I’m not proud of it, but at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought teaching remotely would be a dream come true. It’s not that I don’t value, value, or miss face-to-face interaction with students, but that my reluctant colleagues will also see the light and eventually embrace edtech. Because I thought it was naive. As a technologist at heart, I envisioned a digital utopia where post-pandemic schools would be fully digital, with students and teachers always remotely and online, preserving the magic of human interaction.
But when I looked back at my classes after returning to in-person instruction, I had a sinking feeling that the traditional model of student instruction, with individual seats arranged vertically and horizontally, had been replaced with a replica equipped with devices instead. became. Are we just education freaks, or has the edtech revolution not lived up to its promise? As educators, we need to be more insightful and discerning about the use of technology in the classroom, and see where the drawbacks are the benefits. You must be willing to admit that if it is more than that.
The hype has left the building.
My school’s technology environment was nothing special before the pandemic. Between early adopters and vehement naysayers, most teachers fell somewhere in between. Google classroom It was rarely used, laptops were everywhere, but it was mainly used during standardized testing seasons. It seemed ripe for a technological revolution, but it never gained the critical mass needed to make it happen.
I thought it would be a good thing to have new technology in my school, but it turned out to be mediocre at best. I was working from home with a substandard laptop, so most of my time was spent waiting for things to load. Even the best technicians couldn’t drown out the sounds and distractions from my building’s neighbors, who were forced to shelter in place and work from home. Losing internet connectivity was a minor annoyance at the best of times, but it became the straw that broke the camel’s back.
But ironically, the lack of human interaction became the central problem. Chat his messages cannot imitate active face-to-face interaction between students, shared documents cannot replace real-time collaboration, and collages of student avatars cannot, even in rare cases, It was no substitute for meeting students in person. For example, if you choose to turn on your device’s camera. When technology adoption was voluntary, these shortcomings could be alleviated by using technology to enhance rather than replace human-centered education. When there was no choice but to make it a centerpiece, it became impossible to avoid its flaws.
As a computer science teacher, I have a natural affinity for technology, which I knew would allow me to succeed with a technology-agnostic approach to curriculum and instruction. But by Thanksgiving the following year, I was teaching so many uninspiring, demoralizing online classes that I felt like I was speaking into a deep, dark void. As I exchange stories with fellow teachers over the past year, I find that these experiences are nearly universal. As a medium and a communicator, technology became the scapegoat for all the frustrations and disappointments that teachers and students, myself included, were feeling at the time. As it turns out, when tested, the edtech boom of 2020 was far from living up to the hype.
Prolonged feeling of fatigue
The lingering fatigue that many teachers and students experience with educational technology is real and, in hindsight, entirely predictable. Lockdowns and hybrid teaching during the pandemic have given edtech companies a golden opportunity to market their products to audiences, and given edtech-enthusiast teachers a virtually limitless playground to try out new tools and apps. . The flood of technology also required users to create multiple accounts on multiple platforms, each with its own dashboard and workarounds for monitoring. “I’m deleting all emails from tech companies and whoever provides his PD because it’s just too much,” a colleague told me late in the pandemic.
Even “digital native” students, who many of us thought would be more comfortable with technology, eventually grew tired of juggling so many different platforms. In each of my classes, from introductory programming for freshmen to advanced placement calculations for upper-level students, I noticed a significant drop in student engagement with the numerous technology platforms I was teaching as the months went on. I did. Every new app seemed to fill a gap and provide functionality that was missing from the others, so I was tempted to try to find use cases for them all, but that experience didn’t help me. It left us stunned, confused, and apathetic.
Much of my time is spent learning keystrokes instead of thinking about the more impactful question of how to incorporate technology in meaningful ways that foster the human aspects of teaching and learning, such as conversation and creativity. and was spent manipulating the settings. The hours I spent tinkering with and tweaking classroom technology provided me with a harmless, thoughtless, and legitimate escape from facing the realities of an unprecedented global pandemic, but these The distractions were also symbolic of my worldview before the world changed. My preference for technical solutions above all was as much an unconscious attempt to mitigate and hide the flaws in my own teachings as it was my belief in the superiority of bits and bytes. This is a hard truth to swallow, and it has led me to delete some accounts and intentionally start valuing the small amount of human contact that I managed to get through my digital filters and firewalls.
Observing classes in the early days of returning to in-person instruction and seeing crowds of silent, unresponsive, almost shocked students made me feel more defeated, helpless, and helpless than at any other time in my career. I felt helpless. There is a residual fatigue from that experience, and teachers do not have the time and space to recover before being sent back to the classroom to make up for learning losses and address social-emotional learning deficiencies.
accept what was never before
With the start of a new semester, it feels like peace has finally returned to campus. Although the classrooms are filled with students’ excitement and sounds of fun, there is still some skepticism about edtech among us teachers. While that may seem unfortunate, it’s actually healthy and holds lessons for all of us in the long run. Like all human actors in the pandemic drama, edtechs have been forced into roles they were never intended for.
Our humanity remains at the heart of a great education, and technology is best used to support, enhance, and facilitate that underlying human interaction. As it assumes the role of protagonist and tries to be everything to everyone, its rapidly diminishing advantages outweigh its disadvantages. My digital utopia never materialized, but at least thanks to edtech, I can now differentiate between dreams and reality.
