Family Tech Talk

About Family Tech Talk

The tech podcast for parents who love technology, but don’t have time to keep up! From parents who are just starting out, to those with kids who are grown and flown, and even those kids who happen to be our parents. This is the technology podcast that focuses on using the technology in your life to make it better! Oh My Tech will bring you interviews with folks using tech in unique ways, the latest news or trending topics, and maybe even help you find something to watch. Join Sarah Kimmel as she breaks down tech in ways that anyone can understand! Learn more at https://familytech.biz

Publisher

Sarah Kimmel

Category

kids & family · news · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Jul 2018

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

123 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Would You Let AI Register Your Car? Meta Muse and Drawing Your AI Line

   AI isn't just answering our questions anymore. It's booking things, buying things, and answering messages as us. This week on Oh My Tech, Sarah breaks down Meta's new AI agent, Muse: what it actually does, what it costs, and the Facebook Marketplace story where an AI agent reportedly shared a seller's home address. Then she walks through how to decide what AI can do on its own versus what it has to check with you first, and where to change those settings in Muse. Plus her take on Muse Charm, the cute keychain gadget she'd rather skip. Your 5-minute task works on any phone, no AI required. Family Tech Newsletter: https://weeklytips.subscribepage.io ** FREE RESOURCES ** From customizable technology use contracts to a full family tech plan. Access your free interactive guides here: https://familytechzone.com/links ** JOIN THE DIGITAL VILLAGE ** Join the Discord Server: https://familytech.biz/discord Join us on Facebook: https://familytech.biz/facebookgroup Post on Reddit: https://familytech.biz/reddit ** CONNECT WITH US ** YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@familytech?sub_confirmation=1 Instagram: https://instagram.com/familytech

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   All Your Apps Suddenly Want to Know Your Age

   That birthday your kid typed into a signup form years ago? It's now deciding who can message them, what they can download, and when your parental controls loosen up. This week on Oh My Tech, we talk through how Roblox, Discord, and Instagram stopped trusting the birthday, what the new App Store age laws in Utah, Texas, and other states actually do (and which ones are really in force), and the privacy trade-off when everyone, including you, gets checked. Plus, where your child's birthday lives on iPhone, Google, and Instagram, and one small account check to try before next week.

3. 

   22 Sept 2026

   The Chromebook Nobody Banned: What School Phone Bans Miss

   What parents can actually control on a school-issued laptop, and the five questions that get you real answers from your district. TL;DR Phone bans are spreading fast. As of mid-2026, at least 38 states plus Washington, D.C. require districts to restrict student phones, and 28 states plus D.C. go bell-to-bell (first bell to last bell, lunch and passing periods included). The bans are working on the thing they were built for: distraction from phones. Teachers in New York and New Hampshire report better focus, more talking at lunch, less bullying. The bans mostly do not cover the school-issued Chromebook, laptop, or tablet. In Utah, the bell-to-bell law says so explicitly. Teachers now rate school laptops as a bigger classroom distraction than phones. In one national survey, 56% called off-task laptop behavior a major distraction, compared to 38% for phones. From 8:00 to 3:00, you do not have a switch to flip. You have questions to ask. Most districts already own parent-facing tools (GoGuardian Parent, Securly Home, Bark for Schools Parent Portal) that are switched off by default. Tonight, without anyone’s permission: give the school laptop a bedtime on your home WiFi, and move its charger out of the bedroom. The comment that started this A while back I did a whole episode on school phone bans: what to do when your school bans phones, and how to talk to your kids about it. (Linked below if you missed it.) Then a viewer left a comment that stuck with me. Paraphrasing: phones are banned at school now, so the kids just use their Chromebooks all day. A couple of other people jumped in underneath it. Somebody brought up smartwatches. And honestly, back in the ’90s our graphing calculators were advanced enough to be distractions too. I wrote programs for my TI-83, so I am not exactly positioned to judge. But that commenter was right, and the thing they put their finger on deserves a real answer. Where school phone bans actually stand right now Here is the quick recap. As of the most recent Education Week tracking in mid-2026, at least 38 states and Washington, D.C. require districts to ban or restrict student phone use. Twenty-eight of those states, plus D.C., go bell-to-bell. First bell to last bell, lunch and passing periods and study hall included. These bans were built to solve one specific problem: phones distracting kids during school. And on that specific problem, the early results are genuinely good. Where Who was surveyed What they reported New York (2026) 585 teachers, administrators, and school staff after year one 80% said the phone-free policy delivered positive results. 76% saw better classroom behavior. 80% saw better social connections. 60% reported a drop in bullying and cyberbullying. New Hampshire (2026) 1,399 educators in grades 6 to 12 About 75% said students seemed more focused. About 65% said students talked to more people at lunch and during breaks. Phones in Focus (national, 2026) More than 68,000 educators Teachers report less in-class phone use and more face-to-face interaction after bell-to-bell bans. So the bans are doing their job. The catch is the job description. The ban covers the most visible screen in the building. It does not cover the only one. I keep picturing a house with a front door and a side door. We closed the front door. The side door is propped open, and it was propped open by the school itself. What is still in the backpack every single day? Three things, mostly. 1. The school-issued tablet, laptop, or Chromebook. This is the big one, and it is the one your kid is required to use. 2. The smartwatch. A lot of ban policies never mention it at all. Utah’s does. Our law specifically names smartwatches, and the newer version that took effect July 1, 2026 goes further. Senate Bill 69 covers cellphones, smartwatches, and “emerging technologies that could act in place of or as an extension of a student’s smartphone.” That is lawmakers looking down the road and saying: we do not know what is coming, but we want it covered too. Worth noting what that same Utah law explicitly does not cover: school-issued or school-required devices. Which is the entire point of this post. 3. The stuff nobody has written a policy about. A very capable graphing calculator, especially at the high school level. An e-reader, for the kid who really loves books. Let’s focus on the main screen, though. The one your child is handed and told to use. Why you cannot just “fix” the school laptop (and why that is not on you) Here is the most useful way I have found to think about a school Chromebook: it is a work laptop, and your kid is the employee. The district’s IT department set it up. They decide what is installed, which sites load, which accounts can even sign in. You cannot change the settings on your own work laptop, and you cannot change these either. That is not a failure of your parenting or your tech skills. It is a question of whose name is on the device. I have worked in IT for 24 years and I cannot reconfigure a device that somebody else’s management console owns. Neither can the systems administrators in my comment section. If you have been sitting there feeling behind on this one, you were never in the race. Wait, are laptops really a bigger distraction than phones? According to teachers, yes. The EdWeek Research Center surveyed 1,268 teachers, school administrators, and district leaders. 56% said off-task behavior on laptops, tablets, or desktops was a major source of distraction eating into learning time. For personal cellphones, that number was 38%. School-issued devices outranked phones. In the same survey. By a lot. And then there is a much bigger one. Phones in Focus is a national research project led by University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth, with responses from more than 68,000 educators so far. Teachers in that sample estimate that, on average, about one in three students are using their laptops during class for personal things: texting, gaming, social media, YouTube videos that have nothing to do with the lesson. And here is the part that matters for this conversation: that estimate barely moves depending on whether the school has a phone ban. Ban the phone, do not ban the phone, about a third of the room is still on the laptop. Personal cellphones School-issued laptops and tablets Rated a major classroom distraction (EdWeek, 1,268 educators) 38% 56% Covered by most state bell-to-bell bans Yes Usually no Who controls the settings You (mostly) The district Changes when a phone ban starts Usage drops sharply Barely moves “Okay, but my kid isn’t doing that” Maybe not! I am not saying your kid is the one streaming YouTube during fourth period. I am saying the option is in the bag every day, at school and at home. Building your plan around the idea that it is not there is where families get caught out. It reminds me of the line from Jurassic Park I think about constantly in this job: life, uh, finds a way. Kids find a way. They always have. And finding the way is not a character flaw. That is a 12-year-old with a device and a boring fourth period. I have a whole video on my channel about the ways kids get around controls. It is one of my most watched, so go take a look if you have not. What about the pouches? Last time I covered phone bans, I talked about the pouches: a fabric pouch with a magnetic lock. Phones go in at the start of the day, stay with the kid, cannot be opened, and at dismissal the kid taps it on a base to unlock. You already know how this story goes. Within about a week of any school rolling those out, somebody’s kid has figured out the magnet, or has started putting an old phone in the pouch. The bigger problem is consistency. My son’s high school is supposed to be bell-to-bell, because we are in Utah, and I still get texts from him during the day. I asked him early in the year how that was happening, and he said nobody really cares during lunch. So, shrug. If a rule only works while somebody is watching, the rule was not the thing doing the work. There is a national study on exactly this. Researchers from Stanford, Duke, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania looked at more than 43,000 middle and high schools over three years and published the results through the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2026. The pouches genuinely did cut phone use. In schools with bell-to-bell bans, the share of students teachers reported using phones in class for personal reasons dropped from 61% to 13%. That part held up. But the first year got harder before it got easier. Disciplinary incidents went up. Student wellbeing went down. By the third year, both of those turned around, with wellbeing landing higher than where it started. Which tells us something useful: we do not have the full answer yet. A lot of these bans just went into place. Year one is not the verdict. When your kid gets around something, ask a better question At some point, one of them will get around something. When that happens, the question that actually gets you somewhere is not “how dare you.” It is: what were you trying to do? Because the answer is almost never “I wanted to defy the school.” It is usually: “I was bored.” “Everybody was in a group chat and I wasn’t.” “I wanted to know if you texted me back.” It is a bit like when your boss has you do something that feels completely pointless, right up until you finally see the bigger picture. Kids genuinely believe they can manage themselves. They have self-control, they will not look at it, it is fine. But every “I’m just checking for a second” costs more than the second. Research on interruptions by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes an average of about 23 minutes to fully return to a task after being interrupted. That study followed office workers rather than eighth graders, so treat it as illustrative rather than a classroom measurement. Still, multiply that shape of thing by a steady trickle of notifications across a class period and you can see how little actual learning time is left. So is anything going well with these bans? Actually, quite a bit. The thing teachers keep reporting, survey after survey, is not a test score. It is noise. Lunchrooms got loud again. Hallways got loud again. Kids are talking to each other in the spaces between things. And there is real boredom now. Real, unstructured, nothing-to-do boredom, which we spent about 15 years accidentally deleting. Some of that boredom is going to turn into a friendship, a sketchbook, or a very stupid joke they will still be telling at 25. From 8:00 to 3:00, you do not have a switch. You have questions. Let’s talk about the school day specifically, because that is what the comment was about. Not 3:00 to bedtime. 8:00 to 3:00. During those hours, the laptop is the district’s. The network is the district’s. The rules are the district’s. What you have is questions. And in most districts, the answers already exist. Somebody already set this up. Nobody ever turned on the part that is meant for you. The classroom view your kid’s teacher may or may not be using Almost every district running Chromebooks has monitoring software on them. GoGuardian and Securly are the two names you will hear most often. The first thing that software does is give the teacher a live view of every screen in the room at once. The tab the kid is on, plus every other tab they have open behind it. So the exact problem that commenter described, a third of the room quietly on something else, is visible to somebody in real time. If they are looking. Which makes this a completely fair question at parent-teacher conferences. Not as an accusation. Just: do you use the classroom view during class? Some teachers use it constantly. Some have never opened it. It varies teacher to teacher, in the same building, down the same hallway. The parent version nobody told you about Here is the part that surprises people: a lot of that software has a parent version, and it comes with the license your district already bought. GoGuardian Parent shows you your own kid’s activity on their school device. Depending on what your district enables, it also lets you filter that school-managed device at home and pause the internet on it. Straight from GoGuardian’s own documentation: those parental controls are available only if the school’s IT administrator has enabled them, and they apply only during out-of-school hours. They are switched off by default. Somebody at the district has to go into a settings page and turn them on. Securly Home works similarly. It is free to families as part of the district’s Securly purchase, and it gives parents a real-time activity feed, home rules on the school device, internet pause, and offline scheduling. Also school-owned devices only, and also only outside school hours. Notice the pattern. These tools exist, your district may already own them, and nobody is going to send a letter letting you know. So if you have spent the last few minutes thinking “great, so I have zero control over this machine,” you might actually have some. It may just be turned off. Bark for Schools: free, and frequently switched off Before I say a word about this one: I have an affiliate relationship with Bark on their family products. If you buy one of those through a link of mine, I get paid. The school version I am about to describe is free, so there is nothing here for me to sell you. But you should know the relationship exists before I start talking. Bark for Schools is free. Not discounted, not a trial. Free to every public and private K-12 school in the United States. Your district is not paying for it. So if the answer you get back is “we would love to, but it is not in the budget,” budget is not the barrier on this one. It also has a Parent Portal that shares your own kid’s alerts with you. Same story as the others: the school has to switch it on and choose the alert settings, and plenty of schools never have. Bark for Schools and the family version of Bark are two different products This trips up a lot of families, and the letter that came home in August almost certainly did not make it clear. Bark for Schools follows the account. The family version of Bark follows the kid. Bark for Schools (free) Bark family plans (paid) What it watches Your child’s school Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account: school email, school chats, school documents, and Chrome browsing tied to that account The child’s own device and personal accounts Where it works Anywhere they sign into that school account, including on their own laptop at home on a Sunday On the phone or tablet you set it up on What it does not see Personal Gmail, texts, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, anything on their personal phone Not applicable Cost $0 Bark Jr is $5/month. Bark Premium is $14/month, or $99/year. Who turns it on Your district You So when a district letter says your student is protected by Bark, what that actually means is their school account is covered. Not their entire life. Covering the personal device is a paid family product you would buy yourself, and that is the one I get paid on, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. One more thing worth asking: some districts negotiate a family deal. Bark partners with schools and organizations to offer family packages, and I have seen partner arrangements where families get the junior version free and the premium version at a discount. Not everybody does it, but enough do that it is worth a question to your district. If you are in Utah, something just changed This is new enough that most families have not heard about it yet. Utah Senate Bill 88, “School Technology Amendments,” passed in the 2026 session and took effect July 1, 2026. It requires public schools to provide a parent-accessible monitoring system for school-managed devices. That means a portal where you can see how long your child spent on their screen and what websites they visited. It also says that at a parent’s request, the district must use a preapproved content filtering system on a school-approved device. A “white list” of allowed sites rather than a “black list” of blocked ones. If you are in Utah, that is not a favor you are asking for. Ask your school where the parent portal is. If you are not in Utah, this is still useful: it tells you what to ask for, and it tells you these systems exist and can be handed to parents. The email to send your school Copy this, paste it, change the name at the top. Hi [Name], I have a few questions about the device my child uses at school. What monitoring or classroom software is installed on my child’s school device? Is there a parent version of that software, and can you enable it for my account? Do teachers use the classroom view during instruction? Does the filtering still work when that laptop is on our home WiFi, or only on the school network? Does the district have any family discount or family package available through our monitoring vendor? Thank you, [Your name] Question 4 is the one I would not skip. Device filtering vs network filtering: the distinction that decides everything This sounds technical. It is not, and it changes your entire plan. If the school filters the device, the blocking travels with the laptop. It works at school, at the library, and on your couch. If the school filters the network, the blocking lives at the school building. The second that laptop joins your home WiFi, it is wide open. Same machine, different address, completely different device. If nobody can give you a straight answer, which does happen: treat it as unfiltered and plan from there. Worth knowing too: federal privacy law (FERPA) gives you the right to inspect and review your child’s education records, and schools generally have to respond within 45 days. Whether monitoring logs count as education records is genuinely unsettled right now, so I am not going to promise you it is a magic phrase. But “I would like to review my child’s records” is a valid request, and it is yours to make. Two settings you can change tonight, without anybody’s permission While you are waiting to hear back from the school, and you might be waiting a while (it is September), here is the part that is entirely yours. 1. Give that laptop a bedtime on your WiFi You cannot get into the school’s settings on that device. You can absolutely decide what hours it works on your network. Open your router’s app, find the school laptop in the device list (it usually shows up by name or by something that looks like a model number), and set a schedule. Internet off at 9:00, or 10:00, or whatever fits your house. Most routers made in the last several years do this for free. Some charge for fancier filtering, but “this device goes to sleep at 9:00” is almost always included. Heads up, because this one catches people. If you put a school Chromebook behind your own home filtering and it suddenly will not load anything, just spins and spins, that is usually the school’s software and your router arguing with each other. That is not you breaking it. Back the filtering off and keep the schedule. The schedule is the part doing the work anyway. 2. Decide where it sleeps The school laptop charges somewhere that is not a bedroom. Kitchen counter, hallway, entry table, wherever. You are not going to out-configure a bored 14-year-old at midnight. You will absolutely beat them by having the laptop in the kitchen. 3. The sentence worth saying out loud This is the one I would actually sit down and discuss with your kids, because it applies to any device somebody else issued them: The school laptop is for school. Everything else happens on the personal device. That lesson carries straight into adult life, because the same thing is true of a work computer. Whatever you do on a device your employer owns, your employer can generally see. Your browsing, your messages, the personal email you checked at lunch. You do not want your personal life living somewhere that somebody else gets to look at it. This week’s challenge Three things. None of them take long. Send the email. Five questions, copy and paste, done in two minutes. Set the bedtime. Open your router app, find the school laptop, give it an off-switch at a reasonable hour. Move the charger. Out of the bedroom, onto a counter. Then come tell me what your kid’s school is doing in the comments! I want to know how different this looks district to district, because I suspect the answer is wildly. And here is a good dinner-table version of it for your kids: what is your school actually doing about the phone ban? Do you still use Chromebooks in class? Are kids still goofing off on tech even without their phones? So did the bans actually solve the problem? I am in favor of the school phone bans. I want to be clear about that. I just wish they were more consistent across districts and schools, and clearer about what we are actually trying to accomplish. If we take away the cellphones but the kids are all watching YouTube and chatting with their classmates inside a shared Google Doc, did we solve the problem or did we relocate it? I would encourage districts to look at everything they are doing with technology at school. And while I love the broad access to so many topics that technology gives us, maybe some of that is better served at home instead of in a classroom with a teacher standing right there. We never learned anything during film strip day either. How are we expecting today’s kids to learn while they are constantly connected to a screen? You do not need to solve that question tonight. You need five questions in an email and a charger on the kitchen counter. Start there. Until next time, this is Family Tech, powering down. Frequently asked questions Does a school phone ban cover school-issued Chromebooks and laptops? Usually not. Most state phone bans are written around personal devices, especially cellphones and, in some states, smartwatches. Utah’s bell-to-bell law explicitly excludes school-issued or school-required devices. So in most districts, the laptop the school handed your child is not covered by the same policy that locked up the phone. Can parents monitor a school-issued Chromebook? Often yes, if your district turns on the parent-facing version of the software it already owns. GoGuardian Parent, Securly Home, and Bark for Schools Parent Portal all give parents visibility into their own child’s activity on school devices. These features are typically disabled by default and require a district administrator to enable them. Is Bark for Schools the same as the Bark app I would buy for my family? No. Bark for Schools is free and follows the school account: school email, school chats, school documents, and browsing tied to that account, including when the student signs into that account on a personal computer at home. The paid family version follows the child’s own device and personal accounts. They share a logo and do two different jobs. How much do these tools cost parents? GoGuardian Parent, Securly Home, and the Bark for Schools Parent Portal are free to families, because the district’s license already covers them. Bark’s paid family plans run $5 per month for Bark Jr and $14 per month, or $99 per year, for Bark Premium. Some districts negotiate family packages through their vendor, so ask. Can I block websites on my child’s school laptop at home? Sometimes. If your district enables the parent controls in GoGuardian Parent or Securly Home, you can add restrictions and pause the internet during out-of-school hours. You cannot loosen the school’s rules, only add to them. If those tools are not enabled, the more reliable approach is scheduling that device’s internet access through your own router. Why does my home filtering break the school Chromebook? School devices often run their own filtering software, and layering your home filtering on top can create a conflict where pages simply will not load. If the laptop starts spinning endlessly after you add home filtering, remove the filtering and keep a simple internet schedule instead. Are school phone bans working? On distraction, largely yes. New York’s first-year survey of 585 educators found 80% reported positive results. New Hampshire’s survey of 1,399 educators found about 75% saw students more focused. A national study of more than 43,000 schools found pouch policies substantially cut phone use, though disciplinary incidents rose and wellbeing dipped in year one before improving by year three. What should I ask at parent-teacher conferences about device use? Ask whether the teacher uses the classroom monitoring view during instruction, what software is installed on the device, whether a parent version can be enabled for your account, and whether filtering follows the device home or stops at the school network. Related School Phone Bans Episode: https://familytechzone.com/your-kids-school-just-banned-phones-now-what/ (https://familytechzone.com/your-kids-school-just-banned-phones-now-what/) Ways kids get around parental controls: https://youtu.be/eZaMNsGSvRE (https://youtu.be/eZaMNsGSvRE) Disclosure: I have an affiliate relationship with Bark’s family products. Bark for Schools, discussed above, is free and I earn nothing from it.

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5.0 / 5

15 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 75 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

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0

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Engagement

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