Imo, reason for hope in this article

the latest Naplan results (described by some commentators in the media as a “national tragedy”) have sparked a re-examination of the long-held concerns of some teachers, parents and experts about the implications of unstructured digital exposure in educational settings. While research linking screen usage to student performance is limited, a change.org petition that calls for a rethink of device reliance in classrooms – and cites the recent Naplan results – has so far garnered more than 25,000 signatures.

This unease has yielded an increasing political appetite to consider changing policy and already prompted a few Australian schools to go back to pen and paper where technology offers no explicit educational benefit.

This reckoning isn’t limited to Australia. Across the world many tech-forward school systems are wrestling with declining academic results and concerns about student wellbeing…

“Technology has lots of distractions. And that seemed pretty obvious from the beginning. But we don’t want distraction, we want concentration.”

McPherson says that while he appreciates the opportunities technology has to offer in specific circumstances, he regularly reminds students that “knowledge matters and there’s no substitute for it”.

It’s a conviction Jane says often falls on deaf ears in her own classrooms. She believes years of skimming websites, copying and pasting “and making PowerPoints” have left many students unable to analyse texts, or “really think for themselves at all”.

“So I have to go back and teach them how to read critically, and how to decipher and how to form opinions.”

Jane insists her students work from hard copies. “And at the end of it, I ask, do you prefer this to looking at a screen? Absolutely, they say.”