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Welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World. I’m Leah Cleary and this is our summer PD series on technology in the classroom. If you’ve been listening along, you know, we’ve spent the last two episodes in policy territory — deep in policy territory — the history of one to one device programs and the anti-tech backlash, and then a deep dive into why ignoring AI in schools is a mistake. A mistake we really can’t afford to make. Both of those episodes are linked in the show notes if you need to catch up.
But today? Well, today we are pivoting into practical territory. Because I think if the last two episodes resonated with you at all, the natural next question is — okay, but now what do I actually do? How do I make this decision in real time, in my classroom, with thirty kids in front of me and a lesson to get through? I do have an answer for that, and it’s five questions. And today, I want to walk you through all of them — not just what they are, but where they came from, how to use them. And a few times I wish I’d had them sooner.
And here’s the thing I want you to remember before we even get into the questions themselves: this framework is not about deciding whether to use technology. It’s about deciding where technology belongs. Because sometimes technology belongs at the beginning of something. Sometimes it belongs in the middle. Sometimes it belongs at the end — at the publishing stage, the sharing stage, the moment when a regular classroom assignment becomes something real and permanent that students actually made themselves.
And sometimes, well, we know — sometimes technology doesn’t belong anywhere in a particular task at all. And that’s okay too. The goal is never tech or no tech. The goal is to be intentional with how you use the tech.
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I’ve been blogging since 2014, and my blog really shifted to EdTech in 2015 — presenting at conferences on tech integration and all of that stuff. I’ve been doing that for years, and for most of the time, the conversation in those spaces was always: use more technology. Get to the higher levels of SAMR. Push past substitution. Be innovative. And I believed in that message. And I still do, mostly.
But somewhere along the way — and I think the pandemic accelerated this — I started to notice that the question we kept asking was, how do I use technology? Not should I use technology for this specific task? And those. Well, those are really two very different questions.
You see, the should question is harder. It requires you to slow down. It requires you to think about what you want the students to learn, not just what would look good on a lesson plan or make your administrator happy on a walk-through. So over time, I developed a set of questions I asked myself when I’m planning — five questions in a very specific order that helped me figure out not just whether to use technology, but where in the process it earns its place, if it earns it at all.
I’ve written about these five questions on my blog. There’s a summer blog series running right alongside this podcast series called Should I Use Tech for This, where I take one classroom activity at a time and run it through all five questions. I’ll link to that in the show notes. But today I want to give you the thinking behind these questions — not just the questions themselves — because the why matters as much as the what.
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Here’s something I want to point out before we even get into the questions, because I think it’s going to change how you use this framework. Question one is a bit of a gateway question. If the answer is yes — if a student can complete this task just as well or better without a device — it’s okay not to ask the rest of the questions. But sometimes you should push through and ask all five questions, even if the answer to question one is yes.
So before you move on, think about each step in the process of the activity you’re assigning. Even if the answer to question one is that you can do this better or just as well with no tech. Even if technology is not the right starting point for this task. Keep going through the questions, at least at first, because you might find that technology might not be where you begin, but it might be where you end up. Or it might fit in the middle of this particular activity.
In week two of the summer blog series, we didn’t use tech for the actual Socratic Seminar itself, but we did find a transformative place for it in part of the preparation — not the entire preparation, just part of it. You can see what I mean at leahcleary.com/socratic-seminar-strategies. And I’ll also link to it in the show notes. I want you to think about it this way: the most powerful uses of technology I’ve seen in my classroom — and I’ll tell you about one of them in detail in just a few minutes — they didn’t start with technology.
They started with thinking, with writing, with students doing the hard cognitive work on paper. And then technology came in at the end or in the middle to make the product better, to publish it, to share it with an audience beyond the classroom walls. That’s what publishing does. And publishing is exciting in a way that turning in a worksheet never, ever will be. When students can look at what they made and say — that exists in the world now — something shifts. That’s not a gimmick. That is meaningful. So keep going through all five questions, at least at first. Let the framework do its job. All right, let’s get into the questions.
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Question one: can a student complete this task just as well or better without a device? This is the foundational question, and it sounds simple. But I think a lot of technology decisions never even get this far. We just reach for the Chromebook cart because it’s there, because it’s what we’ve been doing, because making copies is a hassle. And let’s be honest, the copy limit is a reality for most of us and it’s just easier to reach for the Chromebooks.
I get it. I’ve been there so many times. I’ve assigned digital worksheets because I was out of copies and out of time, and I just needed something for the kids to do, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But here’s the honest answer to question one: when it comes to a lot of the things we routinely hand students a device for, yes, they can do it just as well without one, and quite often better.
Note taking is the clearest example. I’ve talked about this in previous episodes and written about it in depth on the blog, and the research is fairly solid. Students who take notes by hand tend to process the information more deeply than students who type — not because handwriting is magical, but because you physically can’t type as fast as someone talks. The limitation forces you to listen. It forces you to filter and put ideas in your own words. And that’s learning. Typing lets you skip that step. You can read the post at leahcleary.com/digital-note-taking-vs-handwriting.
So for note taking, my answer to question one is yes, students can do this better without a device, and I stopped letting them use Chromebooks for notes years ago. But here’s where I want to push back on myself just a little bit. Question one isn’t just about whether students can do the task without technology. It’s about whether technology adds anything meaningful to the task. And sometimes the answer is that it doesn’t. And we need to be willing to say that out loud and to let go of those Chromebooks — even if we’ve been doing it the other way for years.
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Question two: does this task require students to process information or just record it? This question gets at something that I think is underappreciated in the tech integration conversation. Not all tasks are cognitively equal. Some things require students to wrestle with ideas, make decisions, form opinions, synthesize. Other things require students to capture something — to get it down somewhere so that it exists and can be referenced later.
For recording, technology is great. Efficient, organized, searchable. That’s a big deal. If students are logging data for a science experiment, or keeping a running record of sources for a research project, or documenting a process over time — technology can do that really well, and it probably makes sense to use it. But for processing, I’m much more cautious. And here’s why. When you process something — when you’re really grappling with an idea and trying to make sense of it — the act of writing by hand slows you down in a way that’s useful. You have to make choices. You have to decide what matters enough to put on the page. That decision-making is the learning.
I think about this a lot with discussion. When I’m running a Socratic seminar and I want students to take notes during the conversation, I have them write by hand — not because typing is wrong, but because I want them actually thinking about what their classmates are saying, not transcribing it. There’s a difference between a student who’s jotting down a key idea that just shifted their thinking, and a student who’s trying to get every word down in a Google doc. One of those students is in the conversation, actively listening and processing it. The other one’s just a court reporter.
Now, there are exceptions — group discussions where students are recording their conversations so they can submit it as evidence of thinking — that’s a great use of technology. Recording a reflection after a seminar so the teacher can actually hear the student’s voice and reasoning — also a great use. Technology for recording what happened after the process is done: often excellent. Technology as a substitute for the processing itself: that’s where I would advise caution.
13:13
Now for question three: does technology make this task possible or just easier? This is my favorite question, and I think it’s the one that gets the closest to the heart of what the SAMR model was always trying to say. There’s a real difference between technology that makes something more convenient, and technology that makes something possible that could not happen otherwise.
And I’m going to say something here — and I’m guilty of this myself — I think we’ve spent a lot of time in the convenient category and called it innovative. The digital worksheet is the obvious example. It makes things easier for the teacher: no copies, no collecting papers, it’s all right there in Google Classroom. But the task itself? Students could do it just as well on paper. And honestly, maybe better, because paper doesn’t have the screenshot button. It’s harder to copy and paste paper into an AI platform.
In 2020, we were in our hybrid learning year. My AP World History students — I’d only see them every other day because they were divided into two groups. For those of you who have listened to the podcast or followed the blog for a while, you know I’m really big on having my AP students annotate the course and exam description. During that hybrid year, I had them do it digitally. And oh boy, was that ever a mistake. Because what I realized was that students were screenshotting and sharing, and even though this was before generative AI, they would all have the exact same annotations. And one time those annotations were chemistry notes. Talk about an epic fail and a colossal waste of time.
But then there’s the other side of this question — and this is where I want to tell you about my Theory of Knowledge students, because this was great. TOK — Theory of Knowledge — is part of the IB program, International Baccalaureate. It’s a philosophy of knowledge course. The students complete what are called exhibitions: they select a real-world object that connects to a TOK prompt and write a deep analysis of the knowledge question it raises.
A couple of years ago, my TOK students had completed their exhibitions and we were thinking about how to share them. Sharing is a requirement of IB for the TOK exhibitions, and one of the students had the brilliant idea of turning the exhibitions into Saturday Night Live sketches. Now, let me just let that sink in for a second.
Each student took their Theory of Knowledge exhibition — the dense philosophical piece of writing — and they adapted it into a comedy sketch. They had to find the absurdity in their own argument. They had to make it entertaining. They had to understand their own exhibition well enough to parody it. That is a genuinely high-level cognitive task, wrapped in something that felt completely ridiculous and fun.
And they were so good, let me tell you. And then because we had a film program at our school, the film teacher assigned each of his students to one of my students’ sketches. His students were responsible for storyboarding, directing, filming, and editing. My students acted. Each student was in multiple sketches. They even gave me a role — I was actually in two of those sketches. It was a lot of fun.
We also used AI after my students had handwritten their sketches — after all the hard thinking was done. We put the sketches into AI for suggestions, not rewrites — suggestions. Here’s a line that doesn’t land the way you think it does. Here’s a transition that’s awkward. Here’s a place where the joke could be a little bit sharper. And students could take or leave those suggestions based on their own judgment.
Could we have done that without technology? Yes, we could have performed the sketches once as a live show. But we couldn’t have recorded them. We couldn’t have edited them. We couldn’t have collaborated with the film class and published them and shared them with an audience beyond the room. The final product — this polished, collaborative, and genuinely hilarious piece of work that my students made — could not have existed without technology. Technology made that possible, not just easier. That’s question three answered.
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Question four: does using technology here create a distraction risk that outweighs the benefit? And this is a big one. Don’t underestimate it. And I want to be honest with you about this one, because I think it’s the question teachers most often skip — either because we feel like we should be able to manage it, or because we don’t want to admit that we can’t.
Here’s the reality of a classroom with Chromebooks: kids are fast. They know the workarounds. They can see you coming from across the room and switch tabs before you get there. Classroom orchestration software helps, but it’s not foolproof, and students know the workarounds. Every teacher I know who uses it has at least one story about a student who figured out how to get around it. I’m not saying this to be cynical about our students — I actually think it speaks to how resourceful and creative they are that they’ve reverse-engineered every piece of monitoring technology we’ve thrown at them. But it does mean that when I’m deciding whether to use technology for a task, I have to weigh the distraction risk against the benefit.
Here’s an example. Schoology has a hotspot feature that lets you embed interactive questions directly on a map image. For a world geography class, that is a useful tool, and I was so excited to use it. Students can click on a location and answer a question about it right in context. It’s more engaging than a paper map quiz or activity. It uses the technology to do something the paper version can’t quite replicate.
But I stopped doing it on tests because on a test, I want to know what a student knows. And when that student has a Chromebook open in front of them — even with lockdown browser — I’m not confident enough in my ability to monitor thirty students simultaneously to know what I’m getting is actually their knowledge. The distraction risk, and in this case the academic integrity risk, outweighs the benefit.
So in my class, we do paper and pencil tests — not because I’m old-fashioned, but because the goal of the test is to assess what students know, and technology introduces too many variables I just can’t control. This doesn’t mean technology has no place in assessment. It means I’m honest with myself about what I can actually manage in the room I’m in with the students I have. That honesty is part of intentional teaching. I’m no superwoman.
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Question five: what do I want students to walk away with, and does tech help or hinder that outcome? This is the question I think about most, and it’s also the one that requires the most reflection — because it forces you to be really clear about what you’re actually teaching. Not what standards you’re covering, not what the lesson plan says, but what you actually want to be different inside a student’s brain when they walk out of your room.
And here’s the insight I keep coming back to: learning has stages. There’s a beginning stage where students are first encountering ideas and need to grapple with them and make meaning of them. There’s the middle stage where they’re working with those ideas — applying them, revisiting their thinking. And there’s an end stage where they’re demonstrating what they know and sharing it with an audience. Technology tends to hinder the first stage, and it tends to help in the last one. Now, that’s a blanket statement that’s not always accurate. But the middle — the middle tends to genuinely be nuanced. It depends on the task.
If I want students to walk away having processed and grappled with a complex idea, starting with technology usually gets in the way. The device is a shortcut, and shortcuts in the processing stage generally means students are skipping out on thinking. But if I want students to walk away having published something that feels very real to them — something that exists beyond the classroom that they can point to and say, I made that, and I’m proud of that — technology is often essential to that outcome. And that outcome matters.
The difference between a student who turns in a paper that gets graded and handed back, and a student who publishes something that other people can see, is enormous. The TOK students started by handwriting their exhibitions, drafting their sketches, doing the hard thinking on paper. Technology didn’t belong there. But at the end, technology was exactly what made the whole thing matter. They have those sketches. They exist. They’re funny and clever and smart. No amount of paper could have done what that film studio did. That’s question five: what do you want the students to walk away with, and where in that journey does technology actually help you get there?
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I want to leave you with this. These five questions are not a checklist you run through every time you assign anything — that would be so tedious, you’d lose your mind. They’re more like a set of instincts you develop over time, a way of thinking about technology that eventually becomes second nature. But at first, you ask yourself these questions, and you see the core instinct underneath all five questions is really this: technology should earn its place.
Not because we have Chromebooks and Wi-Fi and a county mandate to use them — and a lot of counties are actually backing away from those mandates — but because the technology is doing something for student learning that nothing else can do quite as well. When it earns that place, use it. Use it fully. Use it creatively. Let it make things possible that couldn’t exist otherwise. When it doesn’t earn it, put it away. There is no shame in paper. There’s no shame in a dry erase board and a discussion without any screens in sight. Sometimes that’s the best lesson you’re going to teach all week.
Over on my blog right now, I’m running a series called Should I Use Tech for This? And each post takes one specific classroom activity and runs it through all five of these questions. Note taking is already up. Discussion and Socratic seminars are already up. Formative assessment — specifically exit tickets — is going live this week. And I will link to everything in the show notes.
And if you want to go deeper on the thinking behind all this — the policy context, the research, the history — go back and listen to the last two podcast episodes. It all connects. Next week, we’ll keep the podcast and the summer blog series going. Until then, teach intentionally. Rest when you can, and remember — what you do in that room matters.
