The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

I've never seen a teacher that was comfortably capable with even 50% of whatever EdTech they're handed. How are they supposed to maximize the use of it?

I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.

This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.

as a counter-point,

not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides. there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching

No doubt that there have been poor teaching experiences, but I would counter that my experience with EdTech teachers has been amazing and empowering. Really don't think we can tar all the teachers with the "EdTech sucks" brush.

> there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching

What are the good apps? In what direction do you think educational software should go?

* where "evidence-based" in pedagogy is a grad student who studied two classes of 13 Inuit 3rd graders in 2002 and extrapolated from there

you can start with these podcasts for inspiration, not exactly in this order; "Emerging Research in Educational Psychology" "The Evidence Based Education Podcast" "Psychology in the Classroom" "The Edtech Podcast" "The Cult of Pedagogy"

i never liked school and actually what made avoid it as much as possible (to the point i proposed to my parents to work as a minor apprentice in the construction field because my plans were to quit school) was a 8° grade math teacher saying after my question about why that formula came to be, something like "you need a university degree at least to understand this"; so a neat direction i would like to see education taking is slowing down the amount of stuff we throw at students throat... maybe emotional intelligence/awareness, cooperative behavior (like knowing how to give someone a good feedback) & tech literacy! would be so cool if more people had the basic knowledge of getting some Arduino/ESP32 libraries at Github and hooking up into a board for small things, like a paddle Atari controller or just a cute LED thing as adornment/gift for a loved one (which i think to do that, lots of concepts can be taught); as well critical thinking so we don't have people lured to modern bullshit, like "buying this new fancy iPhone meanwhile i don't even understand what a shutter or aperture control serves, nor i use apps fancier than iMessage and Instagram" etc.