The EdTech revolution that swept over classrooms some 20 years ago was a wave of uncritical implementation: whiteboards, cloud-based learning platforms, and 1:1 computing programmes unfurled in a tidal wave of widespread technology adoption with each school following the next eagerly.
There were always those anecdotes that threw up questions: was it true that the CEOs of the very same companies selling software and hardware to schools were sending their children to pen-and-paper institutions? Somewhere in the school community, you would find voices that stood up to questions of data privacy, but these were the exceptions that proved the rule. The essential idea was to go with the flow, which is what most schools did, and the intensification of networks, fiber optic cables, chargers, leasing agreements, charging trays, and the maintenance to supply this, proliferated exponentially.
This has led us to a highly synthetic classroom environment: it’s possible to see students learning in an entirely paperless environment. Lessons are projected on a whiteboard and homework is done on cloud computing; we navigate learning from one screen to the next. And at break time and after school? Well, out come more screens of course: phones.
More recently, a different type of wave is rising above classrooms, one that calls for a dialling back on screens. From Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation (2021) to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024), more and more voices are asking for schools to reconsider technology, in particular phones and screens. There are worrying correlations in the steepening drop of IQ scores (particularly from 2010) and, with the explosion of Artificial Intelligence on the market, the dangers of cognitive offsetting and deficit due to Large Language Models being available to replace research.
At the center of this is the feeling that we need to regain the community connection between us that is now spliced into separate, individual profiles, isolated yet simultaneously hypnotised by chemically stressed layers of carbon polymers, liquid crystals and rare-earth elements. It takes a concerned effort now to pull us away from screens, to shut them down, to appreciate each other rather than whatever’s happening elsewhere in the tiny prism of light held in the hand or propped up on the desk. It’s got to the point where parents of a certain generation are nostalgic about watching television, which is somewhat depressing considering the virtues of the couch potato and how watching TV was viewed as a waste of time by many back in the 1980s.
We’ve reached something of a perfect storm with an increasingly widespread consternation that technology is not actually helping learning but getting in the way of it.
Of course, it’s much more subtle than this: AI tutors, adaptive online assessments, online courses, and the democratisation of knowledge through the internet mean that in many areas, learning has never been this available. It is also true that through COVID-19, and today in certain rural educational programmes, literacy rates have increased dramatically because of technology. It remains a double-edged sword, a two-sided coin, a Pandora’s Box with hope lurking inside it.
As educators, the question we should be asking ourselves today is a simple one: how is our use of technology advancing learning? Rather than giving assignments on cloud computing as a reflex, stop to ask why and whether it wouldn’t be better to ask the students to handwrite in the classroom? Rather than rushing to the next PowerPoint presentation or whiteboard lesson, stop to think whether it might not be better in an analogic setting, through a discussion, without screens. Given what we know about the cognitive benefits of reading and writing, how are we as educators ensuring that these practices remain strong in the classroom?
At the International School of Los Angeles, we have laid out our position starting next year. It’s in four parts:
- We will be phone-free right the way through the school.
- The 1:1 programme will be staggered, starting in the Middle School with a “computer at school only” policy, then computers at home but with a curfew (we will programme the computers to black out at 21h00). Seniors use computers as before, but we will have scaffolded the way there.
- A very specific AI programme on tutoring in one subject using a protected semantic field (not the World Wide Web) carefully curated by a resident specialist with an opt-out possibility for parents. This sits over our school AI policy.
- A special course on social media for our students for them to understand the way information is distributed and curated.
We will track this carefully and, most importantly, accompany it by discussions and training with our faculty on how to use technology intentionally, with a sense of genuine innovation, but also trepidation and skepticism.
What will your approach to technology be next academic year?
Works Cited
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Dutton.
