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You are here: Home / Archives for screen time

screen time

Online Course Activity Break #5: Combining Mindfulness with a Lesson in Video SEO

February 24, 2020 by Erica Hargreave 6 Comments

Here is the fifth instalment of my ongoing series on creating a healthy balance between screentime and time being present in the real world in the online courses I teach. In an attempt at encouraging offline breaks, I am putting reminders into each Unit of my BCIT Course, BCST 1073: Building Your Digital Media Presence, to take a break from the computer and get up to stretch, dance, meditate …etc. I will be sharing these Activity Breaks with all of you here, in case you are thinking of doing something similar. Feel free to copy and modify these for your own online courses, if so desired.

This activity break is designed to also provide students with an example of how they can get their YouTube Channels and YouTube Videos working with their websites to build audience and help with Search Engine Optimization, as we wrap up our Unit on Video SEO.

Activity Break #5: Mindfulness On the Go

As you’ve just submitted your first video as a part of this course, I thought I’d share an example of how Lori has included video she’s made into a blog post, while at the same time giving you a bit of a mindfulness break and a healthy reminder to unplug for a bit, giving yourself a brain break.

These first two mindfulness exercises, Lori created as a part of this blog post on Roamancing, On the Go Mindfulness Activities:

If you look at the descriptions on the videos, you will see that they both link to Lori’s Mindfulness On the Go post on Roamancing – leading new viewers to the site.  On Roamancing, having video in the blog post, makes the post more dynamic and keeps viewers on the site longer as they watch the videos. It also allows viewers to click on the link in the video to our YouTube Channel, if they wish to discover more of our videos.

If you have links to your own or other people’s activity breaks in online courses, I’d love to see and hear about them. Tell us about them in the comments below.

In case you missed it, here are Activity Break #1, #2, #3, and #4:

  • Online Learning Activity Break #1: Git Up Challenge
  • Online Learning Activity Break #2 : Full Body Shadow Puppetry
  • Online Course Activity Break #3 : Office Chair Dancing
  • Online Course Activity Break #4 : Breath and Body Meditation

Filed Under: Activities, Blog, EdTech, Master's Work, Online Activity Break, OTESSA Tagged With: activity break, lesson plan, online teaching, Open Educational Resource, screen time, screentime

Online Course Activity Break #4 : Breath and Body Meditation

November 7, 2019 by Erica Hargreave 3 Comments

Here is the fourth instalment of my ongoing series on creating a healthy balance between screentime and time being present in the real world in the online courses I teach. In an attempt at encouraging offline breaks, I am putting reminders into each Unit of my BCIT Course, BCST 1073: Building Your Digital Media Presence, to take a break from the computer and get up to stretch, dance, meditate …etc. I will be sharing these Activity Breaks with all of you here, in case you are thinking of doing something similar. Feel free to copy and modify these for your own online courses, if so desired.

Activity Break #4: Breath and Body Meditation

Cornelia and I meditating in a tree.

For this Unit’s Activity Break, as you begin to think about a video you’d like to share on YouTube as a part of your Video Creation Assignment, I thought I’d share a video screentime break from one of my past student’s Cornelia Krikke. When Cornelia was taking this course, it was to better build her story in the digital space, as a healing coach who helps people connect with their creativity and improve their well being in nature. One of the digital spaces that really resonates with her in this storytelling is the creation of online video.

Here is a video that she has created on her YouTube Channel to help people to take a break in their day to focus on breath and body:

Breath and Body Meditations like this one really help me with taking computer breaks in my day to keep my headaches and pain in check post my car accidents. They are also useful to calm down and relax the brain, so that when you return to work, you feel like a more relaxed and creative version of yourself.

You can checkout more videos on Cornelia’s Channel here: https://youtube.com/channel/UC7DhiE5zbEv0A2BbGPz2-tA

If you have links to your own or other people’s activity breaks in online courses, I’d love to see and hear about them. Tell us about them in the comments below.

In case you missed it, here are Activity Break #1, #2, and #3:

  • Online Learning Activity Break #1: Git Up Challenge
  • Online Learning Activity Break #2 : Full Body Shadow Puppetry
  • Online Course Activity Break #3 : Office Chair Dancing

Filed Under: Activities, Blog, EdTech, Master's Work, Online Activity Break, OTESSA Tagged With: activity break, lesson plan, online teaching, Open Educational Resource, screen time, screentime

Online Course Activity Break #3 : Office Chair Dancing

October 25, 2019 by Erica Hargreave 3 Comments

Here is the third instalment of my ongoing series on creating a healthy balance between screentime and time being present in the real world in the online courses I teach. In an attempt at encouraging offline breaks, I am putting reminders into each Unit this term of my BCIT Course, BCST 1073: Building Your Digital Media Presence, to take a break from the computer and get up to stretch, dance, meditate …etc. I will be sharing these Activity Breaks with all of you here, in case you are thinking of doing something similar. Feel free to copy and modify these for your own online courses, if so desired.

Activity Break #3: Office Chair Dancing

Uptown Funk Office Chair Dance
From 4 Funky Agents’ Uptown Funk Synchronized Chair Dance.

With this Unit being on search engine optimization, I thought I’d build this Unit’s Activity Break purely based on the top listings under the search term of ‘Office Chair Dance’ on Google and YouTube.

Fittingly with Halloween approaching, here is the top listed link on Google:

And as I entered ‘Office Chair Dance’ into a YouTube search, here are the top 4 listed videos.  Take a look at the titles, meta descriptions, and tags for a hint at what is helping to boost them to the top of the search engine rankings.

It wasn’t long before I started to clue into the fact that I’d stumbled upon the Office Chair Dance Olympics.

So get your bodies moving in those chairs of yours, as your trainers are here …

It would be wrong to have a dance party without some Uptown Funk …

And last but not least, my personal favourite, which reminds me of some parties from the early days of social tech in Vancouver …

Okay, now your turn, anyone who feels so inclined to share a video with us in this Discussion of you doing an Office Chair Dance, would totally make my day!

If you have links to your own or other people’s activity breaks in online courses, I’d love to see and hear about them. Tell us about them in the comments below.

In case you missed it, here are Activity Break #1 and #2:

  • Online Learning Activity Break #1: Git Up Challenge
  • Online Learning Activity Break #2 : Full Body Shadow Puppetry

Filed Under: Activities, Blog, EdTech, Master's Work, Online Activity Break, OTESSA Tagged With: activity break, lesson plan, online teaching, Open Educational Resource, screen time, screentime

Online Course Activity Break #2 : Full Body Shadow Puppetry

October 19, 2019 by Erica Hargreave 3 Comments

Here is the second instalment of my ongoing series on creating a healthy balance between screentime and time being present in the real world in the online courses I teach. In an attempt at encouraging offline breaks, I am putting reminders into each Unit this term of my BCIT Course, BCST 1073: Building Your Digital Media Presence, to take a break from the computer and get up to stretch, dance, meditate …etc. I will be sharing these Activity Breaks with all of you here, in case you are thinking of doing something similar. Feel free to copy and modify these for your own online courses, if so desired.

Activity Break #2: Full Body Shadow Puppetry

A fun and playful reminder from my creative partner, Lori Yearwood, to take a break from your screentime, get up and stretch. What better way to do that this Halloween season, then by creating Shadow Monsters with some full body Shadow Puppetry!

If you feel so inspired to photograph or film a shadow monster or shadow puppetry of your own, then be sure to share it within this discussion, so the rest of us can enjoy it too!

If you have links to your own or other people’s activity breaks in online courses, I’d love to see and hear about them. Tell us about them in the comments below.

In case you missed it, here is my Online Learning Activity Break #1: Git Up Challenge.

Filed Under: Activities, Blog, EdTech, Master's Work, Online Activity Break, OTESSA Tagged With: activity break, lesson plan, online teaching, Open Educational Resource, screen time, screentime

Online Course Activity Break #1 : Git Up Challenge

September 24, 2019 by Erica Hargreave 4 Comments

I love teaching my online courses, and I love the freedom that taking online courses affords me as a student. It means that I don’t have to give up other work or life matters to teach and to study, and I can accept opportunities in other parts of the world while teaching and studying.

Thanks to studying online, I was able to partake in the OER19 conference in Galway, Ireland this past Spring.

However, like with most things in life there are ups and downs to teaching and learning online. One area that I have been questioning for sometime now, is finding a healthy balance between screentime and time being present in the real world. Exploring that balance was the focus of my research in Master of Educational Technology Course ETEC 500. As a result, I have decided to start to put reminders into each of my Units this term in my BCIT Course, BCST 1073: Building Your Digital Media Presence, to take a break from the computer and get up to stretch, dance, meditate …etc. I plan to share many of these Activity Breaks with all of you here, in case you are thinking of doing something similar. Feel free to copy and modify these for your own online courses, if so desired.

Learning to disconnect and be present in the natural world from Cornelia Krikke.

Here is the first activity break that I’ve shared with my students:

Activity Break #1: Git Up Challenge

Time to get up, swing your arms and dance! (Photo by Paulette Wooten, via UnSplash.)

After dealing with a concussion in my own online studies, and spending some time researching healthy screen-time / real world balance in one of my Master’s courses, I’ve decided to add some reminders for activity breaks into our course.

I thought, I’d start with a little dance break and the Git Up Challenge, as it is also a fun example of an interactive media craze in action.

From a couple of Canadians that have taken up the challenge …

In case you need to learn the steps …

An example of the Git Up Challenge being used to educate, and for social good …

And a bit of social media thinking with examples of the craze spreading across Tik Tok …

I made this a discussion, just in case anyone feels so inspired to partake in the challenge, and wishes to share their video with us!

Oh, and if you have a suggestion for future Activity Breaks in the course, feel free to share your ideas in the discussion.

If you have links to your own or other people’s activity breaks in online courses, I’d love to see and hear about them. Tell us about them in the comments below.

Filed Under: Activities, Blog, EdTech, Master's Work, Online Activity Break, Opinions, OTESSA Tagged With: activity break, lesson plan, online teaching, Open Educational Resource, screen time, screentime

A Tale of Two Research Studies – Contradictory Evidence

August 18, 2019 by Erica Hargreave Leave a Comment

A recent assignment for my Master of Educational Technology in ETEC 500 – Research Methodologies in Education had me examining two contradictory research studies to explore how they could come up with such different findings. For me, this shone a spotlight on why it is so very important to teach media literacy, critical thinking, research skills, the scientific method and proper scientific inquiry (as oppose to science as rote learning, which too often happens), and data analysis.

Photo care of Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash.
Photo care of Brett Jordan via Unsplash

In the media that we consume, we see a lot of articles and statements with bold claims that contradict each other. As a scientist, I am all too aware of how data can be manipulated to seemingly support one claim or another out of bias or at times for more nefarious reasons involving things like politics and finances. Since I have been studying educational technologies, one such topic of contradiction in research studies has been the impact of screen time on children. This is further aggravated by media outlets utilizing the research to create sensationalized headlines, often that misrepresents the data.

Recently I read one such article by Andrew Przybylski and Amy Orben in The Guardian, We’re told that too much screen time hurts our kids. Where’s the evidence? At the time of reading this, I found myself questioning the validity of the questions that were asked of the teens around their social media use, in the collection of data. I also found the title of the article to be misleading, as it mentions screen time use, yet the study focuses on social media use. While you are on your screen when using social media, screen time is a much broader topic to social media use.

My niece’s screen use for the day.

Pondering this article, made me think that perhaps we are missing the important questions here. Screen based technologies are becoming more and more an important part of our lives, and as such part of our schooling, so rather than the extreme viewpoints of ‘screen based technologies are our salvation’ or ‘screen based technologies breed evil’, the questions I wish to ask are around healthy use of those screen based technologies to find the balance both in the classroom and outside of it. While I work on screen based technologies and create both screen based stories and edtech, it is important to me that I do so in a way that is healthy for my audience and my students. I know that for myself, personally, too much of certain types of screen use gives me headaches and can make me feel anxious. Video games were like this for me as a kid, and as I had a slightly addictive nature with them, is why I now avoid them. I also know that when dealing with a concussion, I’ve had to be very careful with my screen time, as too much screen time aggravates the concussion symptoms. This is something that I wrote about in this article on Researching Optimal Screen Time Limits for Classroom Activities for Different Screen Based Activities.

Screens, screens, and more screens, whichever way you look.
Photo care of Constellate via Unsplash.

From the list of research studies that I compiled in the aforementioned article, I looked for two articles with bolder statements in their titles that appeared to contradict one another. The contradictory articles I selected were ‘Everything in Moderation: Moderate Use of Screens Unassociated with Child Behaviour Problems‘ by Christopher J Ferguson in Psychiatric Quarterly (December 2017) and ‘Screen Time is Associated with Depression and Anxiety in Canadian Youth‘ by Danijela Maras, Martine F. Flament, Nicole Obeid, Marisa Murray, Annick Buchholz, Katherine A. Henderson, and Gary Goldfield in Preventative Medicine (April 2015).

‘Everything in Moderation: Moderate Use of Screens Unassociated with Child Behaviour Problems’ by Christopher J Ferguson takes a representative correlational sample of youth from the State of Florida and assessed them for links between screen time and risky behavioral outcomes. Risky behavioral outcomes in terms of this study were classified as delinquency, risky behaviors, sexual behaviors, substance abuse, reduced grades or mental health problems. In reading this study and comparing it to Maras et al (2015)’s study, my interests were specifically in regards to correlations between screen time and mental health problems. The conclusions made in this study were that “use of screens that was moderately high, in excess of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ former recommendations of limiting screen time per day to 2 hours, but not excessive, was not associated with delinquency, risky behaviors, sexual behaviors, substance abuse, reduced grades or mental health problems. Even excessive screen use was only weakly associated with negative outcomes related to delinquency, grades and depression only, and at levels unlikely to be practically significant.”

Photo care of Tom Sodoge via Unsplash.

The research study ‘Screen Time is Associated with Depression and Anxiety in Canadian Youth’ by researchers Danijela Maras, Martine F. Flament, Nicole Obeid, Marisa Murray, Annick Buchholz, Katherine A. Henderson, and Gary Goldfield, “examined the relationships between screen time and symptoms of depression and anxiety in a large community sample of Ottawa youth.” The conclusions drawn from this study are that “screen time may represent a risk factor or marker of anxiety and depression in adolescents”, and that “future research is needed to determine if reducing screen time aids the prevention and treatment of these psychiatric disorders in youth.”

Similarities that exist in both studies include the age of youth – 12 -18 in Ferguson (2017) and 11 – 20 in Maras et al (2015), large sample sizes – 6089 in Ferguson (2017) and 2482 in Maras et al (2015), and school based parent and student opt-in surveys. Difference include the communities the studies were conducted in – Florida in Ferguson (2017) and Ottawa in Maras et al (2015), the types of questions asked on the surveys, different intent between the studies – examining risky behaviour in Ferguson (2017) and examining mental wellbeing in Maras et al (2015), and the delineation of the types of screen based activities in the screen based portion of the questionnaire.

A wee drama queen in my life, hamming it up for the camera, as she laments hitting her screen time limits for the day.

There are many things that could cause the different findings in these two studies. Included in this could be external social and cultural differences that were not measured in the two different communities in which the studies were conducted that might be impacting student responses, the difference in the questions posed in the two different communities, bias of the researchers impacting the interpretation of the data collected, and the different intent in designing the two different studies with the intent of Ferguson (2017) examining risky behaviours and the intent of Maras et al (2015) examining mental wellbeing. In examining the two studies, I suspect the most likely cause for the contradictory findings between the two studies with regards to collecting data around depression is in the questions asked in the surveys with regards to depression. In Ferguson (2017) the scale used consisted of three items related to depressive symptoms. An example of one item was “During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing some usual activities?” Whereas in (Maras et al, 2015) they used a pre-established and tested questionnaire, the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI), consisting of 27 items reflecting cognitive, affective, and behavioural signs of depression (Kovacs, 1992). Similarly for anxiety, they used the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children, which is a 10-item, self-reporting scale that is a short and efficient global measure of anxiety symptoms (March et al, 1999). Having spent the past 6-years having to fill out such surveys regularly during treatments, post two car accidents, depression is complex and multilayered and requires more than 3 questions to assess. Assessing depression as “During the past 12 months, did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that you stopped doing some usual activities?” is more of an extreme scenario, and misses many other indicators of depression.

As such, after examining these two studies, I am more apt to give the data in Maras et al (2015) more credence. The only way, however, to scientifically test whether the difference in the two reports were based on the manner in which depression is being tested is to replicate the studies in the different communities. Using Ferguson’s scale, what results would be found in Ottawa? Using Maras et al’s questionnaire, what results would be found in Florida?

Have you discovered contradictory studies in your research? What were the potential causes of this?


Works Cited

Ferguson, C. J. (2017). Everything in moderation: moderate use of screens unassociated with child behavior problems. Psychiatric quarterly, 88(4), 797-805.

Hargreave, E. (2019, July 26). Researching Optimal Screen Time Limits for Classroom Activities for Different Screen Based Activities [Web log post]. Retrieved August 16, 2019, from https://ericahargreave.com/2019/07/researching-optimal-screen-time-limits-for-classroom-activities-for-different-screen-based-activities/

Kovacs, M. (1992). Children’s depression inventory: Manual(p. Q8). North Tonawanda, NY: Multi-Health Systems.

Maras, D., Flament, M. F., Murray, M., Buchholz, A., Henderson, K. A., Obeid, N., & Goldfield, G. S. (2015). Screen time is associated with depression and anxiety in Canadian youth. Preventive, 73, 133-138.

March, J. S., Sullivan, K., & Parker, J. (1999). Test-retest reliability of the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children. Journal of anxiety disorders, 13(4), 349-358.

Przybylski, A., & Orben, A. (2019, July 7). We’re told that too much screen time hurts our kids. Where’s the evidence? The Guardian. Retrieved August 16, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/07/too-much-screen-time-hurts-kids-where-is-evidence?

Filed Under: Blog, EdTech, ETEC 500, Master's Work, Research Tagged With: educational technology, ETEC 500, Master of Educational Technology, screen time

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