Mobile Phones, Portable Consoles, Tablets and Smartwatches
Technological and scientific advances are a reality, happening at a fast pace. However, not everything they bring is consensual and positive. While they provide significant improvements to people’s daily lives, they also present new challenges, both in their use and in their regulation.
The truth is that the mobile phone has come to be regarded as a tool, considered by many as essential and indispensable, but one that certainly divides opinions. Although it offers undeniable advantages, it can also negatively affect the classroom environment, the relationship between students, and the relationship between teachers and students, thereby weakening the social development of children and young people.
Acording to the Government’s Information Note Recommendations to Schools on the Use of Smartphones (2025), it states that:
“The use of digital technologies for learning should take place within a pedagogical project accompanied by teachers and duly validated by schools. Individual use of devices by students is vulnerable to excessive, inappropriate, and harmful practices for young people’s well-being.”
It further states:
“International evidence points to risks of excessive use in several domains. Firstly, in learning, harming the ability of children and young people to concentrate. Secondly, in community life, promoting isolation instead of sharing, physical activity, and social interaction. Thirdly, in mental well-being, fostering dependency, anxiety or depression, lack of sleep, among other problems. These are the risks that the recommendations proposed in this document aim to mitigate, particularly regarding the use of smartphones.”
Thus, it is essential that certain age groups grow up in a healthier social and individual environment, since social networks and some online games are creating worrying behaviours in today’s children and youth.
In line with the Government guidelines, through Decree-Law 95/2025 of August 7, 2025, Colégio Rainha D. Leonor will reinforce restrictions on the use of mobile phones and other mobile communication devices (tablets, consoles, smartwatches), except for the use of the iPad assigned to the iCRDL Project, and only during learning activities supervised by a teacher.
