When teachers Steve Lantos, Marika Alibhai and Lisa Redding first stepped into their classrooms, chalkboards lined the walls and calculators were the peak of classroom technology. Today, assignments are completed on Google Docs and posted on Canvas, teachers and students communicate through endless emails and students are rarely seen without their phones.
Teachers, parents and students are continuously navigating the rapid increase in technology use in the classroom. While technology has improved access to resources and communication for both students and teachers, it has also brought about new challenges to student learning, such as increased distractions and the pressures of constant connectivity.
From past to present
Redding, an Associate Dean of 10th grade and former student at the high school who returned in 2001 to teach math, said technology was limited during her early years of teaching.
“When I think back to when I first started teaching, we were still using chalkboards. I would come home with chalk dust all over my clothes,” Redding said. “We had graphing calculators, but that was sort of the peak of the technology. It was the most awesome thing for math teachers.”
Alibhai, who has taught math at the high school for 19 years, said despite the added convenience of technology, paper and pen still hold a special place in her heart.
“I’m always writing paper lists, and I have multiple that are just floating around the house that are all partially incomplete. An electronic list just doesn’t feel the same to me,” Alibhai said. “I don’t know if that’s me having grown up in a different era, but I think maybe for some kids, having the electronic list is no big deal, and they’ve just acclimated.”
Redding said the distractions of the past hardly compare to the distractions of the present.
“When I was a student, I was the queen of passing notes. My friend would be sitting over there, we’d write a note, and the teacher would turn their back, and I would chuck it across the room, and that’s how we would communicate,” Redding said. “Now you’re texting; it’s a constant distraction.”
Lantos, who began his 40th year teaching chemistry in 2024 and graduated from the high school in 1980, said that the innovations of technology in teaching have made the school unrecognizable.
“We used to have what we called mimeograph machines. I put a piece of paper in this machine that has duplicating fluid, and I load it up with paper, and then I press go, and it starts to roll. It’s like a printing press,” Lantos said.
Redding said the pandemic also transformed the school’s reliance on technology and blurred the lines between home and classroom.
“We could only rely on the assumption that kids had their own laptops post-pandemic. Before that, they weren’t regularly used in class, and it didn’t feel as necessary in school to me back then, especially being a math teacher,” Redding said.
Effects on students
Alibhai said there are advantages and disadvantages of posting assignments on Canvas.
“Now there’s this culture of everything being expected to be posted. It’s a lot of clicking, especially if you’re posting things individually on Canvas. On the other hand, that also means that everything is more accessible for students,” Alibhai said.
To combat the recent uptick in phone use among students, many districts have opted for phone pouches that lock students’ phones during the school day. At the high school, less extreme measures, such as phone caddies, have been implemented in some classrooms. However, Lantos said his approach is to allow students to take accountability for their screen use.
“Once you leave here, no one’s going to have caddies at work or in college; you’re on your own,” Lantos said.
Senior and member of Judiciary Brett Schneider acknowledges the students’ responsibility in navigating a world with increasing technological distractions, but he agrees with the school’s current policy.
“The ability we have to make our own decisions about how productive we want to be in a given class period is healthy, especially considering that once we go to college we aren’t going to have a professor telling us to get off of another tab,” Schneider said.
Redding said the permanence of the internet may make teens feel like they cannot afford to make mistakes as what they do or say is constantly being recorded, but the act of putting phones aside can help alleviate some of this stress.
“You can’t learn if you’re always distracted. And I do think there’s a social pressure for young people to always sort of be checking what people are saying about them and how they are coming across on social media,” Redding said. “You can’t really mess up. I don’t like that part of technology; it makes me sad for young people.”
Schneider said phones aren’t the only things that cause a distraction in the classroom. Although the use of computers has brought many benefits to learning, they have their downside.
“It is really easy to get distracted because when you’re on your computer doing assignments you are more likely to switch the tab or go to text messages,” Schneider said.
According to Alibhai, online assignments also allow teachers and adults at home to check in on students who need extra support.
“There were always kids 20 years ago who wouldn’t write stuff down at the end of the class, and then they go home, and there’s no hope of them knowing what to do.” Alibhai said. “But now, I think it makes it easier for other adults to support students.”
The rise of technology has also had social implications on school life, but Scheinder said he chooses to acknowledge the bad and focus on the good.
“[Seniors are] in the thick of college applications, and they want to see how they are doing in comparison to others and it can create a lot of competition,” Schneider said. “But come December and March when people are making their decisions and getting acceptances, social media can provide a way for people to support their friends and their peers as they move onto the next chapters of their educational journey.”
Effects on teachers
During the pandemic, the math department adopted the online program Desmos to ensure that lesson plans were accessible to students in the classroom and at home. Redding said the newer technology made teaching more efficient and introduced more advanced concepts to students unfamiliar with them.
“As a math teacher, it’s really powerful to be able to show students higher-level math. Even if they can’t do it, they’re able to see it and appreciate it, and then they are able to do so much more math than they used to by hand,” Redding said.
When email was first introduced at the high school, many teachers began shifting from in-person to digital communications. However, according to Lantos, some old-school teachers were initially hesitant to embrace this change.
“At first, not all the teachers bought into it. And that was okay, because you didn’t have to; it was this novel thing. As more and more people bought into it, no one ever said, ‘From now on, you must use email.’ It was like, well if everybody’s using it, you’ve got to,” Lantos said.
Instant communication allows Redding to reach students more easily, and she said that despite the abundance of messages in her inbox, it is ultimately beneficial to teaching.
“As a dean, if I want to find out where a student is, I don’t have to look up paper schedules. I go to the computer, search for C-block, and find out where this student is that I need to talk to,” Redding said. “The communication, for better or worse, can be instant. On the flip side of that, you’re always getting messages, but I think technology has improved communication and it’s improved teaching.”
As technology has advanced, the media has adapted to captivate younger audiences with more visually engaging content. Lantos said students’ decreased attention spans have led him to adjust teaching methods and materials to ensure success.
“If I were to show a video from my collection from 20 years ago, the kids would be instantly bored. They’d be like, ‘This moves so slow.’ Now it’s all flashy and you see it in advertisements, commercials and movies,” Lantos said. “The nature of teaching is we’re always introspecting and learning what works better and how to tweak and improve the machine.”
