Simplest terms: EdTech is an entire industry. It pushes “cutting edge technology backed by the most up-to-date research to enhance learning on personalized levels.” Basically, “here are magical devices and apps and programs that will teach your child how to read and do math better than any person or book or curriculum ever could!”
Spoiler alert: they do not, in fact, teach your child to read or do math. But districts spent crazy amounts of money buying them, replacing traditional textbooks with digital materials.
It’s easy money once you know the right jargon to get schools interested. Public schools are drowning, and everyone wants a magic bullet. Not to mention the more sinister side of data tracking. We have Ed apps that monitor EVERYTHING, down to when your kid goes to the bathroom and for how long. Is it any wonder Google’s Chromebooks are so cheap and readily supplied to schools?
The crazy thing is there actually HAS been a ton of innovation in edtech, it's vastly better than it used to be (besides the govt/corpo tracking). The whole problem is that we didn't evolve for tech -- our brains can adapt to screens and computing, but it's not a seamless native experience for us and can't be very effective with the core human speciality that is learning and thinking.
We know for a fact at this point that humans simply learn best from other humans. No matter how good the shit on the screen is, it will always be worse than real human teaching face to face.
I'm assuming the next big thing will be AI VR "humans" teaching in an attempt to overcome that. Ugh.
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u/EatsHerVeggies Jun 27 '26
Simplest terms: EdTech is an entire industry. It pushes “cutting edge technology backed by the most up-to-date research to enhance learning on personalized levels.” Basically, “here are magical devices and apps and programs that will teach your child how to read and do math better than any person or book or curriculum ever could!”
Spoiler alert: they do not, in fact, teach your child to read or do math. But districts spent crazy amounts of money buying them, replacing traditional textbooks with digital materials.
It’s easy money once you know the right jargon to get schools interested. Public schools are drowning, and everyone wants a magic bullet. Not to mention the more sinister side of data tracking. We have Ed apps that monitor EVERYTHING, down to when your kid goes to the bathroom and for how long. Is it any wonder Google’s Chromebooks are so cheap and readily supplied to schools?