I loved ed tech. I saw the first demonstration of its power in my teacher ed program at Boston College. There was a project called Eagle Eyes that allowed students with severe disabilities to move a cursor with their eyes. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. It gave students a power they’d never thought possible.
I did my student teaching at the O'Hearn elementary school (now the Henderson) at Boston Public Schools in the mid-nineties. Each classroom was co-taught by a special and general educator team and included five students with severe disabilities. We deployed the latest assistive technology to give students with disabilities the power of speech, movement, everything a non-disabled child takes for granted. I was hooked.
For my doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I took classes from the esteemed neuropsychologist David Rose, the founder of CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology). We studied the neuroscience of learning and how technology could not only offset the impacts of disabilities but accelerate learning in novel ways. I was so taken by CAST’s work, like the first freely available text to speech tools, and early ed tech like Reader Rabbit that I scrounged up a bunch of computers from local businesses and convinced my wife, a 3rd grade teacher, to set up a computer station in her classroom.
A few years later, when I ran student services in San Diego Unified, I bought ed tech at scale ranging from assistive technology to IEP systems. I worked closely with the CTO on a multi-billion dollar construction bond that equipped every classroom with interactive whiteboards and 1:1 devices. A sales friend told me they called buyers like me “whales” and landing me was worth a lot of money. I got the sense of how much when the CEO of an IEP company chased me into a 7-11 and breathlessly offered to buy the water and Junior Mints I was holding for ten minutes of my time.
Even after I left the district world, I still found ways to get my fix – 1:1 devices, flipped classrooms, online professional development... It was my favorite solution to every education problem, especially for students falling behind academically.
I wasn’t the only one. Almost everyone in the sector, especially everyone funded by the philanthropies whose founders made their fortunes in tech, thought the same way.
But there is a difference between believing something is true and knowing it. Today, after spending a couple of years running an ed tech company, I would be telling the “old me” a different story. I’d be convincing him that ed tech isn’t a panacea for every problem. In some cases, it may be the problem. Especially in the AI era, he and his district colleagues should be asking a very different set of questions if they want to make the right investment.
In my next post, I’ll share that conversation. What questions do you think buyers of ed tech (especially the whales) should be asking?
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