child is positioned in such a way that their back is facing you, then you can easily see their screen, whether this is in central space in the home, or the position of their desk in their bedroom, this is a simple but effective monitoring strategy.

See how happy he is that you can see what he's doing? ;o)

Keep the Goal in Mind

Last but certainly not least, as amply illustrated by the amazing Bill Watson below, the real secret to success in terms of maintaining focus on homework, as with any work, is a determination to succeed; no amount of distraction or procrastination will enable your child to actually get their homework completed. While a minority of students may have a barrage of strategies for concealing their futile attempts at multi-tasking, they will still need to actually produce the completed assignment.

What you get out of your computer depends on what you put into it... (Calvin & Hobbes)

* Coca cola of course—what were you thinking?

Five Filters of Failure & a Scale of Scepticism

 

It's not the unrelenting torrent of information that I find troubling, after all, how many books are out there, never mind films and TV shows? How many articles, journals, newspapers, magazines? How many hard copies are holed up in folders, files, cabinets, archives and dusty basements all over the planet? Many I am sure, and yet no one ever complains about this sheer weight of data, I've never heard anyone complain,

"Dude, I just don't want read another book, there are just way too many out there, like, y'know? Like, if I read one a week for the rest of my life, I still wouldn't come even close, y'know?"

And yet, so often I hear this pointless observation made about the web, so yeah there's a lot of data, that's nothing new, the 'information revolution' proceeded the 'digital revolution' by at least a half a century—World Wide Web 1989, Libraries have been around for a lot longer... But even in 1945 library expansion was calculated to double in capacity every 16 years*, if sufficient space were made available... so there's been a lot of data for a long time; all we need to do is learn to deal with it. Literally.

So, the fire hydrant image below, while clever, I relate to more on the level of tech tool overload. Seriously, every gathering of tech types I ever attend is dominated by tech tool talk, new Web 2.0 tools, new gadgets, widgets, scripts, plugins, apps, features, software suite, usually accompanied by a lot of references to them being AWESOME.

Larry Cuban uses a list to help articulate this tension in his seminal publication 'Oversold and Underused' (2001) which reads as follows:

• Is the machine or software program simple enough for me to learn quickly?
• Is it versatile, that is, can it be used in more than one situation?
• Will the program motivate my students?
• Does the program contain skills that are connected to what I am expected to teach?
• Are the machine and software reliable?
• If the system breaks down, is there someone else who will fix it?
• Will the amount of time I have to invest in learning to use the system yield a comparable return in student learning? (p170)

Cuban L (2001). Oversold and underused: computers in the classroom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled up on the most magnificent scepticism dial, or what I prefer to call... the Scale of Scepticism.

In order for me to assimilate a new digital tool to the point of actually recommending it to teachers to use with students, it has to have passed through my own series of stages, along the lines of:

Stage 1 – utter scepticism (yeah, whatever)

Stage 2 – cool reticence (arms folded)

Stage 3 – emerging realisation that, actually, this might be worth a closer look (sitting up)

Stage 4 – mild interest, even emerging (muted) enthusiasm (leaning forward)

Stage 5 – semi-excitement (standing up)

Stage 6 – fervour, obsessive exploration (squeezing through to the front)

Stage 7 – passionate commitment and desire to talk to everyone about it, to the marked irritation of, well, everyone (evangelistic zeal)

The only problem is I needed something more succinct, more ... manageable, I could feel the threads of my sanity slipping, and I needed something simpler to accompany my next foray into techdom.

And thus emerged ... 5 Filters of Failure, now these were mainly conceived in the context of iOS devices, due to their increasing presence in my school, these have somewhat preoccupied my mind of late, but I do believe these 5 filters can be applied more generally:

1. Do this require me to do the same thing more than 5 times? Like tedious account creation for each student? Do kids have to sign in/create an account to use it?
2. Is it transformational? Yeah, it's cool, but does it radically change what I can do? Is it too similar to something I already use?
3. Does it have pedigree? Reputation. How long has it been around? Is it tried and tested? How are they making money? If it is 'free' then how likely is that is will be here in 4 weeks? 4 months? 4 years? Or even if it is, will it still be free (unlikely)? Often the pricing from free to paid (once they think you are committed) is ridiculous, ie from 0 to $10 USD per student. 
4. Is it well designed, simple to use? Can kids use this independently? Can Teachers work it out on their own? Is it intuitive?
5. Can the content be exported/shared easily? Can the App save to camera roll? Export to a universal format? Does it require web access to function, so if WiFi is sketchy the activity fails?

Dealing with the Deluge

This set of filters is essential in the management a phenomenal proliferation of digital tools. On, literally, a daily basis, more tools with funky and not so funky names emerge into a market place already filled to overflowing with a veritable cornucopia of competitors. If you're fortunate, your school hopefully already has a dedicated tech integrator to stand between the teacher and the tsunami wave of digital applications, utilities and all sorts of 'Apps' boasting their pixelated promises to 'save you time' etc.

And if you don't? Then by all means ignore these 'wonders of the web' until you do. Yes, sometimes lurking in the sludge of similarity (and revolutionary? not really...) is the odd golden nugget of greatness, but it's not going to terribly affect your teaching to miss out on those. If that is not an option for you, then arm yourself with these filters and, like the prospector who wades through the mediocre, seeking to route out all except the most worthy, you can then bring the odd truly terrific tool triumphantly back to your team. Not that they will be as excited about as you will be. Yet.

Now it doesn't have to fail all 5 filters to fail, but the more filters it fails, the less interest I have in taking it seriously, I can honestly say that all of the tools I rely on currently all pass at least 4 of the 5 filters. Will these filters change? Absolutely, I'm constantly reconsidering/tweaking/adjusting them—like the cornucopia of competing tools they are designed to filter they need to be flexible; after all there were four filters of failure only a year ago.

1. Setup requirements
2. Similarity
3. Reputation/pedigree/funding
4. Simplicity
5. Ease of Export 

These are my filters

There may be many like them, but these are mine.

The question is... What are yours?

 *Rider (1944). The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library. New York City: Hadham Press.