Hooked on YouTube: Students (and teachers) are distracted by ed-tech
Schools should monitor students' screen time and report to parents, writes Caitlin Lucas, a kindergarten teacher, as part of Fordham’s 2026 Wonkathon on ed-tech.
She evaluated technology use in her own classroom. "My kindergarteners were spending approximately 40 minutes a day on Chromebooks, and I was exchanging unreasonable amounts of instructional time teaching them how to access technology instead of actually teaching," she writes. It took time "to ensure students weren’t attempting YouTube, clicking around aimlessly, or drawing on their screens instead of completing their assignments." It wasn't worth it.
Technology can help teachers work more efficiently and communicate more easily with families, Lucas writes. It can be "life changing" for students with disabilities. Or it can waste everyone's time.
Teachers need to ask hard questions, she concludes. "Is this technology actually improving a child’s education?" Or, "has it become one of the few times during a teacher’s day when they can breathe?"
Systems such as GoGuardian or Lightspeed, which most districts already use, can generate weekly reports on how much time each student has spent on which programs, Lucas writes.
YouTube's educational videos are widely used in U.S. classrooms, reports Tyler Kingkade for NBC News. Most schools give students their own laptop and YouTube access. But schools have no way to disable addictive features like autoplay and YouTube Shorts. "Millions of students have access to billions of videos," most of which aren't educational at all.
Eleven parents nationwide let NBC News analyze their children's site histories to see what they were watching in school. Students ranged from second graders to 12th-graders. Seven spent hours of class time watching YouTube. "More than 95% of the videos, which include ads, were not educational," reports Kingkade. "Hundreds of the videos contained profanity, sexually suggestive scenes or references to drugs and alcohol."
"Parents are increasingly calling on administrators to block YouTube entirely, and dozens of districts have done so for at least some grades this year, Kingkade writes.
In a recent Fordham survey of high school students and recent graduates, one-third said they visited YouTube at school daily for entertainment.
Google, which owns YouTube, created a specialized educational player that lets administrators block YouTube or "restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” Jack Malon, a Google spokesman, said in a statement.
"But the distraction-free educational player is only available to schools that subscribe to Google’s education software or to a handful of other technology companies that pay Google for the player," writes Kingkade. "And the player’s protections disappear when a student visits YouTube through a web browser."
School districts don't want to block YouTube entirely "because curriculum publishers incorporate its videos into lessons and students use it for research," he writes.
Monitoring software "allows teachers to see what’s on every student’s screen, and some can lock down students’ laptops." But that's a distraction for teachers.
“It’s another thing on the teacher's plate to juggle,” said Ross Gorman, a high school history teacher and past president of the teachers union in East Lansing, Michigan, who believes students shouldn’t be assigned their own laptops. “Am I keeping track of what's on every kid's screen, or am I actually helping another kid learn?”
"At least 30 school districts — ranging from the nation’s largest in Los Angeles and New York to smaller ones in Plano, Texas, and Prince William County, Virginia — announced sweeping restrictions blocking YouTube browsing on at least some students’ devices this year, usually with carveouts for teachers to show videos in class," writes Kingkade. Students aren't happy. "In San Diego, the district blocked student attempts to access YouTube 5.8 million times in the first seven weeks after the ban took effect."
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