FINALLY, ED TECH IS PARTNERING WITH TEACHERS TO IMPROVE THE IMPACT OF PERSONALIZED LEARNING

I’ll just say it: As a teacher, I hated the “ed tech” conversation.

Sure, I used basic technology in my classroom—maybe some iPads, or websites like Kahn Academy and Edublogs. But I hated #EdTech Twitter feeds and ed tech professional development and, most of all, ed tech conferences.

Why? Because the technology gurus always seemed to parade their inventions as the silver bullet that would undo years of bad teaching. Conversations were often driven by software developers who were raking in millions in sales and who gushed about how their technology, with its clever animations and gamey-game-games, were “disrupting” the cycle of failure for those low-income, disadvantaged kids.

I would walk away honestly wondering if they thought they could replace teachers with their fancy robots and apps. The ed tech rhetoric rarely referenced the classroom as a living organism within an ecosystem of students’ social-emotional lives, families and communities. I felt that my students and I were being widgetized by the creators of the technology.