As districts crack down on students’ use of personal technology, from phones to smartwatches, some are targeting increasingly popular smart glasses—AI-enabled eyewear that allows students to access many of the same features as a smartphone.
Smart glasses, such as those from Meta and Ray-Ban, allow users to connect to their smartphones to see and send text messages, record and watch videos and images, and interact with an AI assistant on small digital displays within the lenses. A majority of these devices aren’t recommended for kids younger than 13.
Smart glasses are the latest iteration in schools’ battle to manage kids’ digital device use. They are particularly challenging to regulate because it’s harder to tell when kids are using them, experts say.
“In many ways, smart glasses have all the ingredients of smartphones but amplified,” said Juan Pablo Hourcade, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, researching child-computer interactions. “At least with a smartphone, you can see a kid pull it out. You might be able to see that they’re using it, see what’s on the screen. With smart glasses, children could be listening to something, and they could be seeing things, and there’s no way the teacher would know.”
School and district leaders have raised concerns about smart glasses’ ability to help students cheat on exams or discreetly record peers and teachers without consent.
In Parker, Ariz., Superintendent Brad Sale said in an email to Education Week that the ban on smart glasses in his district is also intended to cut down on kids’ reliance on technology.
“By limiting their overall access during the school day, students will start to communicate more face to face with their peers, stay off of online platforms, and not be distracted by notifications,” Sale said.
Among the district’s other considerations behind the ban were: ensuring students are not secretly recorded in private areas like locker rooms; prioritizing the safety of children with sensitive privacy concerns, like those who have relocated due to domestic violence within the home or who may be put at risk if they are recorded without their knowledge and those photos or videos end up online; and limiting kids’ easy access to the internet, where test questions and answers may be available.
At least 39 states and the District of Columbia require districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools, according to an Education Week tally. Other states are either incentivizing or recommending local districts to enact their own bans or restrictive policies.
Many of those policies extend to other “personal digital communication devices,” like smartwatches, but few explicitly mention smart glasses.
Some districts have explicitly added smart watches to their lists of prohibited devices, and others have updated their student codes of conduct to prohibit them.
Schools in Fairfax County, Va., Prince William County, Va., Greenville County, S.C., and Carson City, Nev., are among those that announced students would not be allowed to use smart glasses at school beginning this academic year. Other districts are still mulling whether to ban the devices.
A Utah law enacted in July prohibits smart glasses during school hours, unless the local school board has established exceptions, such as to monitor a health condition or as part of an individualized education program accommodation.
Meanwhile, the College Board, which oversees the SAT, has banned students from wearing smart glasses while taking the exam.
Schools shouldn’t rule out using the devices for narrow educational purposes in the future, however, Hourcade said.
For instance, smart glasses could potentially be used as a tool for accessibility, such as closed captioning for students who are deaf or have limited hearing, he said. They could be used for simulations, in place of clunkier virtual reality headsets. And future iterations of these devices could have eye-tracking capabilities that educators could use to evaluate reading comprehension, he said.
“So there’s potentially beneficial educational applications,” Hourcade said. “None of those that I can think of involves kids bringing their own devices from home with no patrol by the school.”
