Learn21's Weekly EdTech Update
July 30, 2026
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Every policy creates tradeoffs. What do we lose when educational technology disappears from classrooms?
By Stacy Hawthorne, Ed.D.
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It’s a question I didn’t expect to spend so much time thinking about while writing Purposeful Technology, Powerful Learning. The book project grew out a need to share the amazing work that schools are doing everyday to create meaningful learning opportunities with educational technology. During my research, I explored the evidence around screen time, student engagement, learning science, digital citizenship, AI, accessibility, and instructional design.
Again and again, the same conclusion surfaced. The most important question is not simply “how many minutes” students spend on a device. It is “what those minutes are used to accomplish.”
That distinction matters as more policymakers, boards, and communities wrestle with legitimate concerns about distraction, student well-being, social media, and low-value screen use. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. Schools should absolutely reduce technology use that is passive, unnecessary, poorly designed, or disconnected from learning.
But hard limits based only on minutes or device access can miss the deeper instructional question. Every restriction has consequences. When we take educational technology away without asking what purpose it serves, we may solve one problem while quietly creating several others.
Students can certainly write on paper, solve problems in notebooks, and discuss ideas face-to-face. Those experiences still matter. But technology can help students share their work with audiences beyond the classroom. They can publish podcasts, create videos, build websites, design digital portfolios, collaborate with peers in other communities, and receive feedback from people who would never fit inside one school building. When used well, technology helps students see that their work is not just an assignment. It is communication.
For many students, technology is not a bonus feature. It is the bridge into learning. Text-to-speech, speech-to-text, captioning, translation, screen readers, adjustable text, audio supports, and other accessibility tools allow students to participate more fully and independently. A blanket restriction may look equal on paper, but it does not always feel equitable in practice. The students who rely on technology to access learning may be the first to feel what has been taken away.
The best educational technology does not simply digitize old worksheets. It makes new kinds of learning possible. Students can examine real-time data, run simulations, create multimedia explanations, connect with experts, build models, analyze patterns, and revise work based on immediate feedback. Increasingly, they can use AI to generate questions, test ideas, consider multiple perspectives, and push their thinking further. None of these uses are automatic. They require thoughtful teaching. But they are difficult to replace with a simple “no screens” rule.
Students are growing up in a world where technology is not going away. They will use digital tools in college, careers, civic life, healthcare, finance, and communication. If schools respond by removing technology instead of teaching students how to use it responsibly, we postpone an education they still need. Students need practice evaluating sources, managing distractions, protecting privacy, understanding algorithms, using AI ethically, and knowing when technology is the wrong tool for the task.
The people closest to students are usually best positioned to make thoughtful instructional decisions. A kindergarten teacher, high school science teacher, intervention specialist, library media specialist, principal, and technology leader may all make different choices because their students, goals, and contexts are different. That is not inconsistency. That is professional judgment. When policies are written too broadly, they can unintentionally flatten the very expertise schools need most.
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When the debate centers only on minutes, devices become the focus. When the debate centers on purpose, learning becomes the focus. Those are very different conversations.
None of this means every lesson needs technology. In fact, purposeful technology requires the opposite mindset. It asks educators to choose intentionally. Sometimes the right choice is a device. Sometimes it is a discussion, a lab, a book, a whiteboard, a field experience, a pencil, or a walk outside. The point is not to use more technology. The point is to design better learning.
That is why quantity-based rules will always fall short. They may tell us how long a screen was present, but they cannot tell us whether students were creating, collaborating, researching, designing, reflecting, practicing, or simply scrolling.
So before we ask only, “How much technology are students using?” we should also ask, “What might students lose if we take it away?”
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Discovery Education’s Digital Citizenship Initiative Named 2026 CODiE Award Winner
Discovery Education’s free Digital Citizenship Initiative has won a 2026 CODiE Award for Best Digital Citizenship Solution, after reaching nearly a million students since its 2025 launch. This Discovery Education program turns real classroom challenges, including misinformation, cyberbullying, privacy risks, and emerging AI tools, into ready-to-use lessons at no cost to schools.
TikTok Expands Its AI Literacy Drive
TikTok has partnered with the News & Media Literacy Alliance and deepfake researcher Henry Ajder to help users recognize AI-generated content and use AI tools responsibly. This TikTok initiative builds on a program that has already logged more than 200 million views of educational content, giving families and classrooms a starting point for conversations about spotting synthetic media.
Can You Spot Fake News or Images?
University of Miami professor Lindsay Grace has spent decades designing games that teach media literacy, including two new apps that challenge players to tell real news stories and photos from AI-generated fakes. This University of Miami profile offers a fun, game-based way for students and families to practice spotting misinformation.
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Families Deserve to Know the Why
By Stacy Hawthorne, Ed.D.
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A new wave of lawsuits is putting educational technology under a different kind of microscope. Parents and students have filed suits against several major edtech companies, alleging that student data was collected, used, or shared without proper consent. The EdTech Law Center, a Texas-based firm focused on these issues, lists active cases involving companies such as Google, IXL, PowerSchool, and others. The lawsuits vary in their claims and procedural status, and the allegations have not necessarily been proven in court. But the central concern is clear: many parents feel they do not know enough about the digital tools their children are required to use during the school day.
A recent article in The 74 framed parent consent as the issue at the heart of many of these cases. The tension is real. Schools rely on digital platforms for instruction, assessment, communication, accessibility, operations, and student support. Requiring every vendor to obtain direct consent from every parent for every classroom tool could quickly become, as one attorney described it, an “administrative nightmare.”
And yet, dismissing parent concerns would be a mistake.
Most families are not reading data privacy agreements, vendor contracts, software terms, or state student privacy statutes. They are trusting schools to make good decisions on behalf of their children. That trust is powerful, but it is not automatic. It has to be earned, explained, and maintained.
For school leaders, the lesson is not that every edtech tool is dangerous or that every parent concern should lead to abandoning digital learning. The lesson is that transparency is now part of implementation.
Families deserve to know what tools are being used, why they are being used, what student information is collected, how that information is protected, and who has access to it. They also deserve plain-language explanations. A posted spreadsheet of approved apps may technically be transparent, but it may not build understanding. Legal compliance is the floor. Trust requires more.
This is especially important because most edtech decisions are made for good reasons. Teachers choose tools to personalize learning, provide feedback, support accessibility, streamline communication, or help students create and collaborate. Districts adopt platforms to manage instruction, assessment, safety, cybersecurity, data privacy, and operations. But when families only see the device, the login screen, or the headline about a lawsuit, they may not see the instructional purpose behind the tool. That gap is where mistrust grows.
School leaders can close the gap by communicating proactively. Explain the purpose of commonly used platforms before concerns arise. Share how tools are reviewed and approved. Make student data privacy practices understandable. Provide families with a clear place to ask questions. Invite parent feedback before major adoptions. Train staff so that they can explain not just how a tool works, but why it belongs in the learning experience.
Parents do not need schools to be perfect. They need schools to be honest. They need to know that someone is asking hard questions before a tool reaches their child. What data does this collect? Is it necessary? Does the benefit justify the use? Are there safer alternatives? How will we know whether it is helping students learn? Those are the same questions school leaders should be asking anyway.
The current lawsuits may take years to resolve, and courts will determine the legal questions. But education leaders do not have to wait for a ruling to act. We can use this moment as a reminder that education technology leadership is not only about devices, platforms, and contracts. It is about relationships.
Purposeful technology depends on trust, and trust begins when families understand not only what we are using, but why.
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Ohio Just Made AI Policy Homework, And Everyone Has To Turn It In
As of July 1, Ohio became the first state to require every public, community, and STEM school district to have a board-approved AI policy on file, not just a suggestion, an actual law (House Bill 96 / ORC 3301.24). Columbus City Schools, the state's largest district, passed its version unanimously after months of work with roughly 50 stakeholders: AI is a supplement, not a substitute, teachers keep full discretion, and student data can't be used to train AI models. It's basically a syllabus for the whole state: 600+ districts, one deadline, wildly different homework answers.
Who's In Charge Here? Ask a Bee. Or a Frog Cell.
Turns out the boss isn't always who you think. Düsseldorf researchers found the exact brain circuit that assigns worker bees their jobs as they age, and when they switched it off, elderly bees dropped their regular duties and went right back to babysitting the queen, no meeting required. No manager, no memo, just neurons quietly running a hive's entire org chart.
Meanwhile, scientists are growing "neurobots" out of frog embryonic cells that self-organize their own nervous systems, with no brain, no blueprint, and no one at the wheel telling them what to become. They're not robots in the traditional sense, and they're not really an animal either; they're something new figuring out its own rules as it goes.
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