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Updated: June 16, 2026 @ 5:09 am
Fourth grade students using a computer at JRE. Most students in the district have an assigned Chromebook. The district next year will start using a new program to give teachers the ability to monitor what students are doing on those computers.
Consulting Publications Editor
Fourth grade students using a computer at JRE. Most students in the district have an assigned Chromebook. The district next year will start using a new program to give teachers the ability to monitor what students are doing on those computers.
Payson schools next year will roll out a new program to help teachers monitor students’ use of the internet and artificial intelligence.
Some teachers tested the new Blocksi software this spring, which allows them to lock students out of web searches, monitor what they’re doing on screen during class and even monitor homework. Ironically enough, an AI program operates at the heart of the Blocksi system.
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Contact the reporter at paleshire@payson.com
A 2021 study of 2,000 adults found that half said their own attention span is shorter than it used to be and 75% said the attention span of young people has declined.
Research has shown that people who shift tasks frequently have less ability to stay engaged with a task over time, ignore distracting information and stay focused on a goal. However, it’s not clear if this is caused by social media’s distraction – or that people wired for shorter attention span are more drawn to social media.
Cognitive tests suggest that distracting environments worsen people’s performance on cognitive tests, but there’s no evidence that such changes in cognitive performance persist in the absence of those distractions.
A meta-analysis involving 21,000 people from 32 countries between 1990 and 2021 showed no difference in the underlying ability to pay attention despite the big increase in social media use in that time.
People do switch tasks onscreen much more quickly these days, according to a 20-year study of how people use computers. The time spent on a single task before shifting at least briefly to another task went from 2.5 minutes in the mid-2000s to about 47 seconds in the early 2020s.
A Microsoft marketing report concluded that the average human attention span fell from 13 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2013.
Half of students say that using AI in class makes them feel less connected to their teacher and one in five students reports that they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with AI, according to a survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology. About 85% of students said they had used AI for school work in the past year.
The survey also found that 7 in 10 teachers said they’re worried that AI is weakening key skills students need in order to learn.
Student use of AI had mixed impacts in one review of 800 studies by researchers from Stanford University. Use of AI tools can improve scores on math, programming and writing tasks. However, this can come at the expense of deeper learning and the gains don’t persist without access to those AI tools. Tutoring programs seems to provide more benefit than general AI tools, the researchers concluded.
“When you’re actually teaching a lesson, I’m hoping that teachers are interacting – and the students aren’t sitting in front of a computer getting that lesson. That’s really important – that give and take – and getting answers from kids. We all know what kids do on computers. To me, it’s really important to know that teachers in the classroom are hands on when they are presenting lessons.”
Lori Vanover
Payson school board
Consulting Publications Editor
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