Post-COVID, Cramming EdTech In Schools Goes Wild

That technology allowed instruction to continue for many as COVID shuttered schools is no longer surprising—although a mere two decades ago it would have passed for science fiction.

What’s surprised many, however, is how sticky the education technology has become as schools have reopened.

In a recent piece for The74, for example, Conor Williams describes how after having visited nearly 100 classrooms in three states over six months, digital learning is everywhere. “I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room,” Williams wrote.

One effect of the piece is to try and describe a sea change in America’s schools.

Yet has the digital technology really changed the DNA of schools themselves?

From the quoted line above, it’s not clear that it has. It seems that the basic mechanics of schools are still in place: age-graded classrooms, a “front” of the room, a teacher conducting whole-class instruction, a technology that has replaced the proverbial blackboard displaying information to the whole class.

A caveat. One hundred classrooms isn’t much of a sample size. And I certainly don’t know everything that’s taking place in the 3-million-plus classrooms across the country. I’m sure that many schools are blending learning—using online learning in brick-and-mortar schools where students have some element of control over the time, place, path, or pace of their learning. That’s a phenomenon that Heather Staker and I (along with many others) wrote extensively about over a decade ago. There are traces of some of that in Williams’ piece.

But I’ll also bet that most are (in many cases simultaneously) doing what Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson, and I called “cramming” technology into traditional classrooms.

In Disrupting Class, we wrote that when most organizations (in all sectors) confront a new technology, their initial instinct is to try and deploy it to do the things for which their existing model is already optimized. We argued that schools have been no different.