Ontario has already limited cell phone use in schools. And now, the province is considering going further, banning social media and cell phones on school property. Does that go far enough, or is this taking us in the wrong direction?

From St. Catharines, Mohamed El-Estati is an assistant professor of digital pedagogies and technology literacies at Brock University. Malini Leahy is a former teacher and currently vice president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation. Malini, great to have you in our studios. Mohamed, great to have you on the line. Now, to set the table for our discussion, I want to play a clip from the education minister, Paul Calandra, at a press conference on April 28th. Let's have a listen.

"I think the evidence is becoming more and more clear that cell phone cell phone use in our schools, elementary and our secondary schools, anywhere on site, has become a problem. So, we are considering an outright ban of cell phones on school properties across the province of Ontario. Obviously, for health reasons, we'll allow some exemptions to that. And we are going to be working closely with the federal government with respect to a more broad a broader social media ban. Frankly, for kids under a certain age, I know the federal government is is is interested in that."

All right, so we'll delve into a little bit of that, but I want to get our initial reactions. Before I do that, I should mention that we did ask the education minister, Paul Calandra, to join us on our program, but he did not get back in time for our broadcast.

Okay, with that, Mohamed, what are your thoughts on Calandra's announcement?

Well, first starters, it's it's good that this issue is finally getting some attention in terms of policy and government announcements. Cell phones, social media, and now AI in schools have been on our radar for a long time parents and teachers and this is a step forward. My three initial thoughts are first, these are three separate complex problems and complex problems cannot be solved with simple solution. They require collaboration and consultations among all stakeholders including the government, educators, families, school boards, researchers and definitely the tech companies. Second, bans usually are not a fix. Prohibition without education is a deferral of the problem rather than a solution to it. Whatever restrictions go in place, they must be paired with ongoing teaching and digital literacy, digital citizenship and they are literacy. Otherwise, we're just removing the devices from the hands of the kids without teaching them how to handle those devices when they leave the school. And my final thought is what's actually new here? Ontario has had restrictions on cell phones in 2019 and 2024 quite recently. So the first question that came to my mind is what a ban like this would change in practice and whether we relied on certain evaluation data from the 2024 policy in order to expand this decision. Are we building on those data and research or we are just moving ahead of it.

All right, Melanie. Yes, well, I think the empirical evidence is there to show that certainly cell phone use and social media has certainly had a negative psychological impact on adolescents largely. And so it is a step forward as Muhammad says. However, for me as an educator and the and the teachers and education workers that I represent, it's and what? Mhm. Right? So if you put a ban, a complete ban in place, what are the supports that are going into place for these students who are suffering from mental health issues or who use the technology as supports? So, text-to-speech or translation. Um right now, many of the schools and boards across the province have a bring your own device policy. For many of the students, that is their only device that they have. So, if you ban it and students are sharing a say a laptop with parents and they don't have any device now that they can use, what other supports are you putting into place? In the past 8 years, this government has cut funding out of education. >> Mhm. And a cell phone ban on its own is not going to solve a very complex problem, as Muhammad says. You need to ensure that you're having those conversations with the people who are in front of those students every day to understand what is needed. And it you know, the ban, while it is a step forward, it doesn't address and is not going to fix the violence that's happening in our classrooms every day. It's not going to fix the overcrowded classrooms and it's certainly not going to fix the lack of supports when we are losing uh mental health workers, we're losing EAs, we're losing supports in our classrooms for those very students that would need those assistive devices.

All right. I want to I know that you guys have both come in with a few hats, but I do want to ask uh both of you are parents as well. Is that correct, Muhammad? Yes. Yes. I I help me All right. Help me understand, Muhammad, then what are what are the rules uh in your home when it comes to social media use? Do you have sort of strict regulations sort of, you know, in terms of how often they can use it, what they can see and and do. So, I have a 6-year-old and an 11-year-old and uh for now, no social media use because they they don't need social media. We they don't have their personal uh phones. Uh they have tablets for each of them, but we have strict rules in terms of screen time and in terms of the quality of what they can uh use the uh their tablets their tablets for. So, these are the restrictions in place that we have. Malini? My children are a little older, so mine are 25 and 23. But interesting, they hit adolescence at a time when smartphones and social media were becoming a big part of adolescent life. So, I can tell you at that time we certainly had a lot of restrictions uh in place and and my son will tell you he he still remembers being frustrated at getting into online gaming and um at that time the Wi-Fi that I had had a shutoff time. So, I would shut it off between 6:00 to 8:00, so it didn't matter what was going on. 6:00 to 8:00 was our family dinner time and we shut off.

There's a there's another hat that you you wear as well. You were formerly in the classroom. And uh we talk about sort of enforcement. Uh help me understand a little bit of the challenges uh a teacher in a classroom with 20-plus students with cell phones having to manage and navigate that. >> Yes, many of our many of our classrooms have over 30 students. Uh but I will say it it it even when I was in the classroom before there was an actual social media or or cell phone ban or rather restrictions, you know, you still tried to ensure that students weren't on their phone. However, there were examples in my professional judgment where if a student needed it for speech-to-text and they didn't have another device, or I had students who really struggled with once I was done teaching that lesson, would want to put their headphones on and listen to music so that they could focus. It was an accommodation, perhaps not in an individual education plan, but certainly an accommodation that was easy to provide. Now, I've talked to several teachers and education workers across the province, and in trying to implement this partial ban, it's really been difficult. And I know there were concerns originally, you know, oh, I you know, I don't want to be responsible or liable for a student's phone. However, when I'm talking to teachers and education workers now, I I just spoke to Mary the other day, and she said, you know, we've given up on on on that ban. We can't monitor if they are putting that cell phone away in the cubby hole because they're hiding it in their clothes, and then they're taking it out in in class. And absolutely, they will send them down, and they're following the directions. They send them down. Now, that student who is missing a piece of class time, instructional time, that that student may require, and they're missing often at the beginning of class because that's when they're taking it out, and that's the teacher instructional time. And the principals and vice principals now are left with now taking that phone and holding it for a day. Other than that, there's no consequence. So, if you take away the actual support that they need in the classroom, they're actually struggling more in your classroom, and they're missing chunks of information. And there if you're going to put in those restrictions, there needs to be real consequences.

All right. Well, let's pick up on on some of that. Muhammad, the the landscape of classrooms has changed significantly. When I was in school, we did not have all of this tech and all of these gadgets available. Help me understand a little bit how technology is used in the classroom right now. Thank you. This is a great question because when people hear technology in schools, they may think or only pictures students on scrolling on their phones. But actually, the reality of classroom technology is is much broader and much more beneficial than that. It's pedagogically grounded. Teachers use digital tools for interactive activities, for multimedia, for virtual labs and virtual museums to visit places that they cannot visit in other ways or online simulations that they can use to explore certain phenomena. Educational games and gamified learning are are a big thing in education. Building foundational computer skills, research, collaborative work, design and creation tasks, and digital assessment tasks, as well. And more recently, coding is now a curricular requirement in Ontario's science and math curriculum. So, it's no longer an extracurricular or an extra or an optional component in in schools. It is an expectation that students must learn. So, when when we talk about technology in the classroom, we are talking about all of those technological tools that facilitate teaching and definitely benefit the students.

Muhammad, you mentioned AI chatbots a little bit earlier. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is moving towards banning youth from accessing AI chatbots like Copilot, like ChatGPT. What potential implications could this have? So, we we have to distinguish between AI and social media. Manitoba bundled social media and AI chatbots in one uh, in a recent announcement. And Ontario may follow. Now, this is problematic because AI tools and social media are pedagogically and ethically different, uh, different tools. So, if we bundle them together, we are risking under-regulating social media and, uh, over-restricting AI tools. AI tools are now being organically deployed in, uh, software that schools deploy, such as learning management systems, such as search engines. If a student, uh, does a Google search now, the first thing they will get is an an AI overview. So, they are interacting with those AI tools, uh, whether we ban it or, uh, or not. How is it possible to deal with this? Uh, this is, uh, this is problematic. Now, there's there's also a broader inconsistency here. We are hearing about banning, uh, personal devices and AI, uh, chatbots in schools. However, we are also hearing from the government about more investment in STEM education, which is science, technology, engineering, and math. So, the technology piece is very, uh, is very crucial in STEM education. The messaging here is a bit inconsistent, uh, for educators, for policy makers, for families, and for students themselves. Given all the, uh, the prevalence of AI tools in everything that our students are using these days, AI literacy is now a required, uh, competence. We have to teach our students about, uh, how to, uh, use AI tools, and how to critically use them, and how to, uh, navigate those tools, how to understand what they can do and what, what they cannot, uh, to understand how they work, uh, so that they can use them critically and ethically. And if they decide not to use them, that's completely their right. But, at the end of the day, they have to be educated about, uh, the benefits and the limitations of those tools, and they will make their decisions accordingly. Hence, AI literacy is is a crucial component of the curriculum that we need to start incorporating rather than just treating AI tools and AI chatbots as just like social media by restricting by restricting them. All right, I need to talk about what we've been seeing sort of >> on that? Sure, sure, very quickly. Yeah, very quickly. I I mean, I will go a step further and say it's actually hypocritical of the government. This is a government that introduced uh mandatory e-learning. And the way they fund school boards now, they're forcing school boards to offer more and more online courses based on the funding. And so to say we need students off screens and off social media, but now you also need to take courses online, you're actually being hypocritical in forcing them into these domains of online learning and then saying, "And we're not going to allow you the tools that you need." Okay. All right.

In recent weeks, we have seen parents and children rallying at Parliament Hill to bring back the Online Harms Act. There was a Leger poll that reported more than two-thirds of Canadians support a social media ban. Federal government also reconvened an expert group to kind of look into online safety. It seems like most Canadians are in agreement that something must be done. Help me understand here because it seems like you guys are both parents as well. Shouldn't be up to parents to control how their children are behaving online? Polanyi? I I think there's a duty of care on the tech companies, a duty of care on the government, and absolutely on the community as a whole. And that includes educators, it includes parents. It can't be a ban where only one set of people are in charge of moderating that. It's really easy to say, "Oh, parents should be responsible for this." We have parents that are working two jobs and and adolescents that are allowed to be on their own and to monitor them 24 hours is just it's it's just not possible. And I would say the same thing for teachers and educators that are in front to to spend their time monitoring this and trying to enforce it just adds another layer of responsibility while they're trying to teach and deliver their curriculum. And at the same time, remember that you know, these classrooms aren't just a place of of learning curriculum, but that role modeling, learning from others, learning those social cues, those are key. And yet, we're you know, we talk about the responsibility I believe being more than just parents and educators. I think that companies and this government absolutely has a duty of care. All right. I want to get us towards sort of some solutions and how parents can help protect and teachers and everyone around the table protect kids and teens from harms on social media without a total ban. Muhammad? So, the the first thing I would say is being being proactive rather than being reactive. As as Marlene said, we we need to have guardrails on the tech companies. Those platforms are designed to be addictive. This is beyond the capacity of parents to to deal with. They definitely have a role to do in terms of limiting the screen time of their kids uh and and so on, but it's beyond their capacity to do that. So, the restrictions are needed at the level of the platforms that our kids are are using. In terms of being proactive, as I said earlier, we need the education piece to be uh to go side by side with any ban that is going to happen. We need to teach our kids about AI literacy, about digital media literacy, and about all of those skills that they need to acquire. Otherwise, we are not equipping them for the future. The responsibility here is shared. The governments have to do something. Educators have to play a role here, and and the parents as well. Now, on a final note here with respect to our responsibility and how we can protect our kids. In addition to putting all the laws in place, and I'm glad that you mentioned the online harms act because it's it's a step stone here. We need to offer the alternative. We cannot just ban social media without offering the alternative for our kids in terms of extracurricular activities, afternoon clubs, these arts and sports programs. All of these, they require investment from the governments and the community organizations. Currently, we we don't have enough of those. The issue is even more severe in underserved communities and for underserved families that cannot afford for those programs. So, if we ban those those tools, what's the alternative for those for those kids? This is a major major issue that we have to address in order to comprehensively address the problem at hand. Malory, I see you nodding there. You get the last word on that. I think you know, I completely agree with Mohammed. This government has to invest in the other infrastructures that provide everything from play-based learning to free play to those extracurriculars that Mohammed mentions. And I again, I would go a step further and say that the government needs to invest from my perspective and from our members perspective across the province, invest in education so that the supports that are needed that students are using will be there so that all students can be successful. We we need the government to invest in students at all levels in order for them to be successful in our communities and our societies as a whole. All right. Ahmet Olani, we're going to leave it there. Really appreciate your time and your insights on this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. With that, Mohamed, what are your thoughts on Calandra's announcement?

Well, first starters, it's it's good that this issue is finally getting some attention in terms of policy and government announcements. Cell phones, social media, and now AI in schools have been on our radar for a long time parents and teachers and this is a step forward. My three initial thoughts are first, these are three separate complex problems and complex problems cannot be solved with simple solution. They require collaboration and consultations among all stakeholders including the government, educators, families, school boards, researchers and definitely the tech companies. Second, bans usually are not a fix. Prohibition without education is a deferral of the problem rather than a solution to it. Whatever restrictions go in place, they must be paired with ongoing teaching and digital literacy, digital citizenship and they are literacy. Otherwise, we're just removing the devices from the hands of the kids without teaching them how to handle those devices when they leave the school. And my final thought is what's actually new here? Ontario has had restrictions on cell phones in 2019 and 2024 quite recently. So the first question that came to my mind is what a ban like this would change in practice and whether we relied on certain evaluation data from the 2024 policy in order to expand this decision. Are we building on those data and research or we are just moving ahead of it.

All right, Melanie. Yes, well, I think the empirical evidence is there to show that certainly cell phone use and social media has certainly had a negative psychological impact on adolescents largely. And so it is a step forward as Muhammad says. However, for me as an educator and the and the teachers and education workers that I represent, it's and what? Mhm. Right? So if you put a ban, a complete ban in place, what are the supports that are going into place for these students who are suffering from mental health issues or who use the technology as supports? So, text-to-speech or translation. Um right now, many of the schools and boards across the province have a bring your own device policy. For many of the students, that is their only device that they have. So, if you ban it and students are sharing a say a laptop with parents and they don't have any device now that they can use, what other supports are you putting into place? In the past 8 years, this government has cut funding out of education. >> Mhm. And a cell phone ban on its own is not going to solve a very complex problem, as Muhammad says. You need to ensure that you're having those conversations with the people who are in front of those students every day to understand what is needed. And it you know, the ban, while it is a step forward, it doesn't address and is not going to fix the violence that's happening in our classrooms every day. It's not going to fix the overcrowded classrooms and it's certainly not going to fix the lack of supports when we are losing uh mental health workers, we're losing EAs, we're losing supports in our classrooms for those very students that would need those assistive devices.

All right. I want to I know that you guys have both come in with a few hats, but I do want to ask uh both of you are parents as well. Is that correct, Muhammad? Yes. Yes. I I help me All right. Help me understand, Muhammad, then what are what are the rules uh in your home when it comes to social media use? Do you have sort of strict regulations sort of, you know, in terms of how often they can use it, what they can see and and do. So, I have a 6-year-old and an 11-year-old and uh for now, no social media use because they they don't need social media. We they don't have their personal uh phones. Uh they have tablets for each of them, but we have strict rules in terms of screen time and in terms of the quality of what they can uh use the uh their tablets their tablets for. So, these are the restrictions in place that we have. Malini? My children are a little older, so mine are 25 and 23. But interesting, they hit adolescence at a time when smartphones and social media were becoming a big part of adolescent life. So, I can tell you at that time we certainly had a lot of restrictions uh in place and and my son will tell you he he still remembers being frustrated at getting into online gaming and um at that time the Wi-Fi that I had had a shutoff time. So, I would shut it off between 6:00 to 8:00, so it didn't matter what was going on. 6:00 to 8:00 was our family dinner time and we shut off.

There's a there's another hat that you you wear as well. You were formerly in the classroom. And uh we talk about sort of enforcement. Uh help me understand a little bit of the challenges uh a teacher in a classroom with 20-plus students with cell phones having to manage and navigate that. >> Yes, many of our many of our classrooms have over 30 students. Uh but I will say it it it even when I was in the classroom before there was an actual social media or or cell phone ban or rather restrictions, you know, you still tried to ensure that students weren't on their phone. However, there were examples in my professional judgment where if a student needed it for speech-to-text and they didn't have another device, or I had students who really struggled with once I was done teaching that lesson, would want to put their headphones on and listen to music so that they could focus. It was an accommodation, perhaps not in an individual education plan, but certainly an accommodation that was easy to provide. Now, I've talked to several teachers and education workers across the province, and in trying to implement this partial ban, it's really been difficult. And I know there were concerns originally, you know, oh, I you know, I don't want to be responsible or liable for a student's phone. However, when I'm talking to teachers and education workers now, I I just spoke to Mary the other day, and she said, you know, we've given up on on on that ban. We can't monitor if they are putting that cell phone away in the cubby hole because they're hiding it in their clothes, and then they're taking it out in in class. And absolutely, they will send them down, and they're following the directions. They send them down. Now, that student who is missing a piece of class time, instructional time, that that student may require, and they're missing often at the beginning of class because that's when they're taking it out, and that's the teacher instructional time. And the principals and vice principals now are left with now taking that phone and holding it for a day. Other than that, there's no consequence. So, if you take away the actual support that they need in the classroom, they're actually struggling more in your classroom, and they're missing chunks of information. And there if you're going to put in those restrictions, there needs to be real consequences.

All right. Well, let's pick up on on some of that. Muhammad, the the landscape of classrooms has changed significantly. When I was in school, we did not have all of this tech and all of these gadgets available. Help me understand a little bit how technology is used in the classroom right now. Thank you. This is a great question because when people hear technology in schools, they may think or only pictures students on scrolling on their phones. But actually, the reality of classroom technology is is much broader and much more beneficial than that. It's pedagogically grounded. Teachers use digital tools for interactive activities, for multimedia, for virtual labs and virtual museums to visit places that they cannot visit in other ways or online simulations that they can use to explore certain phenomena. Educational games and gamified learning are are a big thing in education. Building foundational computer skills, research, collaborative work, design and creation tasks, and digital assessment tasks, as well. And more recently, coding is now a curricular requirement in Ontario's science and math curriculum. So, it's no longer an extracurricular or an extra or an optional component in in schools. It is an expectation that students must learn. So, when when we talk about technology in the classroom, we are talking about all of those technological tools that facilitate teaching and definitely benefit the students.

Muhammad, you mentioned AI chatbots a little bit earlier. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew is moving towards banning youth from accessing AI chatbots like Copilot, like ChatGPT. What potential implications could this have? So, we we have to distinguish between AI and social media. Manitoba bundled social media and AI chatbots in one uh, in a recent announcement. And Ontario may follow. Now, this is problematic because AI tools and social media are pedagogically and ethically different, uh, different tools. So, if we bundle them together, we are risking under-regulating social media and, uh, over-restricting AI tools. AI tools are now being organically deployed in, uh, software that schools deploy, such as learning management systems, such as search engines. If a student, uh, does a Google search now, the first thing they will get is an an AI overview. So, they are interacting with those AI tools, uh, whether we ban it or, uh, or not. How is it possible to deal with this? Uh, this is, uh, this is problematic. Now, there's there's also a broader inconsistency here. We are hearing about banning, uh, personal devices and AI, uh, chatbots in schools. However, we are also hearing from the government about more investment in STEM education, which is science, technology, engineering, and math. So, the technology piece is very, uh, is very crucial in STEM education. The messaging here is a bit inconsistent, uh, for educators, for policy makers, for families, and for students themselves. Given all the, uh, the prevalence of AI tools in everything that our students are using these days, AI literacy is now a required, uh, competence. We have to teach our students about, uh, how to, uh, use AI tools, and how to critically use them, and how to, uh, navigate those tools, how to understand what they can do and what, what they cannot, uh, to understand how they work, uh, so that they can use them critically and ethically. And if they decide not to use them, that's completely their right. But, at the end of the day, they have to be educated about, uh, the benefits and the limitations of those tools, and they will make their decisions accordingly. Hence, AI literacy is is a crucial component of the curriculum that we need to start incorporating rather than just treating AI tools and AI chatbots as just like social media by restricting by restricting them. All right, I need to talk about what we've been seeing sort of >> on that? Sure, sure, very quickly. Yeah, very quickly. I I mean, I will go a step further and say it's actually hypocritical of the government. This is a government that introduced uh mandatory e-learning. And the way they fund school boards now, they're forcing school boards to offer more and more online courses based on the funding. And so to say we need students off screens and off social media, but now you also need to take courses online, you're actually being hypocritical in forcing them into these domains of online learning and then saying, "And we're not going to allow you the tools that you need." Okay. All right.

In recent weeks, we have seen parents and children rallying at Parliament Hill to bring back the Online Harms Act. There was a Leger poll that reported more than two-thirds of Canadians support a social media ban. Federal government also reconvened an expert group to kind of look into online safety. It seems like most Canadians are in agreement that something must be done. Help me understand here because it seems like you guys are both parents as well. Shouldn't be up to parents to control how their children are behaving online? Polanyi? I I think there's a duty of care on the tech companies, a duty of care on the government, and absolutely on the community as a whole. And that includes educators, it includes parents. It can't be a ban where only one set of people are in charge of moderating that. It's really easy to say, "Oh, parents should be responsible for this." We have parents that are working two jobs and and adolescents that are allowed to be on their own and to monitor them 24 hours is just it's it's just not possible. And I would say the same thing for teachers and educators that are in front to to spend their time monitoring this and trying to enforce it just adds another layer of responsibility while they're trying to teach and deliver their curriculum. And at the same time, remember that you know, these classrooms aren't just a place of of learning curriculum, but that role modeling, learning from others, learning those social cues, those are key. And yet, we're you know, we talk about the responsibility I believe being more than just parents and educators. I think that companies and this government absolutely has a duty of care. All right. I want to get us towards sort of some solutions and how parents can help protect and teachers and everyone around the table protect kids and teens from harms on social media without a total ban. Muhammad? So, the the first thing I would say is being being proactive rather than being reactive. As as Marlene said, we we need to have guardrails on the tech companies. Those platforms are designed to be addictive. This is beyond the capacity of parents to to deal with. They definitely have a role to do in terms of limiting the screen time of their kids uh and and so on, but it's beyond their capacity to do that. So, the restrictions are needed at the level of the platforms that our kids are are using. In terms of being proactive, as I said earlier, we need the education piece to be uh to go side by side with any ban that is going to happen. We need to teach our kids about AI literacy, about digital media literacy, and about all of those skills that they need to acquire. Otherwise, we are not equipping them for the future. The responsibility here is shared. The governments have to do something. Educators have to play a role here, and and the parents as well. Now, on a final note here with respect to our responsibility and how we can protect our kids. In addition to putting all the laws in place, and I'm glad that you mentioned the online harms act because it's it's a step stone here. We need to offer the alternative. We cannot just ban social media without offering the alternative for our kids in terms of extracurricular activities, afternoon clubs, these arts and sports programs. All of these, they require investment from the governments and the community organizations. Currently, we we don't have enough of those. The issue is even more severe in underserved communities and for underserved families that cannot afford for those programs. So, if we ban those those tools, what's the alternative for those for those kids? This is a major major issue that we have to address in order to comprehensively address the problem at hand. Malory, I see you nodding there. You get the last word on that. I think you know, I completely agree with Mohammed. This government has to invest in the other infrastructures that provide everything from play-based learning to free play to those extracurriculars that Mohammed mentions. And I again, I would go a step further and say that the government needs to invest from my perspective and from our members perspective across the province, invest in education so that the supports that are needed that students are using will be there so that all students can be successful. We we need the government to invest in students at all levels in order for them to be successful in our communities and our societies as a whole. All right. Ahmet Olani, we're going to leave it there. Really appreciate your time and your insights on this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.