00:00
Welcome back to If Teachers Ruled the World. I’m Leah Cleary, and I’m recording this with the specific knowledge that school is out for the summer. Can I get an amen? Summer is when teachers get to breathe and think, and maybe, just maybe, do a little professional development that we actually chose for ourselves, not because a district coordinator put it on our schedule in August, which is going to happen all too soon.
So here’s what the next few weeks are going to look like for this podcast. We’re going to spend the summer doing a little informal professional development together, focused specifically on technology in the classroom, not because someone told us we had to, but because there is a conversation happening right now that deserves our attention. We’re going to have a couple of policy episodes this summer unpacking what’s going on in the world of edtech and school technology bans and all of that. We’re going to have some practical episodes, real classroom strategies, about when tech is worth your time and, and when it just isn’t. And we’ll probably weave in a wellness episode or two because let’s be honest, rest is part of professional growth, too. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.
And here’s the other thing I want to tell you. At the end of summer, I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off right around the time school starts, and then I’ll be back with season two. Same podcast, you know and love, but with a fresh start because, you know, we’re teachers. We need that. It is baked into our DNA. We have our summer break. We start a new school year. For now, though, we’re still in season one. This, my friends, is season one, episode forty six, and we’re kicking off the summer with a policy episode because there is a lot to talk about on this front.
3:25
All right, it’s time for your teacher reality check, where we take what’s happening in the world of education policy and translate it into what it actually means for those of us in the classroom. This month’s topic: technology, specifically the growing movement to pull it back, to ban it, limit it, and in some cases, treat it like the villain in a very, very complicated story. And here’s my take on all of this. Well, I think that story is missing some pretty important context.
Education does this. It swings. I’ve been in classrooms for twenty five years, and I’ve watched the pendulum go back and forth more times than I can even count. Phonics is out. Whole language is in. Whole language is out. Phonics is back. Direct instruction is so old fashioned. Now it’s an approved best practice. Standardized testing is the answer. Standardized testing is destroying our kids. We’re very good at extremes in education. We’re not so good at being in the middle.
And right now, well, right now the pendulum has swung hard against technology. For about a decade, the message was get devices in every student’s hands, one to one learning, modernize, innovate. And if you weren’t using tech in your classroom, you, my friend, were behind. That was the prevailing message. And a lot of us, myself included, were out here giving workshops and writing blog posts and presenting at conferences saying, yeah, yeah, technology, let’s do it.
And now twenty six states have laws or policies requiring schools to ban or limit student device use. Twenty two of those were passed in twenty twenty five alone. That’s not a slow trend. That’s a legislative avalanche. So what happened? How did we go from put a Chromebook in every kid’s lap to get the screens out of our schools? I want to walk through the history here because I think context matters a lot.
5:49
One to one device programs have actually been around a lot longer than most people realize. There was a pilot program in Australia in nineteen ninety. Maine launched its first statewide initiative in the United States in two thousand and two. But the real explosion came in twenty thirteen and twenty fourteen, when schools purchased more than twenty three million laptops, tablets, and Chromebooks in just two years.
My own high school where I was teaching at that point went one-to-one in twenty fifteen, but we got the carts a few years before that. That was the moment a lot of us remember — the Chromebook carts rolling in. The professional development sessions on Google Classroom, the presentations at ISTE and state conferences about best practices for one to one. I was at some of those. I was presenting at some of those. And here’s what we knew then, what the research was already telling us. There was a framework for doing this well — Dr. Ruben Puentedura’s SAMR model. Substitution. Augmentation. Modification. Redefinition. That was the SAMR model — it gave teachers a way to think about technology integration as a progression.
The idea was that you start where you are at substitution. That’s the first step where tech does essentially the same thing a paper task would do. And then you work your way up toward redefinition, using technology to do things that simply could not happen without technology. In twenty seventeen, I wrote a blog post walking teachers through SAMR step by step. I’ll link to it in the show notes. And the message of that post was start at the bottom of the staircase. Don’t overwhelm yourself. Take it one lesson at a time. I think that was the right message for that moment.
8:02
The problem is what happened next. Because the research was also showing us something else. That sustained implementation over multiple years was necessary for teachers to move beyond substitution toward more transformative uses of technology, that the depth of change depended heavily on ongoing professional support.
And then Covid hit. Overnight, every teacher in America was doing distance learning. Schools that had barely touched their Chromebook carts in twenty nineteen were suddenly having to go digital. Teachers who had been hesitant, who had needed that slow supported climb up the SAMR staircase, were thrown into the deep end and told to swim. And they did. They survived. They figured it out — and kudos to them for that.
But what most of them figured out was survival level tech: digital worksheets, assigned Google Slide decks, YouTube videos, and responsive forms. In other words, substitution. The very bottom of the SAMR staircase. And then the pandemic ended. But those habits stayed. In March of twenty twenty one, ninety percent of educators reported having at least one device for every middle and high school student. That’s a massive expansion. And it happened because of emergency necessity, not strategic planning. And that’s a big deal.
9:40
See, teachers had the devices. They already knew how to use them at a substitution level — it was easier than making copies. So that’s where a lot of the classrooms stayed. And kids figured out the workarounds like they always do. And screen time climbed. A twenty twenty two EdWeek survey found that eighty eight percent of teachers, principals, and district leaders said learning challenges increased as student screen time went up. Eighty percent said their behavior got worse.
Now, here’s the part I want you to remember. The data driving the current tech backlash is largely about smartphones and social media. The correlation between phone use, social media, and declining adolescent mental health — that’s real. And that is worth taking seriously. But the data is being applied in a much broader way. The conversation has expanded from: phones are a problem, to screens are a problem, to — for a whole lot of people — technology in schools is the problem. And those are three very different claims.
11:06
I want to be clear about something here. I’m not here to dismiss the research on phones and adolescent mental health. That conversation is real. That conversation is important. I’ve done two previous episodes on cell phone bans in schools. I will link to both of those in the show notes. And my position there is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, but I don’t allow students to use cell phones in my classroom. But when we’re talking about technology in the classroom more broadly, we need to be careful about which research we’re actually citing.
Here’s one piece of research I do think applies directly to what’s happening in classrooms. The Mueller-Oppenheimer study on note taking — their landmark twenty fourteen research — found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes by hand. Not because laptops are evil, but because typing allows students to transcribe lectures almost verbatim without actually processing the information. Handwriting forces you to listen. It forces you to filter, to reframe. That’s deeper learning. And that makes sense to a lot of us.
12:26
But I would be remiss not to point out that in twenty nineteen, this study was replicated and the gains that Mueller and Oppenheimer found in their original study were found to be negligible in this one. But I want to go back to the original twenty fourteen study because it’s directly relevant to how we use technology in the classroom, and it’s a good argument for keeping some things on paper — not because paper is nostalgic, but because the physical act of writing by hand does something cognitively that typing just doesn’t.
I think about this in my own classroom all the time. Note taking? Paper. I believe in that. But recording a podcast-style reflection, publishing a website, connecting with primary sources through a curated multimedia experience — that’s where technology earns its place. That’s where it shines. The question shouldn’t be tech or no tech. The question should be: what does this tool allow students to do that they couldn’t do otherwise? And are we actually asking them to do that?
13:45
Here’s what I keep coming back to. The problem’s not the technology. The problem’s how we’ve been using it. A digital worksheet is a worksheet. If a student can do it just as well on paper — and can also hand it to AI to complete in forty five seconds — then you’re not really using technology, you’re just using a different surface. The SAMR model told us that years ago. The bottom of the staircase exists for a reason. It’s where you start, not where you stay.
But for a lot of teachers, pandemic-era necessity cemented substitution as the default. And now we’re dealing with the fallout of that. And we’re calling it a technology problem. It’s not a technology problem. It’s an implementation problem. And blanket bans don’t fix implementation problems. They just take away the tool and leave the underlying issue untouched. Now I want to be careful here. I’m not saying bans are always wrong.
14:55
Phone bans specifically — keeping personal smartphones out of the classroom — that is a conversation worth having, and there’s real research to support it. But that’s a different conversation than whether a teacher should be allowed to have students record a documentary, collaborate on a shared document, or access a multimedia primary source on their Chromebooks. The danger right now is that the anti-phone energy becomes anti-tech energy, and we throw out genuinely transformative tools because we haven’t figured out how to use the basic ones well. I believe we call that throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
15:42
Okay, so what do we actually do with all of this? I promised you a practical tip at the end of this episode. And here it is. It’s simple. It’s five questions, but I want you to start with one. One question. Before you assign any tech-based task, ask yourself: could a student do this just as well or better without the technology? If the answer is yes, go analog. Seriously. Not because technology is bad, but because some tasks genuinely benefit from paper, from handwriting, from the friction of working without a screen. Note taking is one. Certain kinds of reflection are another.
So if you can answer no to that first question, then ask yourself these four other questions. Does this task require students to process information or just record it? Does technology make this task possible, or just easier? Does using technology here create a distraction risk that outweighs the benefit? And finally, what do I want students to walk away with? And does tech help or hinder that outcome? Now I’m going through all five of those questions on my blog this summer with very specific types of classroom activities, such as note taking and Socratic seminars.
17:15
So head on over to leahcleary.com, and I’ll link to the first post — which is about note taking — in the episode notes here. I’m hoping that by the end of summer we’ll get really good at starting with that first question and then following it up with those four additional questions and being really mindful about how we use technology in the fall when we return to school. Who am I kidding? In August, when we return to school. The goal this summer is not to make you more tech savvy or less tech savvy. The goal is to make you more intentional. And that’s my goal for myself, too. I’m on this journey with you.
18:00
As always, I want to leave you with this. What you do in your classroom matters not because you’re doing it perfectly, but because you’re doing it thoughtfully. And in a world that wants to hand you either a mandate to use all the technology or a mandate to ban all of the technology, the most powerful thing you can do is to think for yourself. You are the expert on your students. You are the one in that room. That expertise matters. Do not let that pendulum make decisions for you. Enjoy your summer. Rest. Breathe. And I will see you in the next episode.
