As a student, I loved playing Oregon Trail in my high school's computer lab.

To this day, I could still win at that game (and it's still playable, for free, at the link above!) I know when to ford the river, and which buttons to press to hunt.

But despite dozens of in-school hours spent on the game, I didn't learn or retain much about the actual Oregon Trail.

I didn't learn who followed the trail, why they went, or why dysentery was such a big issue (or for that matter, how dysentry even works.)

Lack of engagement was never the main problem with classroom technology. It's the lack of learning that was (and, according to my latest podcast guest), still IS the main issue.

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist and former classroom teacher who wrote a new release called, The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again. This book has turned into a national conversation, with Jared testifying before the Senate and parents handing it out at school board meetings.

His argument is that we've spent decades building a $400 billion ed tech industry on a promise about what technology would do for learning, and that promise never materialized.

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I'll be honest that I don't agree with all of his viewpoints, and I pushed back in this conversation (especially on the evaluation of learning via standardized test scores, and his implication that schools were working just fine before devices showed up). Jared took my questions seriously, and the episode is better for it.

What we get into:

• Why technology never seems to lighten teachers' workloads
• What "engagement" means at the level of the brain, and why gamified learning keeps kids entertained without teaching them much
• The only two use cases where the research shows ed tech genuinely works (and why neither are very exciting)
• The difference between what a tool could do and what kids will actually do with it
• Whether school was actually working better before devices, and what we lost that's worth going back for
• Why the work of learning goes against our natural human biology, and what that means for a tool designed to remove friction
• How to reintroduce friction in your classroom so tech stops being the default

This conversation runs long (just over an hour), but I decided not to trim it down very much. Ed tech debates usually get flattened into "screens are bad" or "screens are the future", and I wanted to really dig into the research to offer you more nuanced information.

It's well worth your time, and we end in a more hopeful place than I expected. Jared's closing point is that teachers are the experts on their students's learning, and we shouldn't hand that role over to tech.

I hope you enjoy the discussion: let me know what you think in the comments of the post or on Instagram.

Angela

Angela Watson Connect with our community of educators: ​​​​​​ PODCAST CURRICULUM BOOKS COURSES SPEAKING

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If you're teaching students who struggle with focus and follow-through, Finding Flow Solutions gives you no-prep lessons that help kids build the executive functioning skills behind real learning. Download a free unit for either elementary, middle, or high school at findingflowsolutions.com​.​

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