Technology in Education: A Blessing and a Curse

I have said from the beginning of my teaching career in 2013, as I gained experience with having access (though very

 limited, at the time) to Chromebooks in my classroom that it was both a blessing and a curse.

According to American Universities, School of Education, “many of today’s high-demand jobs were created in the last

decade,” (see link below). I would argue that most of these high-demand jobs have something to do with technology. It should

be a schools job to teach students how to be responsible users of that technology. There are many tools teachers can use to 

incorporate technology on the classroom, ranging from videos, textbooks, the Google arsenal of tools, learning management 

systems, robots, artificial intelligence. When taught and used responsibly these tools can greatly improve engagement and 

“more inclusive learning environments,” (American University). I really like this line from American University “The promise of 

educational technology lies in what educators do with it and how it is used to best support their students’ needs.” Being able to

use technology in a way that supports students is important. I struggle to know exactly what the means and should look like. 

Having easy-to-access information is such an advantage today’s students struggle to even comprehend. With that said I think 

many teachers are struggling to figure out how to harness that information in a way that does support learning and the students

skills around it. Having a student ask a question that I do not know the answer to and being able to tell them to look it up is 

pretty phenomenal. It is the follow through that I can be difficult to support. Do they look it up right then and there and possibly 

miss what you are teaching? Do they even know how to look it up and make sure what they find is reliable? Are they able to 

stay on task and complete the research? These are just a couple of the questions that technology in education brings up and 

are part of the curse technology brings into education. 

Students can flip their screens around, change the background of their desktop or Google homepage, logout their friends 

computer, change the keyboard language, get to the games they want to play, flip between tabs so fast that it is hard for the 

teacher to see what they have been doing, using the chat feature in Google docs to communicate with each other. These are all

 

examples of ways students use technology. The district I work for had to turn off the chat feature in Google Docs because its 

use was becoming so widespread that bullying was taking place and students weren’t paying attention in class. It is hard to 

support students needs when the students are not helping the process. The district I work for tried assigning every student a 

Chromebook, luckily this started right before the pandemic hit in 2020. Unfortunately, as I predicted from day one of this plan, 

allowing students to take home their Chromebooks every night resulted in many students not bringing them back to school, 

and if they did they weren’t charged, or they were broken. Parents started pawning them for money, students lost them. This all 

got so bad that we could not rely on planning lesson using technology because there weren’t enough extra Chromebooks to 

make up for the missing ones. A major problem with that was that many of the resources the district purchased for us were 

online. How can you teach with technology when the technology is not being brought to the classroom?

I enjoy using technology in the classroom. American University says “Still, children learn more effectively with direction. 

The World Economic Forum reports that while technology can help young students learn and acquire knowledge through play, 

for example, evidence suggests that learning is more effective through guidance from an adult, such as a teacher.” This use of 

technology cannot and should not be used without guidance. Direction and structure around technology is absolutely essential 

to effective support and learning; without it students abuse their the power they have at their finger tips. I have far fewer 

problem with technology in my classroom because I have set it up in a way I can, fairly easily, monitor what the students are 

doing. All the students face the toward the front of the room, and I stand in the back so I can see their screens. If a students 

screen is not facing me I use the program the district bought to monitor students screens to check in on what they are doing. 

Usually they are off task can I guide them back to where they need to be. I don’t fight them. If they still refuse to comply with 

the expectation I simple take their Chromebook, no questions asked. I do have to figure out how they can complete their work 

without technology, but to me that is an easy price to pay to keep technology as a tool to support their learning, not a tool for 

them to be entertained with games or videos. 

Resources

American University: School of Education