NEWSLETTER
While I’m not proud to admit it, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought teaching remotely would be a dream come true. It’s not that I didn’t value, appreciate, and miss the face-to-face interactions I had with my students, but because I naively assumed that my more reluctant colleagues would see the light and finally embrace educational technology. As a techie at heart, I imagined a digital utopia in which post-pandemic schools would become completely digital, with students and teachers always remote and online, while preserving the magic of human interaction.
But when I reviewed my classes after returning to in-person instruction, I had the feeling that I had changed the traditional model of instruction for students with individual seats in rows and columns for a replica with devices. Are we just education Luddites, or has the edtech revolution failed to live up to its promises? As educators, we must be more discerning and discriminating about the use of technology in our classrooms and be willing to admit when the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
The hype has left the building
The technology landscape at my school was far from unique before the pandemic. Between the early adopters and the strident detractors, most teachers fell in the middle. google classrooms They were rarely used and laptops, although ubiquitous, were primarily used during standardized testing season. The landscape seemed ripe for a technological revolution, but it never reached the critical mass necessary to carry it out.
While I thought integrating new technology into my school would be a good thing, it turned out to be mediocre at best. Working from home on a crappy laptop, I spent most of my time waiting for things to load. Even the best technology couldn’t drown out the sounds and distractions of my building’s neighbors, who were also forced to shelter in place and work from home. A dropped internet connection (a minor annoyance at best) became the last straw.
Ironically, however, it was the lack of human interaction that became the central issue. Chat messages couldn’t mimic lively in-person exchanges between students, shared documents couldn’t replace real-time collaboration, and a collage of student avatars certainly wasn’t a substitute for seeing students face-to-face, even in rare cases. cases where they would choose to turn on their devices’ cameras. When technology adoption was voluntary, these shortcomings could be mitigated by using technology to enhance, rather than replace, human-centered teaching. When there was no alternative but to make him the centerpiece, his deficiencies became impossible to fix.
As a computer science teacher, I thought I had a natural affinity for technology that could translate into a successful technology-independent approach to curriculum and instruction; However, by Thanksgiving the following year, she had led too many demoralizing and boring online classes in which I felt like I was speaking into a deep, dark void. In exchanging stories with other teachers over the past year, it is evident that these experiences are almost universal. As a medium and messenger, technology became the scapegoat for all the frustration and discouragement felt by teachers and students at the time, myself included. Ultimately, when put to the test, the edtech boom of 2020 fell far short of its expectations.
Exhaustion persists
The persistent fatigue that many teachers and students are experiencing with educational technology is real and, in retrospect, completely predictable. Lockdowns and hybrid classes during the pandemic provided edtech companies with a golden opportunity to sell their products to a captive audience, and gave edtech-enthusiastic teachers a virtually limitless playing field to try out new tools and Applications. The technological avalanche also required users to create multiple accounts on multiple platforms, each with their own dashboards to monitor and quirks to iron out. “I just delete all emails from tech companies and people offering PD because it’s too much,” a colleague told me in the latter stages of the pandemic.
Even students, the “digital natives” many of us assumed would be much more savvy with technology, eventually grew tired of juggling so many different platforms. In each of my classes, from freshman introductory programming to my upper-level Advanced Placement calculus, as the months went by, I noticed much less student engagement with numerous technology platforms I used to teach. Each new app seemed to fill the gap and provide features that other apps lacked, so it was tempting to try to find a use case for them all, but the experience left us dazed, confused, and apathetic.
I spent much of my time learning how to press keys and navigating preferences rather than thinking about the more impactful question of how to incorporate technology in a meaningful way that facilitated the human aspects of teaching and learning, such as discourse and creativity. . The time I spent tinkering and tinkering with classroom technology gave me a harmless, stupid, and justifiable escape from facing the realities of an unprecedented global pandemic, but these distractions were also emblematic of my worldview before the world changed. My preference for one technological solution over all others was both an unconscious attempt to mitigate and hide deficiencies in my own teaching and my belief in the superiority of bits and bytes. This was a difficult truth to accept, one that prompted me to delete more than a few accounts and intentionally value the fragments of human contact that made it past digital filters and firewalls.
Watching my classes during these first days back to in-person instruction and seeing a sea of silent, indifferent, and almost shocked students, I felt more defeated, ineffective, and helpless than at any other time in my career. There is a lingering burnout from that experience, a burnout that teachers have not had the time and space to recover from before being thrown back into the classroom to make up for learning losses and reinforce social-emotional learning deficits.
Accept what never was
As we move forward into this new school year, I finally feel like a sense of normalcy has returned to our campus. The classrooms are filled with the voices of excited and happy students, but among us teachers, skepticism about educational technology still persists. While this may seem unfortunate, it is actually healthy and, in the long run, serves as a warning to all of us. Like all human actors in the pandemic drama, educational technology was forced to play a role for which it was never designed.
Our humanity remains at the core of good teaching, and the best way to use technology is to support, enhance and facilitate the human-to-human interactions that underpin it. When you try to take a leading role and become all things to all people, your rapidly diminishing benefits are outweighed by your drawbacks. While my digital utopia never came true, at least educational technology has given us a better ability to distinguish between a dream and reality.
