How Instructional Technology Can Help to Avoid Digital Distraction

Nowadays, the use of instructional technology for educational purposes is increasing day by day. Therefore, we can’t deny the importance of the internet and technology for the students. This technology is also becoming the cause of lots of distractions for the students.

Due to digital technology and gaming smartphones, the students are facing some problems like they are interrupted while doing different kinds of academic assignments, they are not able to complete academic tasks before the deadline and their capacity will be reduced. Here, we will discuss how instructional technology is helpful for the students to avoid distraction.

Digital Note-Taking:

There are lots of younger students who are more assertive with multitasking because they think that it is easy for them to handle different tasks at a time. They should come to know that multitasking is a myth and if they are doing multitasking, they will never be able to complete a single task easily. Its reason is that if a student is reading a book along with listening lecture, he may miss some essential points of his lecture.

Nowadays, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets are considered the best resources to take notes but these devices are also creating lots of problems for the students because most of the students are involved in multitasking while using these devices.

Under such a situation, instructional technology is helpful for us. For this reason, you should try to install Free Mode for Google Docs in the devices of your students.

While using Free Mode for Google Docs, students will not be able to open other applications. As a result, they will be restricted to a single task at a time. These tools act just like Google extension and by using these tools, it will be easy for us to hide all the formatting tools, controls and buttons.

Device Contracts, Screen Locks and Monitoring:

To ban digital devices from your college classroom is not a possible solution to the problem because these digital devices are helpful for the students to learn new things. Now, the solution to this problem is that we should try to create such platform for the use of these devices that is helpful for us to force the students to concentrate on the task in their hands.

For this reason, teachers should try to prepare some rules for the use of these digital devices in the classroom. After preparing these rules, teachers should take sign on these rules from the students and their parents.

After that teachers should try to introduce screen locks and monitoring apps in the devices of the students. These screen locks and monitoring apps will provide you with an idea either your students are using these digital devices by following these rules or not.

If your students are using these digital devices by following these rules, you should appreciate them and if they are breaking these rules, you should report these students.

Encourage Compartmentalization Of Time:

No doubt, mobile phones have become a basic need. Most of the students are also using mobile phones in order to stay connected with their friends and family members as well as using to buy dissertation online. If a student is going to complete an academic task and notifications on the mobile phones are distracting their attention from the main theme of the academic task, it is almost impossible for the students to concentrate on the academic task.

As a teacher, you should monitor your students and provide them with the best suggestions. You should ask them that they should use the Pomodoro method of working. It means that after concentrating on the academic tasks for consecutive 25 minutes, they should take a break of 5 minutes. In these five minutes, they should check all the notifications on mobile phones and try to respond to these notifications.

Adopt a Blended Classroom Model:

As we know that the use of instructional technology in the classrooms is increasing day by day and in the future, there is a possibility that all the classroom activities will be technologically based. Under such a situation, if we want to improve the concentration level of the students, it is necessary for us to adopt a blended classroom model.

It means that we should try to study the students by using a mixture of technological-based and non-technological based activities. This kind of instructional method of teaching the students is known as a blended classroom model. In the blended classroom model, there comes station rotation, lab rotation and individual rotation etc.