Giving Compass' Take:

• Research shows that technology overuse is the sharpest difference between wealthy and unwealthy children, creating a potential new digital divide, that is no longer about access. 

• How are parents, educators, and districts addressing this problem? How does the onset of technology in classrooms impact children's' media usage habits?

• Read about excessive screen time for kids. 

For years policymakers have fretted about the "digital divide," that poor students are less likely to have computers and high-speed internet at home than rich students. The fear was, and is, that technology might cause achievement gaps between rich and poor students to grow if it's easier for rich kids to use educational software, practice computer coding or learn about the world online.

A 2017 survey of technology use at home shows the gap in computer access is rapidly closing. When it comes to mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, the gap has virtually vanished. Even high-speed internet access is becoming more commonplace. Nearly 75 percent of families making less than $30,000 a year said they had high-speed internet access in 2017, up from 46 percent in 2013. More than 70 percent of low-income families said they had a computer at home.

Instead, the sharpest contrasts between rich and poor children now are in media usage. The survey, conducted by the nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense, found that low-income parents sat their young children, from birth to age eight, in front of a television or a computer screen for 3 hours and 29 minutes a day, on average. That's almost double the 1 hour and 50 minutes of daily screen time that the typical high-income child has. (The study labels families making more than $75,000 a year as high income.)

Read the full article about technology overuse from the Hechinger Report at Children & Nature Network.