On technology in schools

Some speculations on why educators find tech so appealing

Photo by Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash. The future. No, not that future!

You may have noticed that I wrote “educators,” not “teachers.” This was deliberate. The decisions about whether to allow or promote tech in schools are only partially informed by teachers. I don’t have a huge problem with this because tech, depending on what’s implemented and how, can cost a lot of money. It shouldn’t be about teacher preference alone. In addition, it can affect enrolments; a certain approach might be a drawcard for a certain type of family (see this article, for example). How, what and how much tech to enable in schools should, of course, have learning at the core. But we all know that’s not always realistic or feasible in a complex school environment.

I’ve been doing some investigation into the benefits of tech for students, and I haven’t been able to make a strong case for a reliance on it for teaching and learning. It’s tempting to draw on the balance fallacy here, but the research is fairly damning. Hours per day online is correlated with loneliness at school (from PISA data), total daily time on screens is correlated with suicide-related outcomes (according to Jean Twenge’s research, which you really should check out), and there are physical effects including on vision, posture and lifestyle. The ill-effects on learning run from multitasking, distractions—including for other students—lower test scores, and poorer retention of content.

I’ve been lucky to work in low tech environments for almost four years. In both schools, phones had been banned by leadership well before the State stepped in to mandate. My lessons were uninterrupted by distractions, children conversed at break time, and most classwork happened in exercise books. At my previous school, we killed a lot of trees but saved—I assume—money that would have been spent on helpdesks and software subscriptions, and possibly even time. Learning was highly efficient, although the kids were fairly useless with basic things like file management, which as a result we teachers avoided, creating a self-fulfilling ineptitude. Some of the students are grown adults now, but I’m sure they’ve learned to save a Word document since then.

Years ago, I worked in a high-tech school with 1:1 devices. Students were frequently in and out of class with laptop issues, and an inquiry model meant interminable hours of research tasks. I became good at teaching “that kind of kid” in those exact conditions, especially as they got older and I became more experienced. Seniors would verbatim scribe the words that came out of my mouth during class, and I didn’t have the understanding of cognitive science to correct them. The upside was that our digital routines were such that time was saved finding work, completing work and collaborating or sharing work. I would hazard a guess that these students were marginally better prepared for university, but I wonder if those skills transferred to a new, more autonomous environment.

I have some theories about why the educators, educationalists and unqualified commentators (usually rich tech-bros) are so enamoured of technology. First, many educators—and often teachers too—think of students as mini adults, that the school experience should replicate the workplace—oh, except when it comes to the inconvenient fact that as adults, we need bladder control! This feeds into a vision of an imagined “future” where our students will enter jobs that “haven’t been invented yet,” yadda, yadda. I’m going to take a moment to remind everyone that it was my generation that invented the internet when most people still had dial-up. We did okay.

Educators and teachers have a somewhat unique view of the “future world of work” considering so many have never experienced it—I mean literally not experiencing the future, as well as not experiencing work that isn’t being a teacher. Perhaps for this reason, and in the absence of “real world” work experience of our own, even we teachers believe the world to be whatever Elon Musk (and for some reason I feel the need to add Guy Claxton to this category) thinks it is. This is where instrumentalism and entrepreneurialism combine to present a measure of success that is highly materialistic and individualistic. Schools seem to take the entrepreneurial route or the humanist route and never the twain shall meet.

I’m getting a little Marxist here, but perhaps in thinking about tech, schools could consider bigger questions like:

• What does our student need to be able to do and know in Year 13? Before you say, “Be resourceful,” remember the myth of the digital native.

• What values should our Year 13 student hold? Is this based on the kind of deep knowledge that supports civic participation, critical thinking and empathy? In this case, Lemov’s principle of choosing the ‘fastest route to learning’ and knowledge rich curricula hold fast. Tech is not the key enabler here and can be detrimental.

• Given the detriments, and on balance, are students missing out on some crucial element of learning that only tech can provide? Perhaps they are. That’s what the comments section is for.

As a final confession, I will admit that I have lost my tech chops. I’m more comfortable with workbooks and a mini whiteboard, and any time I try to do something halfway impressive with collaboration or online interaction, it’s a flop. After a tech hiatus of several years, I’m willing to admit this may colour my view. But I would like to see big questions answered by tech enthusiasts, starting with the question of whether, hand on heart, we are putting learning at the core.