Since we have all found it necessary to move to remote learning, a number of commentators, such as Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, have been hailing this switch as the beginning of a learning revolution. Teachers are perhaps more sceptical. When we note our scepticism based on our current experiences, we tend to be told that these are unusual times, don’t represent a proper test of edtech and are pointed in the direction of this article. So I made a relatively mild criticism about the logic of this argument on Twitter:

The tweet received a lot of likes and positive comments from teachers but some negative pushback from proponents of edtech.

It may be worth mentioning some context here. With another colleague, I am in charge of my school’s plan for remote learning using a mix of synchronous and asynchronous teaching. This weekend has been the first time I’ve taken a break from that in about a month. I am teaching remotely myself and I have set up the @remote_teacher Twitter account to curate resources for teaching remotely. I am not in the business of criticising anyone’s hard work.

At the moment, although evolving, I am confident that we have a pretty good programme in place. We have replicated much of what we can achieve on campus using edtech tools. The trouble is that everything takes longer and I cannot see a point when it will be better than what you can do with a physically present class. This is not just about the need for more practice and training on the part of teachers – although that will definitely help – some tasks are just intrinsically harder online. For instance, I can check my students’ completion of class work by simply walking around a physical classroom. There are a number of potential ways of doing this remotely but none are as straightforward.

Of course, the tech has been extremely useful, critical even, during this crisis because we cannot teach in our regular classrooms. Similarly, for distance learning approaches more generally where you cannot physically bring people together, edtech fills that role. What I cannot see any time soon, however, is edtech being a superior solution when you can bring students together in a classroom.

This feeds into a long history of edtech overpromising and underdelivering. Most of the time the products are simply not designed with the needs of teachers in mind. A current example is Microsoft Teams – you can only see four of your students at any time and you cannot easily choose which four. Zoom is better on this – you can see the whole class – but lacks many of the features of Teams.

My own gripe as a maths teacher is that these systems rarely have good, if any, support for maths notation. I remember raising this as a issue with a particular Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) platform I was tasked with implementing in a school in 2008. It was always something the developers were working on for the next upgrade. I don’t know whether it ever happened but it had not done so by the time I left that school. This is a pattern I have noticed repeated throughout my 20 year career: Teachers learn that the tech cannot do x but the developers insist we should buy it anyway because it will be able to do x soon. This can be something as critical as integrating with your timetable software so that you don’t have to manually maintain all of the class lists.

It is not just a lack of responsiveness to teachers’ needs. Often, edtech packages are unnecessarily clunky in a way we would not tolerate in a regular Microsoft or Adobe application. Who thinks it’s a good idea, for instance, to design a VLE where, in order to upload content to a class page, you first have to upload it to somewhere else and then move it across? I’ve seen that.

At its worst, crappy edtech is a waste of precious resources. Look, for instance, at the interactive whiteboard splurge in England in the early 2000s. If you adopt a new technology, not only do you have to pay for it, you have to train staff to use it. That’s not a great investment if it only has a lifespan of 2-3 years which, experience has taught me, is typical.

At this time, edtech is critical. Similarly, if my street flooded, a boat would be extremely handy. However, in normal times, I don’t need a boat. Teachers still need to be convinced of the value of edtech in normal times. Being offended by our scepticism doesn’t help.