I don't have a ton of teaching experience, but with my three kids the general rule is tech is useful if your teaching them something that requires tech -- otherwise stick with old fashioned methods.
First some data:
Some 90% of high-school students and 84% of primary-school pupils have school-issued devices; four-fifths of kindergarteners are given them.
This is just insane. Why give children devices in school at all? They'll figure it out on their own. This is definitely true for kids under 10 years old. But then we learn:
A 2024 meta-analysis of 119 studies of early-literacy tech interventions, led by Rebecca Silverman of Stanford University, found the studies described programmes that delivered at best only marginal gains on standardised tests.
In 2024 American schools spent $30bn on education technology. Globally, it is a $165bn industry. Technology does save money on textbooks and streamline lesson planning. But licensing and training costs add up, and many teachers feel burdened rather than liberated by all the admin and dashboards.
Nothing says dreadful like the cheerfully named new institutional (and proprietary) app everyone gets to use.
In my experience, teaching kids takes energy. You have to pay attention to them and get them interested in the topic largely by modeling the interest. The latest awful licensed platform isn't gonna help. Happy that my tax dollars are going to such a great use, though.
Also there was this:
distraction proved irresistible once they were on their school-issued laptops. The school tried blocking YouTube and Spotify, then student-to-student email. But children found workarounds and teachers resented their new surveillance duties.
Now what does this remind me of? Efforts to prevent arbitrary from getting into Bitcoin blocks? My money is on the arbitrary data goons just as I'll always bet on a teenager's ability to circumvent parental controls...
It really depends what is meant by ed-tech.
Classroom management tools are obviously a great boon, and I utilize tech heavily in my teaching (bespoke custom tech programmed by myself, I'm proud to say).
The problem isn't the tech itself, it's one-size-fits-all approaches that are primarily driven by financial incentives disconnected from student learning.
Teachers should be the ones deciding what tech they want in their classrooms and how. I'm a big believer in teacher autonomy, but also greater freedom for administrators to fire or discipline bad teachers.
haha, you always find a way to bring it back to this topic
This has been a significant point of friction in departments I’ve been in. Either the college or the chair really wants a particular technology to be used in the classroom and teachers with no interest in it either have to shoehorn it in or get into stupid power struggles.
I suspect the real reason is that teachers can take more remote learning days
The mistake is not in recognizing that technology can serve as a powerful tool in education. The mistake is in making it omnipresent regardless of context or developmental stage. For younger children in particular structured low tech learning often produces richer cognitive engagement because it forces attention to human interaction and the tactile elements of learning. A tablet cannot substitute for the way a teacher’s enthusiasm can bring a subject to life.
There is also the unintended cost in teacher energy and focus. Every new proprietary platform arrives with training modules new workflows and a subtle shift toward data compliance over actual teaching. This is not liberation. It is additional administrative load disguised as innovation.
And yes the arms race between system restrictions and student workarounds is predictable and perhaps inevitable. Teenagers are motivated and creative when the challenge is circumventing a rule particularly one they see as arbitrary. Schools can spend fortunes on locking down devices but that only diverts attention from the more important task which is guiding students toward purposeful use of the tools they already have.
Everything related to students and scholarship could be profitable.