Some students turn off their webcams for privacy — they don’t want people peering at their family members or homes. Other students turn off webcams to play games on their phones or text their friends.

But there’s also a deeper issue, said Amanda Kaupp, a psychology teacher at a public high school in St. Louis. Students have developed passive technology habits from constantly consuming entertainment like YouTube and Netflix videos.

Now with remote learning, schools are asking students to instantly develop active relationships with technology, she said, while many digital tools are poorly designed, and students are distracted and stressed out by the pandemic. Kaupp said that 70 percent of students in a recent live lesson admitted they were at that moment also using their phones.

“I have long felt that the obsession with tech in the classroom was an obsession with a false god,” Kaupp said, “and even more so now.”
Before we go …

Is government surveillance through your phone legal? The Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog said it would investigate the use of cellphone location data to track Americans without a warrant, The Wall Street Journal reported. I wrote recently about government agencies buying commercially available data on our movements.
Google vs. Googlers: The U.S. agency that enforces labor laws said that Google had wrongly fired two employees who were involved in organizing company workers, my colleagues Kate Conger and Noam Scheiber reported. Noam and Kate have written before about the firings and cracks in Google’s culture of embracing dissent from its employees.
It pitched public health instead of beaches: Guam’s tourism bureau organized a campaign to get more citizens to download an app that notifies people about potential coronavirus exposure, MIT Technology Review reported. And a flurry of WhatsApp messages, a TV telethon and other tactics were effective — to a point.
The New York Times