On Monday September 17, Apple released its 12th operating system, iOS 12. Along with the launch of the iPhone XS, iOS 12 offers new capabilities such as Memoji’s, group FaceTime, stronger performance on older iPhones, grouped notifications, and others.

Most importantly, iOS 12 now offers a panel where you can view screen time, social networking usage, how many times you pick your phone up, and other similar features, allowing you to monitor and manage how often you’re on your phone.

If you own an iPhone 5c or later, you can open your settings after the update and see ‘Screen Time’ close to the top with a purple hourglass icon. The feature showcases a daily (or weekly) summary of how long you’ve used your phone, and your most popular apps.

Students can use the new monitoring system to manage how much they use their phone during school days. With features showing the times of day you use your phone most, you can know when to limit yourself.

With ever developing technology, new ways of moderating ourselves and keeping healthy technology habits are essential. Apple is helping teachers, students and average technology consumers reach that happy medium, however the effects are not being seen just yet.

Greeley West student Blaine Cullen, said “I didn’t even know that I could see this.”

It was only after he was asked about the feature when he opened it for the first time. As awareness grows of the functionality, teachers and students can better understand their cell phone usage and work to better integrate that into class, or completely eliminate it, respective of the class’ habits.

New tools to monitor how big the issue of screen time actually is will help students better reach that point.