Welcome to the Low-Tech Teacher
Hanging onto Humanity in a High-Tech World
I’ve been teaching English in a public high school in Massachusetts since 2005. When I started, we had three-ring binders, loose leaf paper, and notebooks. We had handouts that were photocopies of old photocopies, two desktop computers for the entire English department (one Mac, one PC), an archaic email system for teachers and none for students, and daily attendance taken on a paper bubble sheet. Chalkboards were on the way out, whiteboards were on the way in, and every classroom had a pull-down screen to use with our transparencies and overhead projectors. In the corner of my first classroom was an old MacIntosh computer, that may or may not have worked, and which might have been the manifestation of Bill Clinton’s 1996 promise for a computer in every classroom. If we wanted to use computers, we reserved the computer lab or a portable cart of chunky white Apple iBooks with perpetually low batteries. We rolled a TV cart into the room to show movies on DVD or even VHS. I kept grades in a paper gradebook and calculated them in an Excel spreadsheet, and students got a (sometimes surprising) paper report card at the end of each quarter. Students still texted in class, but it was a cumbersome process on their flip phones. They doodled and daydreamed out the window, too.
Things have changed. Now every student and teacher has a school-issued, state-of-the-art MacBook Air and a Google account. Our gradebooks are online and transparent to students and parents 24/7. Most assignments are distributed, collected, and graded on Google Classroom. I’ve stopped requiring three-ring binders for my classes because paper handouts are no longer a regular necessity. Document cameras replaced the overhead projectors, and whiteboards gave way to Smart Boards with ceiling-mounted projectors, which have now in turn given way to massive flat-panel touch screens. Students have in their smartphones more computer processing power than in that entire 2005 computer lab. Texting, gaming, selfie-taking, music-playing, and social media scrolling, posting, and messaging are not cumbersome, but pervasive. Students seldom doodle any more, and they’re far more likely to be looking at screens than daydreaming out windows.
Almost all of these changes have occurred without any real institutional discussion beyond budget and logistics. Oh, there has always been professional development aplenty for the EdTech du jour, and I’m fortunate to enjoy the tireless and patient support of our living saints in the Technology Department, but at no point do I recall anyone wondering, for instance (other than a few of us cranky teachers), whether something like online gradebooks were really a good idea. Or Google Classroom. Or a very large screen in the classroom, front-and-center. These new technologies have progressed as inexorably as a glacier—only at the speed of Moore’s Law.
Don’t get me wrong—there are great benefits to some of them. I’m not just some Luddite; I’m a guy who builds his own computers, who taught himself as a kid to code text-adventure games in BASIC on an Apple IIe, and who’s helped his own kids build their own computers. But our collective lack of critical thinking about technology in our classrooms—as teachers, parents, students, school leaders, researchers, and tech developers—worries me.
So I’ve started The Low-Tech Teacher as a place to write honestly and open-mindedly about technology, human nature, and education from a teacher’s-eye-view in a high school English classroom. I’m a busy teacher (and parent); posts here may be intermittent at best and often infrequent during the school-year crunch. I don’t claim to speak for all schools, or all teachers, or even others in my own discipline, and I certainly don’t speak in any official capacity for my own district or department; all opinions and mistakes are my own. But I do hope others will join me in honest conversation and thought about the consequences of our decisions around technology in education.