The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has announced it will be reconsidering its guidelines on the amount of entertainment screen time for young learners, a follow-up to its 2011 guidelines which it is now calling "unrealistic."

AAP released "Media Use By Children Younger Than 2 Years" back in 2011, before the first iPad had been released, a fact that in itself questions the accuracy of the guidelines today.

These guidelines "recommended no more than two hours of screen time a day for kids older than 2, and discouraged any time at all in front of a screen for toddlers younger than that. It reaffirmed those guidelines in 2013," said The Los Angeles Times.

In the October issue of AAP News, the group admitted that the standards must evolve or will become obsolete as screen time becomes "simply 'time.'"

To remain current, the group "convened a two-day symposium where researchers, educators and medical experts met to evaluate data to create an updated and more realistic set of guidelines for parents" in May.

This updated set of guidelines as determined from the convention will be released in 2016, The Times said.

"The current recommendation is that parents monitor and limit their children's screen time, but there's no magic number of maximum hours to which they should ascribe. Instead, parents should curate their children's interactions with media and 'co-view' what they're doing," the article said of AAP's current stance before the new guidelines' release.

As screens become more and more prevalent in education, with many schools adopting one-to one initiatives that provide all students with an individual device, these updated guidelines could have an effect on the support schools give to edtech in the classroom.

Generally speaking, the organization tells parents that "[c]reating tech-free zones around the house -- particularly in bedrooms and at mealtimes -- should be a standard practice for all family members. Parents should still give priority to spending time talking directly to their young children without a screen involved."

The recommendation comes just after a U.K. school banning technology in both the classroom and at home drew national attention- indicating the presence of a push-back to the influx of technology in the classroom.

Read the full article here.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

10/05/2015