This video may be my magnum opus, and makes my Summaries of Learning from EC&I 831 in 2019 (which I called “a masterpiece. The Citizen Kane of final projects”) and EC&I 834 in 2021 (which I “presented without comment”) look like hot garbage.
To be clear, I am NOT joking, it is that much better, but there is a caveat: the technology that made this video possible wasn’t available in 2019, 2021, or frankly even 2025. It’s a Brave New World (shoutout to anyone who took my ENGL 110 dystopian literature course) out there folks, but at least I got to have a little fun.
Please enjoy: because of the hours and hours of editing the song will be stuck in my head for weeks, and misery loves company.
Cellphones, unfortunately, are terrible at knocking.
In a moment of possibly excessive commitment to my own metaphor, I used Canva’s AI for the *very first time* to generate a cellphone knocking on a classroom door. Canva’s version waited patiently outside until invited in. My argument is that actual phones should be expected to do the same.
They buzz in pockets, light up beneath desks, vibrate against tables, and arrive carrying TikTok, Snapchat, games, group chats, cameras, AI chatbots, and every other part of the internet competing for attention. They are less like a polite visitor and more like the Kool-Aid Man crashing through the wall (there is another reference that may confirm I am older than some classmates).
I voted in favour of banning cellphones before the debate.
I voted in favour again afterward.
Admittedly, that is not the most dramatic intellectual transformation. There is no third-act reveal where I announce that Snapchat belongs beside Shakespeare in ELA B30 or that I am creating an Instagram Module about the Treaty of Versailles in History 20. Still, keeping the same vote does not mean the debate changed nothing. My position became narrower, more cautious, and, I like to think, more defensible (remember, I firmly believe debate is about mutually exploring a topic for both sides).
The Agree side’s opening argument: a phone-free classroom is not anti-technology, it is pro-learning
Cindy, Joni, and Jayda’s video compared a cellphone waiting inside a student’s pocket to the Jumanji box, quietly drumming: “Open me! Open me! Open me!” That image landed for me because:
a) Jumanji was one of the few videos we had at our cabin, a grainy recording from our home VHS set, complete with 1997 American JC Penny ads, yet still the best rainy-day entertainment we had well into the mid-2000s.
b) I love metaphors.
c) I agree that the distraction does not begin only after the phone appears.
Part of a student’s attention can remain attached to the very possibility of a message, notification, photograph, or recording. I have seen them noticing a phone going off or vibrating in the pouch at the front of the room.
After thirteen years of teaching, I am also tired of the thousand tiny negotiations.
Put it away.
Take out the EarPods.
No, checking the time does not require scrolling for six minutes.
No, independent work does not mean unrestricted personal screen time that you call “listening to music.”
None of these moments is catastrophic, but together they consume attention, instructional time, and teacher-student goodwill. And folks, I am tired.
The strongest case for a ban is therefore not that removing phones will cure adolescent anxiety, eliminate cyberbullying, or suddenly make every student love semicolons (though they have started loving em dashes… that’s a bit of an inside joke for those familiar with the norms of AI-generated text).
The strongest reason for banning phones is quite small, I would argue: classrooms work better when teachers are not forced to compete continuously with devices and platforms literally designed to capture attention. I tell students that social media apps would happily let them stay on their apps 24/7: after all, their attention is profitable.
An Education Week survey listed in the annotated source list found that roughly seven in ten educators believed cellphone restrictions improved classroom behaviour and engagement. The same article also emphasized that a policy is not the same as successful implementation; design and consistent enforcement matter (semi-colon not em dash there: conscious design choice). That distinction seems obvious, but, in my 13 years of classroom experience, schools are remarkably talented at producing rules that exist mainly in handbooks and staff-meeting slides.
After my success with Canva, I decided to see how WordPress’s AI would do at generating an image, and it had a bit of a challenging time… (seriously, it messed it up SO badly)
Dalton, Orie, and Belinda’s Disagree-side video complicated this position in useful ways. It raised unequal access to devices and internet service, particularly in northern Saskatchewan, where a phone may be the most reliable device a student has. It also included a student explaining that bans sometimes create a performance in which phones disappear whenever the teacher looks and reappear when the teacher turns away.
The Disagree side argues that blanket bans can push use underground without addressing access, habits, or digital citizenship
That description is both funny and painfully believable. At our school, the newest technique is the two phone bluff: one burner phone goes into the holder, the *real* phone gets to stay in the pocket.
The research also resists a simple victory speech for the Agree side, who I think had the easier argument structually. One South Australian study found no significant short-term differences between ban and non-ban schools in problematic phone use, academic engagement, school belonging, or bullying. A larger scoping review found mixed results and little conclusive evidence that one-size-fits-all bans consistently improve achievement, mental health, or cyberbullying. The Harvard EdCast discussion (thanks to a 2x speed option, I listened to the WHOLE THING) was similarly inconvenient for my position: restrictive policies reduced school-day phone use by around forty minutes and social-media use by thirty minutes, but did not produce significant differences in the broader educational, physical-health, or mental-health outcomes measured.
In other words:
A ban may change the room without changing the child.
I still think changing the room matters.
A classroom rule does not need to repair every underlying problem to be worthwhile. We do not reject a rule against shouting because it fails to cure impulsivity (this is a shout out to the middle years teachers out there). A cellphone ban can protect an environment even if it does not transform students’ total daily screen use, resolve conflicts that began online the night before, or teach self-regulation by itself (if anyone knows a good self-regulation teacher, let me know, because I am LOOKING).
This is where the word ban (as usual, I am digging into semantics) is doing a lot of work.
I support phones being unavailable by *default* during class, not a policy that ignores accessibility, medical needs, emergencies, translation, or genuine instructional uses (the Photography teacher at my school, who I consider a good friend, would be furious if I didn’t mention this). A teacher may decide that a camera, calculator, poll, recording app, or internet search serves the lesson. Students who depend on assistive technology or lack access to another device also require workable accommodations rather than an inflexible slogan. My school has 1 to 1 devices: the Discord shows me that is not as common as I thought.
Ironically, this brings me fairly close to one of the Disagree side’s final recommendations: teachers should determine when phone use is appropriate. Where I differ is again the default. Students should not possess an automatic right to unrestricted access simply because the device occasionally has educational value.
A fire extinguisher is useful too. I do not carry one around all day in case a lesson suddenly requires it. I could probably try for some “my words are a fire extinguisher” metaphor here but it’s late, I’m tired, semi-lucid, but my writing nevertheless is flowing like sweet cremery butter (and yes, I am posting this in the morning because I sat on it overnight to allow for proofreading the next day, as the best writers and I tend to do).
I thought an image of the cell phone holder in my classroom would be punchy here, but it turns out I don’t seem to have one. So I expertly ‘photoshopped’ (Microsoft Paint’ed) it onto this 2018 photo at exactly where it is today.
So, yes, I voted for banning cellphones twice.
The debate did not change my vote. It changed what I believe the vote means.
A phone ban is a boundary, not a cure. It can protect attention, reduce constant negotiation, and make face-to-face interaction, which I increasingly see as precious, as more likely. It cannot replace digital citizenship, equitable technology access, family conversations, platform regulation (looking at you, Mark Carney), or the slow developmental work of learning self-control (that stuff is gone and never returning, folks!)
In my earlier post, I wrote that technology should have to knock. I still believe that. During direct instruction, discussion, reading, writing, and assessment, the answer to the cellphone’s knock will usually be no. At other moments, for a specific reason, the teacher may open the door.
The point of having a door is not that it never opens. The door to my house opens every day. But it is for a pretty small part of that day (realistically a minute or less), nonetheless.
The point is that something (and someone) controls the threshold.
Technology should have to knock.
Cellphones have not earned a permanent skeleton key.
So, in my increasingly predictable final-question fashion: when a cellphone knocks on the classroom door, who should decide whether it enters—the student, the teacher, or the notification?
Anyone who knows me well knows that Jurassic Park is my favourite movie. I once even designed an English B10 unit around the novel (which is quite different and better from the film, though this is neither the time nor place for that lecture).
Many channels like sharkstalgia have released memorials to Sam Neill, who died on July 13th
Following Sam Neill’s recent death, I offhandly used one of Alan Grant’s less famous lines in the Zoom chat during the debate:
The world has just changed so radically, and we’re all running to catch up.
The quotation appears during the scientists’ discussion of whether anyone can anticipate the consequences of bringing dinosaurs back into the modern world.
Grant was talking about dinosaurs returning after 65 million years. I am talking about generative AI which, admittedly, is less likely to eat a lawyer sitting on a toilet but may be causing nearly as much chaos in education.
The line came to me during Debate #3 because the first half of our debated statement no longer feels especially debatable:
AI technologies will revolutionize education.
They already have.
The difficult part is contained in the final three words: for the better.
(and yes, I am again digging into semantics: so sue me)
Like many in 2026, I have (need?) a side hustle. As a sessional lecturer teaching first-year university English since 2023, AI has changed what I can reasonably infer from a polished essay, why I emphasize drafts and revision histories, and how grading increasingly seems more like forensic investigation (I wish I watched more CSI as a kid…)
In a previous post, I joked that I sometimes spend more time reporting suspected AI use than grading the damn assignments. After checking my records more concretely, I realized this was not much of an exaggeration.
In the case of *just* one student in Fall 2025, I spent several hours across October, November, and December comparing writing samples, collecting evidence, and completing reports involving three of the course’s four major assignments. The formal decision arrived in March 2026, months after the course ended. Unauthorized AI use was confirmed on all three assignments, but the sanction was 40% on each. Somehow, the student still passed the course. The letters we receive as instructors following the investigations are quite interesting. I will include a snippet of a small piece of it:
I will say, the univeristy is thorough in their investigations.
Regardless, by the end of the course in December, I had limited reliable evidence of what the student could independently produce in written English without AI assistance. I did, however, have extensive evidence of my own ability to prepare academic-integrity reports.
Apparently, that was the learning outcome I mastered.
I would say, at this point, I spend equal amount of time dutifully reporting AI-usage as I do marking, at least at the university level (it’s much easier to mitigate, thankfully, with the increased autonomy over assignment structure at the high school level). For what it’s worth, I am not planning on continuing the sessional work in the fall. My Google Drive will thank me:
Just a small portion of the paperwork AI has allegedly saved educators.
This makes claims about AI creating efficiency difficult to accept without asking: efficient for whom? AI may have saved the student time, but it transferred the labour to me and displaced time that could have gone toward feedback. And who the hell wants to write feedback for something written by a computer?
There is an irony here because I use AI too. I use it to brainstorm, reorganize information, and occasionally locate a sentence that, much like my phone between the car seat and centre console this morning, refuses to emerge from my own brain.
I am worried that students might use AI to avoid thinking while I use AI to organize my thinking about students using AI to avoid thinking. I also worry that I use AI to avoid thinking about how students are using AI to avoid thinking.
What am I thinking?
Am I thinking?
Welcome to Jurassic Park!
It’s amazing how many franchises have their own wikis (source: jurassic wiki)
In today’s debate (that introductory clause just obligates me to finish this post by midnight), the Agree side placed current anxieties within a longer history of technological fear. Socrates worried writing would weaken memory, while calculators were accused of destroying mathematical ability. Education eventually adapted to both.
I found Kristen Howard’s “The Calculator Problem” particularly compelling. Students usually develop foundational skills before calculators begin doing substantial portions of the work. Howard argues that AI should be sequenced similarly: protect the struggle that builds disciplinary knowledge, then introduce the tool once students can evaluate its output.
For an experienced historian or writer, AI *may* amplify expertise. For a novice, it can quietly replace the struggle through which expertise develops. I absolutely loved learning more about the concept of cognitive friction this week, by the way. Thanks to the many who contributed to its discussion.
The Agree side had other interesting evidence, too. A recent meta-analysis of generative AI and educational outcomes reported generally positive effects on academic achievement, higher-order thinking, writing, and feedback. This surprised, but didn’t shock me.
The potential is real.
So are the velociraptors.
Today I learned the velociraptors in Jurassic Park are named The Big One, Kim, and Randy. RANDY?! (source: Nightmare on Film Street)
The Disagree side raised a harder question: what happens when AI enters tired, under-resourced schools where the fastest solution quickly becomes the default? The study “Generative AI Can Harm Teaching” found that an AI tool did not improve average achievement and reduced student motivation. Faster materials did not necessarily mean better teaching.
AI can produce the appearance of learning without much learning underneath. The paragraphs, transitions, and thesis may all be present, but the essay can resemble a Jurassic Park movie set: impressive from the front but largely just a facade. The same applies to a polished lesson plan produced without the teacher’s voice, judgment, or knowledge of the students. I may come back and edit this post later if I can recall it more specifically, but I made a related comment in the Zoom chat about my experiences trying to generate lessons via AI. In summary: my reviews are decidedly mixed.
While I have done my fair share of research on AI, I was also provided an idea for the first time today that was much more novel, yet undeniably true: AI is also not culturally neutral. Worrell and Johns warn that it can reproduce misinformation, colonial assumptions, and distorted representations because some voices dominate its data (let’s be honest, probably white dudes like me) while others remain absent.
That does not mean we should hide AI from students. At the very front of my classroom, I have a poster that looks as follows:
I actually made this thing myself. No cap. Got it printed at Staples and everything.
What if we had a similar poster for AI-generated material. Something like:
Show them what it produces, then ask:
Where did this come from?
Whose voice is missing?
What needs verification?
That is not teaching students to trust AI. It is teaching them to interrogate it.
AI can undeniably remove tedious work such as formatting, transcription, or creating a starting template. It can also remove the uncertain and frustrating work through which learning occurs (like me painstakingly working on this post… I cannot believe these blog posts seem to take longer than many essays).
Unfortunately, those efficiencies can look almost identical from the outside. So yes, AI is revolutionizing education. Whether it does so “for the better” depends on whether it extends human judgment or replaces it and whether it supports meaningful learning or merely makes its appearance easier to produce.
Dr. Grant was right: the world has changed radically, and we are all running to catch up.
I am simply no longer certain that running faster is the answer.
In my bold, increasingly-overused rhetorical fashion, I ask you: What should AI make easier, and what needs to remain difficult?
I did not expect a debate about childhood to involve steroids, alcohol prohibition, TikTok dances, online third spaces, acceptable-use policies, and Star Wars. Yet, somehow, all of them entered the conversation.
The pre and post scores were interesting too, with 78% initially agreeing with the titular statement and then only a minority, about 40%, at the debate’s conclusion. And while I ostensibly (I love this word and it is not AI-generated, so please let me keep using ostensibly) was on the team that successfully convinced classmates to change their opinion, I have appreciated remembering the origin of debate (from way back from my undergrad days in the philosophy course Logic and Critical Thinking) was a mutual process designed to get closer to the truth. As Meg Mott’s article “Don’t Dismiss Debate” states:
“Instead of reinforcing one point of view, debate reveals each team’s weak spots and the opposition’s strengths. By creating a container broad enough to hold divergent claims, debate increases cognitive strength. What’s more, it also works very well on Zoom” [emphasis mine].
Nonetheless, even if the class did change its mind, mine became more complicated.
While slightly redundant for those in the Zoom session, my deep desire to embed a video in this blog post reminds me of a good starting point, our team’s openining debate video (attractive thumbail included):
One of the core arguments our team put forth has was also the primary impetus for me choosing this topic and position at 6:00 PM sharp on signup day: the statement is far too absolute in its nature (admittedly, I also choose the topic simply because I wanted to present on the first day).
Being a long-suffering English teacher, I knew that my inner pedant (Merriam-Webster: one who is unimaginative, rigid, or overly concerned with minor details in the presentation or use of knowledge) couldn’t agree with the statement *as written*, so it would be a great starting point for the assignment. However, doing independent research, working with my group, hearing things in real-time in the debate, actually rewatching parts of the recording, reviewing the transcript, and now, after several days reflection, I have reached a new synthesis.
While I still hold aspects of my position on social media, attacking the word ruined cannot become a convenient way of avoiding the very real harms it caused, causes, and will continue to cause.
The most difficult part of defending our side was that the opposing team was not exclusively describing hypothetical harms. Cassie’s contribution, in particular, made the issue personal in a way that statistics and research could not. She described growing up with AskFM, where anonymity did not produce honest discussion so much as an efficient delivery system for gossip, humiliation, and cyberbullying. Since AskFM didn’t even exist until I had graduated high school, this was far from my experience, and, quite frankly, horrified me, especially on rewatching the debate when I did not feel as much urgency in terms of preparing responses and could listen more empathetically.
I appreciated hearing more of Cassie’s perspective in her blog, which took the unique form of a podcast (and the animated cover art was super cool too!). If you aren’t familiar with AskFM like I wasn’t, the site essentially allowed people to publicly confront someone with private information without ever having to attach their own name to it. I am not surprised to see that AskFM was shut down in 2024 being linked to several teen suicides.
Cassie’s podcast is worthwhile listening if you haven’t checked it out.
My inadequete and hastily-developed response during the debate was that, for every child being harmed online, another child in rural Saskatchewan might be finding people who share an identity or experience for the first time. I still believe that. It was also, in retrospect, a very debate-like answer: quick, oppositional, and a little too tidy (though I am glad to hear it also resonated personally with some members of the class as well). The existence of an online support community does not cancel out Cassie’s experience any more than her experience cancels out the support another young person may find. Both can be true, including for the same person and on the same platform.
That may be where my thinking changed most. I still reject the claim that social media has uniformly ruined childhood, but I no longer see it as a neutral tool. I still agree with the American Psychological Association article I annotated that served as our “smoking gun” to some extent that emphasizes that its effects depend on the child, the content, the platform, and the context. The quote I have seen several of my classmates blogs isolate puts it well:
“Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.”
Social media can intensify harassment, comparison, and isolation. It can also provide creativity, identity, connection, and community, especially where those supports do not exist locally. Both realities can exist on the same platform and even affect the same child. While we had a debate, I also think this embodies something called dialectical thinking, also known as the art of holding two truths. Both statements are correct.
So, my Star Wars conclusion still stands, though less confidently than it did during the debate: only the Sith deal in absolutes. Social media has changed childhood, sometimes seriously and harmfully, but changed is not the same as ruined. The responsibility now belongs not only to young people, but also to parents, schools, governments, and the companies designing the platforms they use.
On that note, let me end on a grainy image macro that complicates and weakens my entire argument. Happy Sunday night everyone!
In my first EC&I 830 post, I confessed that my teaching life is largely held together by an unreasonable number of browser tabs. In other words, move over Red Green and your duct tape, here’s Mr. Sharp and his brower tabs!
*That reference might be too old for some of my classmates, which also makes me feel old…
I have started to wonder whether classrooms have adopted the same operating principle I seem to innately hold: if one digital tool can be useful, twelve must be better.
Apparently, “more tabs” is not an instructional model.
Neverthless, shortly after the first debate (which was way more enjoyable and interesting than I imagined it being!) I shared an image in our Discord that complicated the word that often drives our technology decisions: engagement.
Appearing engaged is not the same as actively thinking (or learning!)
I then did the thing no one ever does and went looking for the source, since the image really truly intrigued me. Apparently it came from Sarah Oberle and Mitch Weathers’ book, Executive Functions for Every K–3 Classroom. The book’s focus appears to be, according to the online summary (and I quote):
“Some learners seem naturally ready for school routines while others struggle to follow directions, stay organized, or manage their impulses. The difference often isn′t about a student’s ability or behavior—it′s about executive functions, the cognitive processes that promote attention, memory, and adaptability.”
From reading reviews of the book on Amazon and looking at comments on social media and elsewhere, one thesis the books seems to hold is that (and I paraphrase): Engagement photographs well, but executive function is ugly.
The Discord responses made the image’s point more complicated in useful ways. Hayley (also notable as my great group member in Debate #2!) noted that learning does not always look like sitting still, facing forward, and making eye contact, which I agree with wholeheartedly, Meanwhile, Brooke connected it to her experience with Building Thinking Classrooms (which I just learned about for the first time because of her mentioning it): three students could be standing together at a whiteboard while only two were actually participating in the thinking. The third student looked engaged from across the room, but the appearance concealed boredom, confusion, or exclusion.
Technology can create the same illusion remarkably well. A colourful Canva presentation, a rapid-fire Kahoot, or a completed online activity can make a classroom look active. I know it. I’ve lived it. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself. But as an English and History teacher (and perhaps even moreso over the past three years as a university instructor) I am increasingly interested in a less photogenic question:
Who is doing the intellectual work?
The readings supporting technology in the classroom provided by the Pro side gave good reasons not to dismiss it. Pasani and Amelia found that mobile technology improved mathematical communication and Sibley and colleagues discussed accessibility tools, which is important as well. However, the technology in these research studies did not wander into the classroom, sprinkle enhancement dust on the lesson, and leave everyone smarter. It worked when teachers used it within a deliberately designed instructional process which, let’s be honest, isn’t always how we do things in our day-to-day work, at least to the degree we would like (unless you have a gig that lets you do that, let me know, because I will apply tomorrow!)
The disagree side gave me equally useful language for what can go wrong. The CNN article argues that screens can increase distraction and reduce deeper processing, while the YouTube discussion (and sorry, I didn’t watch all hour and 13 minutes!) describes students “offloading” memory and thinking onto devices. That concern feels especially immediate now that a student can move from question to polished answer without doing much of the uncertain, frustrating work in between (I think I will save elaboration on this for next week, but I have spent more time reporting university student work for AI usage than actually grading the damn stuff).
Let me be clear: I am hardly arguing for the return of the overhead projector (though I do occasionally pull out the Super 8 projector and record player in my classroom). Technology can make learning more accessible through text-to-speech, captions, translation, amplification, adjustable text, and alternative ways to demonstrate understanding (I maybe sound smarter than I am because I recently took the ACVREP Chromebook Accessibility Expert course).
But truly. Sometimes technology does not merely enhance access: it creates it. Google Docs also lets me observe writing as a process rather than simply receive the final product, which is extraordinarily useful… even if watching a cursor remain motionless for twenty minutes is less inspiring. I’ll take it over online games any day though.
Even Google Photo’s wonderful ability to search my entire catalog came up empty for photos of my Super 8 projector, so I am instead using this 2022 photo of old projectors and TVs down in an isolated “techology graveyard” hallway in my school.
Still, one of the most memorable ideas from the debate came from Michelle, who asked us to think of classrooms as “sacred learning spaces.” When I asked her about the phrase in the 25 minutes of free discussion, she described the classroom as a deeply human place where students should be able to flourish without being surrendered to every distraction, fad, or new technology (and yes, I had to go back into the Zoom recording to find her exact words). In her recent lovely blog post, she followed up by asking a wonderful question: “how do we cling to what matters most about our humanity while embracing the digital era?“
I do not think a sacred classroom must be an analog classroom. Sacred spaces can (and probably should) contain laptops, microphones, projectors, assistive devices, videos, online archives, and collaborative documents. My classroom certainly does.
Calling the classroom sacred (such a powerful word!) does, however, suggest that not everything should be admitted simply because it is available.
Technology should not be banned from the room. It should have to knock.
(I say this in a year when I started closing my door for the first time due to how increasingly noisy the massively growing Functional Integrated program next door to me has gotten).
If classrooms are sacred spaces, the element I most want them to protect is attention: attention to ideas, to other people, to our own developing thoughts, and to the world immediately around us. Being present is increasingly hard. I recognize this in myself as much as anyone.
Technology can belong in that space. Sometimes it may even make the space accessible, or, in the case of online courses such as this, exist at all.
But it should have to earn the tab.
*For those groaning about that line, I love a good callback and have a bit of a poetic heart, so my apologies for the constant flowerly language and lack of concise writing.*
Since I just ruined my non-sequitar Glitzy Finale (also the name of a song in my new favourite musical, Operation Mincemeat) I’ll steal Michelle’s rhetorical device and end with a question of my own: What should a technology have to prove before it earns a place in your classroom?
This year, at a humourous student-voted teacher awards ceremony at an assembly, I was given the title of “Teacher with Most Tabs Open.” In a high school with over 50 other teachers, I am choosing to see this as a professional distinction rather than a cry for help.
It was, however, perceptive. And accurate.
Apparently “Most Tabs Open” was less a joke and more a peer-reviewed finding, I guess.
On an average teaching day, my classroom’s desktop computer browser is a digital junk drawer: Google Classroom, Google Docs, our attendance system, my email, a half-finished lesson plan, a YouTube clip I am fruitlessly trying to preview during and between classes, news articles I opened for “later,” my Google Calendar, URCourses, and at least one stubborn tab I cannot close because I am convinced it contains something important. I might not know what the important thing is, but I know I *will* need it and won’t be able to find it if I close it.
(sidenote: as an educational psychology student, I recently learned the tendency to remember unfinished tasks more than finished ones has a name: the Zeigarnik effect)
That is probably an honest place to start my initial EC&I 830 reflection. Much like my life when I took EC&I 831 in 2019 and EC&I 834 in 2021, my continuing relationship with educational technology is decidedly not sleek, seamless, or minimalist. It is practical, messy, necessary, and occasionally overwhelming. Sometimes for me, but almost always for observers.
I have spent the past thirteen years teaching high school in Swift Current, primarily History, English, Creative Writing, Psychology, and Media Studies. I have also been teaching first-year English through the University of Regina for three years now, so a significant part of my life is dedicated to reading, writing, source use, critical thinking, and trying to help students communicate in a world filled with extraordinary tools and extremely tempting shortcuts.
Technology is built into nearly every part of that work. Google Classroom is an instructional homepage, assignment submission box, announcement board, and everything in between. Google Docs is where writing becomes visible, messy, endlessly revisable, and commentable. Google Drive is where I store everything in an archaic organizational system that I am sure made sense in 2017. Daily, I use Google Slides, YouTube, online archives, news sites, databases, Zoom, Discord (as of July 8, 2026), and, increasingly, AI tools for planning, brainstorming, feedback, and thinking through the seemingly limitless possibilities that our world now offers.
This is where my habits around bookmarks are also useful and ridiculous. I have thousands and thousands of bookmarks saved (and thankfully organized, at least in a rudimentary way) from years of teaching, planning, graduate courses, rabbit holes, and “this might be useful someday” moments. In one sense, it makes it easy for me to find something on almost any topic (such as this blog post). If I need a resource about holding online discussions, evaluating the news critically, creating rubrics on Google Classroom, Generative AI at the University of Regina, or a random History 10 lesson idea circa 2015, there is a decent chance I have something saved somewhere. The harder task isn’t finding the resource. It’s knowing whether the resource is still current, still accurate, still useful, and still worth bringing into a classroom today.
Of course, I constantly find dead links, too.
Honestly, this might be a pretty good metaphor for education technology today more generally. It doesn’t seem like nothing is available. Rather, there is too much available, and not all of it deserves a place in front of students.
At its best, technology makes my teaching more flexible and, frankly, more humane. I can give feedback in digital form without waiting until the next day, immediately revise instructions in a live Google Doc when I realize they were less clear than I thought, and leave students with digital resources they can return to with their cell phones or Chromebooks after the bell. Some students will not ask a question out loud, but will respond in a shared document, a private comment, a poll, or a quick online check-in. In those moments, the technology genuinely helps.
A recent example is using Mentimeter to solicit student rankings in my ENGL 100 university course to help seed my final exam which takes the form of a playoff bracket. In a hybrid class with approximately 20 students in person and 10 online, it allowed for everyone to have their say over a variety of questions. When it often feels like the online students are simply blank screens, I can tell they are following along when I see 28 out of 30 students responded.
“Bloodchild” always makes it into the semi-finals, but doesn’t always win the tournament, like my much-maligned England in the World Cup.
Many of these same tools create distractions. A laptop can be a writing tool, a research tool, an accessibility tool (we sometimes forget that one), or a very expensive way to avoid eye contact. AI can help students brainstorm and revise (I have seen it, I swear!), but it can also easily produce something that looks suspiciously like learning without much learning underneath. As a longtime backstage director of our school’s drama program, I am reminded of how elaborate our sets appear from the front, but are simply flimsy facades from behind.
This is all incredibly important in English and History, where I strive to teach students that they do not just need to be able to find information. They need to judge it, question it, connect it, and sometimes slow down long enough to actually think about it. On that note, this probably applies beyond students too, including more than a few adults on Facebook.
My interactions with students now happen before, during, and after class through digital spaces: submitted assignments, comments, reminders, links, and the occasional question that was already answered in the document I already posted. My connections with colleagues and classmates are increasingly digital too: email, shared folders, Zoom, Discord, blogs, comments, and the strange little ecosystem of tabs, bookmarks, and conversations we forget to respond to that follow us outside of scheduled class time.
So I am not starting EC&I 830 as someone who is either fully pro-technology or anti-technology. That feels too clean. My actual “day in the life” is messier: tools, students, colleagues, shortcuts, questions, possibilities, and, of course, far too many tabs. Technology helps me connect, organize, respond… teach, really. It also distracts, overwhelms, and occasionally encourages me that today is the day I close my entire browser window and accumulated tabs.
Home can something so simple-looking have taken so long?
Well, it’s finally come together. My course profile captures two modules set up in an environment that matches the technology I have available with my own educational philosophy.
Having just read many early submission posts by my classmates, I was relieved to see many people had changes from their original plans. Obstacles came up, priorities were altered, and sometimes things just didn’t work. That was my experience as well, and seeing others experienced it too helped me feel less frustrated. I came back to the realization that teaching and learning is an iterative process that is never finished: despite our best efforts, things are never perfect.
Nonetheless, I am proud of where I came from and where I now am. My modules utilize technology I already use (namely the Google Suite for Education) better than I did before, and new technology in interesting and hopefully engaging ways. Ultimately, I feel that Media Studies, a course I last taught in 2018, is much more modern and suitable for students today (and frankly, it was probably a little bit outdated even when I last taught it, but I’ll choose to blame the 1998 curriculum rather than the teacher!)
Course Profile
The first step in designing my course was considering the class and the students in it. In summary, I came to the conclusion that while Media Studies did an admirable job of addressing media in the 20th century, some serious work was needed in successfully adapting it to today’s media context (for example, more than in another course I teach with an older curriculum, History 10 (1991).
One other key takeaway involved making sure the course was adapted to today’s school context. I made a conscious method to become paperless this school year, and this course prototype adapts to that demand—which also makes sense in a class about online learning. I also accepted the reality that the actual Media Studies course I am teaching may well be switched to an online delivery model at anytime (so far, so good though). As such, that altered the content, structure, and delivery of my modules. Feel free to read the course profile itself for more context.
Module 1 Creation
My first module was premised on updating an activity I had utilized in previous iterations of Media Studies: an activity around advertising. In the past, students had to mock up advertisements in magazines trying to pitch products to teenagers that they likely wouldn’t be interested in. It was a lot of fun and helped established a collaborative culture early in the semester. The activity was based on a Media Smarts lesson and was well-linked to the Media Studies curriculum, but severely dated (attributed to 2012, but I suspect developed much before that). I spent most of my time adapting this module around that lesson, but changing the format, context, and, well, pretty much everything to suit 2021. As such, the use of Jamboard, Google Chat, and Google Forms all helped make it more technology-oriented, while changing the prompt from magazine to social media apps made it more current. In piloting the lesson with students, it was a big hit, at least from an engagement perspective!
Feedback
One of the best uses of time this semester was meeting with peers to discuss our modules. My post about it shares some of my feelings. Arguably as valuable were some of the comments on that post from others in the class. They were directly responsible for my choice to go beyond the “walled garden” of Google for Module 2, and try new technologies such as Nearpod and YoTeach. While I still think I can get 90% of the same functionality within the Google environment, I appreciated the chance to broaden my horizons.
Nearpod has so many different ways to be utilized.
Module 2 Creation
My second module came together a bit haphazardly… I recently stumbled upon Common Sense Media’s Teaching Digital Citizenship Training and quickly completed the hour-long course (I would recommend it), which is an example of the microcredentials discussed in class last week. During the lesson, I got to look at Common Sense Media’s new updated lesson plans, and walked away impressed. I used some of their resources in 2013, and while they are still of decent quality, they are starting to show their age (teens used social media then, but not the same apps in the same manner).
Nothing better than seeing this bad boy on a resource!
This module was an effort to take their new resource, and connect it to my older curriculum requirements, while jumping over Google’s walled garden. The end result includes Common Sense Media’s well-designed slideshow (heavily edited to suit my needs, which is thankfully permitted in their Creative Commons license!), a YoTeach discussion board, an interactive NearPod video, and a curricular-linked media log summative response utilizing a Google Doc template and a Google Rubric. As such, it featured a completely different set of tools from the first module.
Summary and Course Walkthrough
If you’ve made it this far, congrats! One of the challenges with creating a Google Classroom on my personal account is the inability to fully demonstrate the class in action. To support a more fulsome viewing, my class included screenshots including real anonymous student exemplars of their Google Chats, Jamboard creations, YoTeach interactions, and Nearpod responses. Coupled with an explanatory video in each module, the end result is meant to be fairly intuitive, though admittedly a little less structured than I’d like—something I have always found challenging with Google Classroom.
I certainly hope you enjoyed seeing the project take shape, and nothing provides a more holistic overview than this YouTube walkthrough. Enjoy, and take care out there!
This week’s prompt was super timely, as I have been having some discussion on Discord regarding student interaction in the past week. Specifically, I asked:
Two suggestions I received were Padlet and YoTeach.
Padlet is a tool I am fairly familiar with. I definitely like it, but my inclination has been to use it more in the vein as a virtual poster. It really deserves another look from me, however. I’m always interested in seeing what others are doing with these tools, so feel free to share your uses, please!
YoTeach is another intriguing option, apparently an alternative for Todaysmeet (something I haven’t heard mentioned since back in my undergrad days circa 2013). My initial impression is that it offers a similar functionality to Google Chat, but is much more temporary and quick to set up. For my purposes, that is generally not particularly useful, but two contexts I could see it being used would be: 1) people who don’t have access to any sort of built-in discussion tools like Google Chat or 2) situations where you don’t want a record of group conversations (this seems like a rare situation, but when you realize you seemingly can’t delete Google Chat groups, only leave them to become meme-filled nightmares, it makes more sense).
The YoTeach! homepage
As my question originally implied, my first module already utilized some tools for student interaction. Google Chat fulfilled the role of instant and immediate conversation, being used in a manner not unlike Slack in workplaces (from what I know, anyways), while Google Jamboard served as the collaborative proofing space, a digital sandbox, so to speak. For these two purposes, they are well-suited.
My question came from some of my ongoing issues with creating effective discussion boards using Google Chat Rooms. These are threaded versions of Google Chats that, on the surface, are well-designed and intuitive (and with new features all the time like read receipts, GIF functionality, etc). My experience, however, has been that students have not really engaged in great discussion within these rooms. They work well for students to post their work, and certainly there is value for students in seeing others’ work, but the actual interaction is what I have found lacking.
Some of the responses to my question, coupled with self-reflection, has actually made me question if some of these issues simply come down to how I set up and model the use of these discussion boards. I have created much more technologically simplistic discussion boards in the olden days back in Microsoft Sharepoint, and my recollection was that discussion was much more vigorous. As such, guidelines and examples of discussion boards are two of my next steps in trying to get the process working better.
On a related note, I just spent all day working with an engagement coach to revise my in-person ELA B30 course and allow for some co-teaching opportunities. Among our many discussions today, how to facilitate student discussion was perhaps the most significant. This has been a weakness for me so far in the course: covid restrictions have made small group discussions very difficult (but small Google Chat discussions have been very productive, unlike my discussion boards), while getting full-class discussions going has been painful with this group. I was, however, introduced to Wonder.me, which seems like a fascinating tool I will be exploring more soon!
Wonder.me is a fascinating new tool!
It sounds like in both my academic and professional work, facilitating better discussion remains a work-in-progress! Any insight from readers is appreciated!
About two weeks ago, I shared this on Twitter. It’s a link to an article article entitled “How to Facilitate Remote Socratic Seminars.” I felt like this was an untapped area of potential personal growth, and wanted to explore it even further. This blog post provides some of that analysis.
The article in question.
Proof I am not lying
My experience suggests Socratic Seminars are a high-impact learning strategy that benefits student learning. A few years ago I purchased the book Socratic Seminars and implemented some seminar-like discussions that might be considered watered-down versions of what was described in my ELA courses. However, I never really took Socratic Seminars to their full potential, which I felt that familiar teacher guilt about.
This article reignited my interest in the topic, and made me think of the weaknesses of my own remote online teaching in the past year (happy covid-ersary!) and ways it could have been improved. I also thought the article had general relevance regardless of situation because it said it applied “”whether your school is in person, virtual, or hybrid.”
For those unfamiliar, here is a good overview of how the learning strategy works:
I reached out to my former colleague and current Engagement Coach Shaun Spence to discuss seminars more. I know that he had used Socratic Seminars as a final assignment in some of his classes, so I wanted to know his thoughts on the article.
One of the areas we reached immediate agreement on was the statement that Socratic Seminars need to be, as the article states, “highly structured” and “well-planned.” This is true in person, and is surely true online as well. I would imagine Google Classroom would be a useful tool to set up templates for students to use. It is sometimes harder to manage things online (visual cues can often help determine who is on task or confused in person), so I would put careful attention here.
Another aspect more particular to online learning is collaboration, particularly facilitating collaboration via online tools. I would likely start with a combination of Google Chat and Google Meet based on student familiarity. Jamboard could also be used if visuals are useful (my limited experience suggests they almost always are). My research hasn’t found external tools that would do anything in a better way that the Google Suite, so I think this is a good starting point.
I foresee potential benefits for this learning strategy in breaking apart some of the tendency for students to hide their video and not talk during online sessions. However, meaningful collaboration would require student engagement, which relates back to teacher preparation and the classroom environment–students need to feel safe to share their thoughts. I am debating how to deal with situations where someone does not participate, which is often an issue with in-person discussions as well.
Like many educational issues, I am left with more ideas and questions than I started with. But I firmly believe Socratics Seminars have a place in effective learning, whether in-person, or online. I always appreciate hearing about other peoples’ experiences and thoughts.
Really Jay Sharp 