We Don't Need Tech in Education

It seems like the news is full of stories right now of school districts imposing screen time limits, education experts calling for a reduced technology presence un the classroom, and the general revelation that students (and most adults for that matter) don't know what books are.

Meanwhile, in the AP Seminar corner of the world, it seems like every other post to the Facebook groups is about AI. "How do I get my students to stop cheating?" "How can I prove my students didn't use AI?" "They can't write without AI!" "My students got flagged for AI!" "I've never had to report so many kids for AI!" "Do I teach them how to use it properly or teach them to not use it at all?"

I'm not going to pretend that I have all the answers or that what answers I have will work for everyone, but I can say that I'm firmly in the anti-AI camp and generally support the current trend away from technology in the classroom. Over the course of the summer, I've been doing some thinking about what changes are best for my students in the coming year. If the goal is—what it always should have been—to give our students the best opportunities to grow as critical thinkers by engaging long-term with projects, then I'm ready to kick tech to the sidelines and get my students out on the field.

But how do we do it? How do we take tech out of a class like Seminar? One of the simplest things for me is to walk back the digital notebooks I had started using and return to pen and paper. Honestly, I wasn't loving OneNote. There were moments where it worked great and it certainly saved paper. Plus some students loved it. But for everyone of those, there were two kids whose notes looked just too refined, too copy/paste perfect for the kind of workers I knew them to be.

But returning a five subject notebook to my class supply list is far from enough to ensure they are doing their own thinking and their own writing. I've always simplified Seminar like this: "It's a class on research, writing and presenting." With those three things in mind, let's see how we can take the tech out of AP Seminar.

Research

At first glance this seems like the most impossible element of the class to remove tech from. They have to get on the databases! We're not going to take them all the way back to index cards and the card catalogue.

I think this is the place where we can flip the classroom somewhat. Often times my students, will research in class then they do their writing and presentation prep at home. But in the age of AI, I want to see them doing as much writing and thinking in the classroom. Even though I don't want them using AI to conduct their research (I think near any use of AI in education is immoral for nothing other than its impact on the environment), our CollegeBoard overloads say that using it as basically a search engine is fine. So I plan to demonstrate more positive research methods in class and hope they use them at home. Either way, I can require that all they have to do at home is research and then bring that research into class. (This is one of those points where I'm contemplating how extreme I want to be about going low tech. I could require that they print the articles and bring them... 🤔)

In class is when I can give them time to read and unpack those sources. During group projects like Task 1, this can lead to students bringing sources for them to discuss with their peers. During solo projects, students can use graphic organizers to take notes and then journal responses. That journaling leads me to...

Writing

Good writing is good thinking. I'm not going to keep students from using MS Word or typing their final essays, but I want to get them doing as much writing as possible by hand, in class. If we get into a cycle of them researching at home, this might look like students bringing in sources they found, having a reoccurring bellwork to read and annotate that source, then responding to it in their journal. If we are all exploring the same topic as a class of if they are working as a group, that informal writing time should probably be followed by discussion of the issue, which would then lead to students recording questions they have for further research and thus they go home and the cycle repeats.

I'm imagining that cycle (

1. research
2. read and annotate
3. informal journalling
4. discussion
5. question

) could be done every other day during the first semester with the days in between being lessons or teacher provided sources. That would give them two days to research.

With that cycle in mind (which is inspired by NWP's C3WP program), a lot of writing instruction can happen during that informal journaling/response writing. If the day before you taught them about finding limitations to an author's conclusions/research, then prompt them to include questions about possible limits when they respond to the source they brought in. It could also open the stage for grammar mini-lessons akin to Jeff Anderson's Mechanically Inclined such as showed students better ways to integrate quoted evidence and having them revise sentences from their journal.

Plus a repeated discussion element would start them on...

Presenting

Again, I'm not going to say that we can't let students use PowerPoint (or Slide or Canva or whatever (anyone remember Prezi???)) but let's focus their time presenting on the skill of presenting and not just shove them on a computer.

For a long time, I've had my student's first presentation be verbal only, getting them to focus on vocal variety in extemporaneous speaking (one version of that assignment is here). Only later would I add visuals and how they visually present themselves. Now I'm thinking of extending their time presenting without digital aids. Posters, trifolds, pamphlets, and even dioramas are great alternatives to presentation software. I particularly like the idea of students creating a Flipchart presentation. Students could lay out their posters to create a line-of-reasoning, then add whatever information (drawing or chart or graph, writing a few large words, listing a citation) is most crucial for their audience to see while they talk through that part of their presentation. It might seem tedious or unnecessarily low-tech, but think about it this way: how often are we faced with students who dump TOO MUCH on their slides? How many times have you seen students paste in images or charts or other nonsense from the internet that they haven't properly sourced or vetted? This is before we get into issues of plagiarism and AI usage. Giving students eight sheets of poster paper and having them present them on an easel will immediate force students to choose exactly what is necessary and no more because they have to write or draw it out themselves!

It's ideas like that which make me excited about pulling tech out of the classroom and getting back to basics. I want to focus on how my students present and write and think critically, not show them how to write prompts for AI to do it for them.

As we move into the school year, it's my goal to start posting a lot more and providing my fellow AP Seminar teachers with resources to teach better, start strong, and do it all by de-centering tech. Again, comments are open. If you tell me what you need, what questions you have, or where you're struggling, I'll be happy to address any issues in a future post.