Day 1 Global Teachers’ Festival 2026 | Laura Broadbent

Digital life significantly reshapes learning by affecting students’ attention, memory, and reading skills. While teachers assume students can focus, digital “cognitive mode” trains them for speed and constant switching, making sustained attention difficult. This creates “illusions”: engagement doesn’t guarantee deep learning, strategies are known but often misapplied, and digital reading promotes recognition over true understanding (the “Google effect”). Teachers should design “cognitive transitions” with quiet routines to help students arrive, use one instruction at a time, give explicit signals for task depth, and prioritize reconstruction activities like paraphrasing to build memory. Silence is a secret weapon.