REPORTING. "Motivation factor" for some, "very addictive side" for others: why the place of screens in school is not unanimous
What place do screens have in society, and more specifically at school? The debate has been open since the publication of the expert report on April 30 which recommends limiting children’s exposure to screens. In the process, Gabriel Attal assured, National Education must “sweep in front of your door” on the question of the use of these digital tools. So, will any developments be decided by the executive? This would be a major political turnaround, as digital technology has been promoted in recent years in the classroom.
First there were the communities, which financed computers and tablets for students from the beginning of the 2010s. Since then, the use of digital tools has been regularly highlighted. Six months ago, Gabriel Attal himself affirmed, during a visit to Educatech, the educational innovation fair, that the “Digital and artificial intelligence were key tools.” As Minister of National Education, he extolled the merits of an application to help all second-year students with their homework.
Today, there are numerous devices. In Pierre’s class, for example, a teacher in Drancy in Seine-Saint-Denis, there is a tablet on the desk of each CE1 and CE2 student, financed by the town hall. “The tablet is really a tool, for me, which allows us to adapt to the needs of each student”. They use it 30 or 40 minutes a day on average, to work on writing, reading, conjugation, grammar, and even math. “And we also have, with all these applications, the fun side. It’s a real motivator at school,” explains this teacher. The application is called Lalilo, so each student has their own tablet, with headphones to follow the instructions. “I go behind a student who is not going to make it, I will be able to go see him.”
Companies in this sector are grouped together in an association within Edutech France. The general delegate Orianne Ledroit defends reasoned use of these educational applications. “The more we play with a technical tool, the more we appropriate it, the more we free ourselves from it”she says. “It is important not to completely exclude digital education from classes. This is one of the conditions for our children to be able to use technological tools in a critical, reasoned and civic manner.”. For professionals, these tools must be differentiated from social networks, which can be dangerous.
But this use of screens in the school setting is far from consensus. It is particularly criticized by some teachers, like Agnès Favre, literature teacher in middle and high school. In January 2024, she founded the collective for reasoned digital education. For her, young people must be able to work without connecting to their screens, she refuses to use tablets in class. “First, because our role, that of the school, is to get students back into reading”argues Agnès Favre.
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