By MATT RICHTEL

Redwood City, California Even en as some parents and educators express unease over how engrossed today’s students are with digital technology, many American schools are intensifying its use in the classroom. The tension is on vivid display here at Woodside High School, amid the forested hills of Silicon Valley.

As elsewhere, it is not uncommon at Woodside for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook. But the principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician, is determined to engage these 21st-century students on their own terms.

He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

“I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.” O ne consequence of technology’s impact on young people, say researchers, is the risk of developing brains unable to sustain attention.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston.


Vishal Singh, 17, often works on his computer instead of doing homework. He multitasks by answering texts from friends.

“The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.” The tension between technology and learning surfaces in Vishal Singh, a bright 17-year-old student whose ability to be distracted by computers is rivaled by his proficiency with them.

At the beginning of his junior year in high school, he made a name for himself among friends and teachers with his storytelling in videos made with digital cameras and editing software.

He acts as his family’s tech-support expert, helping his father, Satendra, a lab manager, retrieve lost documents on the computer, and his mother, Indra, a security manager at the San Francisco airport, build her own Web site.

But he also plays video games 10 hours a week. He regularly sends Facebook status updates at 2 a.m., even on school nights, and has such a reputation for distributing links to videos that his best friend calls him a “YouTube bully.” Teachers call Vishal one of their brightest students.

But he performed poorly in English and algebra last semester. He did get an A in film critique. “He’s a kid caught between two worlds,” said Mr. Reilly - one that is virtual and one with real-life demands. S everal recent studies show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning.

Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report.

“I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ” Some shyer students do not socialize through technology ? they recede into it.

Ramon Ochoa-Lopez, 14, an introvert, plays six hours of video games on weekdays and more on weekends, leaving homework to be done in the bathroom before school.

“It’s a way for me to separate myself,” Ramon says. “If there’s an argument between my mom and one of my brothers, I’ll just go to my room and start playing video games and escape.” Some parents wholly embrace computer use.

“If you’re not on top of technology, you’re not going to be on top of the world,” said John McMullen, 56, a retired criminal investigator whose son, Sean, plays video games for four hours after school and twice that on weekends.

He was playing more but found his habit pulling his school grades below a level he was comfortable with. He says he sometimes wishes that his parents would force him to quit playing and study. Still, he says, video games are not responsible for his lack of focus. “Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean. Sam Crocker, who has straight A’s but lower achievement test scores than he would like, blames the Internet.

“I know I can read a book, but then I’m up and checking Facebook,” he says, adding: “Facebook is amazing because it feels like you’re doing something and you’re not doing anything. It’s the absence of doing something, but you feel gratified anyway.”

Some neuroscientists have been studying people like Sam and Vishal. German researchers found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in students’ ability to remember vocabulary words.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns. These and other brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self. “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School.

“But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.” Vishal can attest to that. “I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m doing a million things at once,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can’t.”

But it is thanks to the Internet, he says, that he has discovered filmmaking. Without the Internet, “I also wouldn’t know what I want to do with my life.” Teachers at Woodside are divided over whether embracing computers is the right solution.

“It’s a catastrophe,” said Alan Eaton, a charismatic Latin teacher. He says that technology has led to a “balkanization of their focus and duration of stamina,” and that schools make the problem worse when they adopt the technology.

“When rock ‘n’ roll came about, we didn’t start using it in classrooms like we’re doing with technology,” he says. Mr. Reilly hopes that computers can be combined with education to better engage students and give them technical skills without compromising deep analytical thought. But in Vishal’s case, computers and schoolwork seem more and more to be mutually exclusive.

Marcia Blondel, a teacher, says that, after a decent start to the school year, Vishal has fallen back into bad habits. Vishal says he is investing himself more in his filmmaking. But he is also using Facebook late at night and surfing for videos.

The evidence comes in a string of Facebook updates. Saturday, 11:55 p.m.: “Editing, editing, editing” Sunday, 3:55 p.m.: “8+ hours of shooting, 8+ hours of editing. All for just a three-minute scene. Mind = Dead.” Sunday, 11:00 p.m.: “Fun day, finally got to spend a day relaxing ... now about that homework ...”


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tudents at Woodside High School in California are allowed to use their phones at lunch and between classes.