- “Any technology can be used well or badly.”
- “Technology is just a tool – what matters is what you do with it.”
- “Kids can use a tablet to study or to play games – the issue isn’t the tablet, it’s what they are doing on the tablet.”
I hear this argument all the time: that when technology gives you a bad outcome, the problem is not the technology but the way teachers or kids are using it.
For example, last week, Matt Yglesias wrote an article called “Ed tech is not the answer or the problem”. Referring to a specific app that has come in for a lot of criticism, he said that it was probably being used well in some effective schools, but poorly in some ineffective ones. The issue was not the app, but how it was being used.
But asking whether ed tech is “good” or “bad” is like asking whether schools should have desks or whether teachers should use erasers. In both cases, they almost certainly should!
But the presence or absence of erasers is not what’s making the difference between effective and ineffective schools. If you had a building full of good teachers who were using a good curriculum and had adequate support from administrators and other stakeholders but for some reason they weren’t allowed to use erasers, they would find that annoying, but I’m sure they’d figure it out.