Amount of Screen Time at School

Students, Teachers and Computers

In the age of computers, we thought it would be interesting to know the average amount of screen time at school that children are currently getting. Surprisingly, we found that nearly 50% of children spend less than an hour a day looking at screens whilst only 13% spend more than 4 hours a day.

This is in direct contrast to a similar survey that we ran a few weeks ago. At that time we found that about 33% of children spend more than 4 hours looking at a screen whilst at home.

Evidently, children like screens more than teachers do!

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Pleasing the Adults

There’s lots of concern amongst adults that children are spending too much time watching screens but it’s no secret that computers are the future. Almost every job you can imagine will involve computers in one form or other. Everything from fisherman to fireman and from nurse to nuclear scientist will require computer skills in an ever-increasing variety. Mums, dads and teachers all know this but what they worry about is kids spending too much time on computer games and social media instead of what they call the “serious stuff”.

You may have noticed that parents and teachers don’t much care for Facebook and computer games so let’s look for a few things that kids can do on computers that will keep the grown-ups happy.

Wikipedia

Whatever your interests in life you will find endless hours of entertainment on more than 45 million pages in Wikipedia. On every page of this huge website there is a search button into which you can type the things that most interest you. You will then be taken to pages that deal specifically with that subject. From there, you can follow the links to a myriad of other related things.

Explore and get to know Wikipedia and you’ll have a friend for life!

Read Beanz

Beanz is a fabulously entertaining American magazine for "Kids, Code and Computer Science". There are many free articles such as the one at "What is Artificial Intelligence" and if you like the idea then get your mum and dad to subscribe for you – it costs about £12.00 per year.

Start a Blog

If you have an interesting hobby and you like writing, why not start your own blog and tell the world about it? Setting up your own blog is much easier than you might expect and it’s really exciting when you find that people are reading it all over the world. It takes some time and effort to get started but it’s not rocket science so don’t think you need to be an adult before you start.

Neither do you need to be an expert in anything nor a great writer – all you need is enthusiasm for your subject. Interested? Take some inspiration from Scott Chow at Blog Starter where you will see just how easy it is. Scott tells you how he made a “ton of mistakes” when he first started blogging but he lived to see another day! Scott’s website has been written to help you avoid the same mistakes that he made.

Learn About Spreadsheets

Maybe you are more interested in numbers rather than words and if that is the case then we recommend you stop by the MS Excel section of Free Training Tutorials.

For anyone looking for a career in any scientific subject, managing spreadsheets is essential knowledge because they can manipulate numbers a thousand times faster than even the most intelligent human brain. Once you begin to see how formulas are used you will quickly become hooked. You’ll be creating budgets and predictions in no time at all and you’ll have great fun along the way.

Education Quizzes

We really must mention our own website here at EQ! We have quizzes on almost all the national curriculum subjects as well as our Specialist section where you can find quizzes on Nature, Art, Gardening, Flags, Books and a whole host of other topics.

If you don’t want to subscribe to play all the quizzes whenever you like then remember that you can always play one quiz a day free of charge.

The Final Word on Screens

All the above activities, and many more besides, are only possible because of computer screens so make screens your friends at both school and home. And don’t forget to tell the grown-ups about all the educational stuff you are doing – that ought to keep them satisfied!

Survey Results

The survey question this week was “In an average day at school, how long do you spend using a computer device?” Here are the results from a total of 1,375 responses:

MORE SURVEYS OF CHILDREN