Students can swipe a screen but have “no manipulative skills,” says Colin Kinney

Apr 16, 2014 16:41 GMT  ·  By

Members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers are warning that overexposure to touch-screens can render a child unable to cope with traditional pen and paper tasks or, for instance, to play with building blocks.

At the ATL annual conference in Manchester, a teacher from Northern Ireland named Colin Kinney said his colleagues “talk of pupils who come into their classrooms after spending most of the previous night playing computer games and whose attention span is so limited that they may as well not be there.”

According to The Telegraph, Kinney added, “I have spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of young pupils who can swipe a screen but have little or no manipulative skills to play with building blocks or the like, or the pupils who cannot socialise with other pupils but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smartphone.”

He admitted that many of these kids actually showed “brilliant computer skills,” but these abilities were dwarfed by their “deteriorating skills in pen and paper exams.”

The children reportedly “rely on instant support of the computer and are often unable to apply what they should have learned from their textbooks,” according to Kinney.

The key takeaway here is that the parents are at fault, not Apple, iPads, or any other touch-screen device out there. No one’s stopping these people from buying their kids LEGOs and putting a padlock on that iPad after dark.