The Ed-Tech Ban Debate That Ate My Parent-Teacher Conference Night
Last week I spent three hours sitting at my wobbly 7th grade science desk, the one that has a permanent ring from my 32oz water bottle and a sticky spot from a kid’s spilled lollipop I haven’t bothered to scrape off, talking to parents. The third conversation of the night started with a mom leaning across the desk, folding her arms, and saying she’s collected 127 signatures on a petition to ban all ed-tech from our school, and she expects me to back her. She pulled out a printed copy of the petition from her tote bag, and it had a coffee stain on it too, which felt like some kind of weird irony.
I nodded, because I get it. I really do. My own sister has a 2nd grader at the elementary down the road, and she texts me at 9pm once a week screaming that she can’t figure out how to log into three different reading apps to get his homework done, and one of them charges $9.99 a month for “premium access” that’s required to turn in the assignment. Last semester our district forced us to adopt that new math platform that glitches every time it rains (something about the old Wi-Fi in the 1960s wing of the building, I don’t know) and I spent a whole Friday morning re-setting 26 student passwords instead of grading lab reports. I’ve assigned work on it and had half the kids come in the next day saying their internet cut out mid-assignment and it wouldn’t save. I hate that garbage as much as any parent.
So when this mom told me her son comes home with dry eyes and headaches from three hours of screen time a day at school, I didn’t argue with that part. I just spilled my lukewarm coffee all over the edge of my parent sign-in sheet when I went to grab a tissue, which was awkward. We both leaned down to mop it up with a spare paper towel, and that broke the tension a little, but she still said a total ban is the only way to fix this. And that’s when I had to tell her: that’s just insane.
Not because I love screens. I spend half my day begging kids to put their personal phones away when we’re doing group work. Last week I had an awkward moment where I caught three kids playing Minecraft on their school Chromebooks during a lesson on ecosystems, and I had to take one away, and his dad emailed me three days later mad that I was “punishing him for being technologically literate.” So I’m not out here trying to turn my classroom into a giant glowing screen.
But here’s the thing no one’s yelling about when they demand a total ban: ed-tech isn’t just fancy review games that waste time. It’s the text-to-speech tool that lets Mia, my student with dyslexia, do the same exact lab worksheet as every other kid in the class. Before we got this tool, Mia would sit in the back and never raise her hand, because she was embarrassed that she couldn’t read the questions fast enough to keep up. She’d have to wait for me to walk around and read every line to her, which took forever, and the other kids would notice. Last month she raised her hand and walked through her whole lab result out loud, all by herself, because the tool read it to her first. If you ban all ed-tech, you take that away from her. You put her right back in that corner being embarrassed.
Or take the pH sensors we use for our local pond water lab. The old way, we had test strips that you’d match to a color chart, and half the kids would squint and argue for 15 minutes about whether it was light green or yellow, and then we’d run out of time to talk about why the pH is off near the playground (it’s the irresponsible dog owners who don’t pick up poop, don’t ask). Now they hook the little sensor up to their Chromebook, it graphs the reading in 10 seconds, and we spend that 15 minutes talking about runoff and what that means for the frog population that lives in the pond. That’s not laziness. That’s more learning. Do I sometimes pull out the test strips anyway, to show them how it works the original way? Yeah, of course. But why would I throw the sensor away entirely?
I get why parents are mad. A lot of the ed-tech that schools buy is garbage, pushed by smooth salespeople who tell principals it’ll boost test scores, and no one stops to ask actual teachers if it’s actually useful for kids. I turn down half the new stuff the district sends me, because I know it’s just a distracting gimmick. But a total ban? That’s throwing out the baby with the bath water, and the babies are kids like Mia, who finally get to participate like everyone else.
Yesterday I had to cover a study hall for another teacher, and I watched a nonverbal student with autism use a communication app on his school tablet to ask me for a hall pass to the bathroom. Before he had that app, he’d just stand by the desk and cry, frustrated because he couldn’t get the words out to tell me what he needed. If you ban all ed-tech, what does that do for him?
I don’t have a pretty, wrapped-up answer to all this. I know too much screen time isn’t great for kids. I limit it in my classroom to less than an hour a day, usually, and we do plenty of paper worksheets, group projects, and labs with actual physical rocks and beakers. I don’t assign ed-tech homework because I know half the kids in my school don’t have reliable internet at home, and I don’t want to punish them for that. I agree with parents that we have way too much useless ed-tech shoved down our throats these days, just to make the school look good on a district report.
But when people talk about banning all of it, all I can think about is Mia smiling after she finished her presentation last month. I can think about that nonverbal kid grinning when I nodded and said yes to his hall pass. A total ban would fix some parents’ headaches about screen time and forgotten passwords, but it would break a whole lot of things that actually help my most vulnerable students. That’s why it’s an insane idea. I wish there was a comfortable middle ground everyone could agree on, but right now, I’m just over here mopping coffee off my lesson plans and holding onto the good stuff.
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