Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have fostered the digitalization of contents which are likely to be shared and consumed interactively in real time. This has shaped a dynamic media ecosystem that has surpassed people's ability to understand, from a critical perspective, the implications of media consumption and the creation of their own contents for diffusion. Concepts such as "infotoxication" (Cornella, 2003) or "digital/visual infotoxication" (Aguaded, Marin-Gutierrez & Caldeiro-Pedreira, 2018) depict how audiences can suffer because of the content overload which different media generate, as they do not have the tools to process and select what they consume. As a response, some tools have been designed to measure the level of media competence (Ferres & Piscitelli, 2012) that different communities display. This research applied one of these tools to a Chilean public school community which has significantly improved its school performance indicators in the last few years -an increase which coincides with the period when they decided to ban the use of smartphone devices in the classrooms. The outcome shows that such a decision can produce better results in school performance, but without a perceptible impact on media competence, which calls for the need to include digital literacy and media competence training in the syllabus for elementary education.