Teacher ditches screens; class gets harder, but works

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.​Seventh-grade math teacher Dylan Kane decided to conduct an experiment in his classes by going cold turkey on ed-tech.Kane, like just about every other teacher in the country, has seen the use of screens proliferate in his classroom — its own sort of accidental experiment. Then, last December, Kane read “The Digital Delusion,” a harsh critique of ed-tech. Although he was not entirely convinced by its arguments, the book made him pause.“I had kept some of my technology routines the same for a bunch of years without really thinking twice,” says Kane, who teaches in Leadville, a rural mountain town in Colorado. “So I said, ‘Hey, why don’t I just throw it all out?’”Kane, who writes a popular Substack about teaching and learning, decided to drop screens from his class for the month of January to see what would happen.More edu