Screen Time is a new feature in iOS 12 that was really designed to allow people to self limit their
access to various apps or their devices in general, if they feel like they need to spend less time
on social media, for example, they can limit how many hours a day that they're using Facebook or Twitter
or something like that.
But there are also some management features within screen time that I wanted to highlight.
These are particularly helpful if you're providing devices to students or young people and you want
to give them a little bit of time away from the technology or limit their ability to be on the device
all day, every day or at certain times of the day.
So to access screen time, go into settings and screen time is here on the left hand side.
So there's a few things here that I'll talk through.
We've already covered content and privacy restrictions.
One of the first things you want to do if you're going to provide this to another user instead of self
maintain it yourself is to use a screentime password.
So you put a passcode in here.
We'll just do a passcode here.
Real simple.
And we won't forget once we've turned on our screen time passcode.
Now we have the ability to set some of these limitations like downtime.
So I'm just going to go through these real quick downtime.
Of course, I've got to authenticate here so that someone else can change it and I'll hit this.
And so downtimes pretty cool.
So it allows you to basically say the device is unavailable on these days from this time to this time.
So I use this feature for my daughter so that her iPad basically becomes unavailable after bedtime on
school nights.
So I have the ability here to go in and do customized days.
And I can say, OK, well, you know, Monday through Thursday or Sunday through Thursday, let's say
it's unavailable from 10:00 p.m. to seven a.m. That seems about right.
And then what I do on Friday is I increase this to eleven fifty nine p.m. So she has the ability to
stay up a little bit later and the same thing on Saturday as well, so.
Just make that change their.
And block the divisive down time means that you're not going to use it during that time.
So we've set that.
So that gives you a good example of basically say these are the times that the device is off limits.
And I do that stuff that my daughter can actually get a good night's sleep.
Otherwise she'll be up watching movies and texting with her friends online.
Applicants also handy, you can hit this, and so what's really cool about this is that let's say you
want to limit access to social media with with iPads that you might be giving the student so that when
they're on campus with their iPad, they're not on social media.
But at night when they get home, they can definitely be on social media.
So you can go in and just use social networking.
So what's cool about this is that it looks at the apps that are on my device right now and it selects
those.
But let's say I go in and download now.
Currently, I don't have Facebook installed on this device, but let's say I go and download Facebook
from the App Store.
It'll automatically put that into this grouping.
So it recognizes new apps as they download as being part of these categories and then takes action on
them as required.
So I'm going to say next to this and then I'm just basically going to go through and what I'm doing
here is I'm setting a time.
So basically this is how much time I can use the app in total.
So in this app category, let's say I only want students or someone to have access to social media one
hour a day.
They can use any of those applications that are considered social applications up to including a full
hour together.
And then they can be blocked at that point.
And I always have the option to override that.
So you can go in and enter a passcode.
They can bring you the device and say, hey, I want to do ten more minutes and you can go ahead and
add, I think about a 15 minute intervals, but you can add more time as needed.
You can also go in here and customize these days.
So like I was saying, you could probably limit this so that, you know, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday
or let's say Saturday, Sunday on the weekend, there's much more availability for this.
So I can say on Saturday, actually, we'll just let you have it all day.
So we just do, what, basically twenty four hours or twenty three hours and fifty nine minutes, I
think is the maximum.
So you can say that on a Saturday and say, OK, Saturday, social media day.
I don't care what you do with your iPad, whatever, but the rest of the days of the week, you know,
there's the limit.
So you have the ability to get very detailed with some of those options here.
So I'm just going to go back to that cancel.
So you have the same option here for all of these different devices.
And then there's also the always allowed apps.
So these are the apps that you can use no matter what, and the only one you really can't change is
phone.
Phone basically is always available.
But any of these other ones, messages, FaceTime camera and then any other apps you may have installed
on the device are also listed in here.
So, for example, let's say I don't want my daughter to be able to instant message all the time.
So we're going to remove those.
And I don't really care what maps will remove that, but I do want her to be able to listen to podcasts
and listen to Apple Music any time.
So this allows me to say these apps are always allowed and then I can go in to downtime and I can basically
set this so that I've got this schedule that I've got here.
But any time after 10 p.m., even though it's a unblock the device at downtime here.
So from 10 p.m. to seven a.m., all the apps are going to be unavailable except for.
Music and podcasts and the phone.
So that gives you the ability to provide, you know, some of the basics, like maybe I want the iPad
to be available for with Microsoft Word for doing homework, or maybe I'm grounding my my my daughter
or something from her device for the week.
But she does still have homework to do.
So I can allow the devices, the applications that she needs for homework and that while disallowing
others.
And the other thing I will mention on the app limits, this also governs content in Safari.
So if I do social media in here, if it recognizes the website, I'm going to as a social website will
also count against my hours.
So those are the basics of screen time, and you can just do this to change your password.
I'm just going to say turn off my passcode here and that way I don't forget what it was had later on.
I need to use this again and I'm going to go ahead and turn off down time as well.
And so I'm just backing out all these changes that I had made.
I don't think I'd set any of these.
So there you go.
So that's how you enable and disable screen time settings.
I really recommend you play with this a little bit to get an understanding of how it works.
Try it out on your own devices.
And by all means, if you've got a social media addiction, give it a shot.
It does a pretty good job of just limiting the apps that you have access to and when you're done using
them and basically graze out the icon on the desktop.
So sort of out of sight.
Out of mind in a way.