EdTech: 21st Century Tool, or Takeover?
Happy New Year 2025! I hope we can be done talking about using technology to prepare our learners for the 21st century by now. We’re one quarter through this century, and if you aren’t immersing learners in its technologies, you’re not preparing them.
Technology will be essential to our learners’ futures in 2025 and for the next 25 years. Today’s learners understand that better than most of us. Perhaps the question we need to prepare learners for today is not whether they are prepared to use technology in college and their careers but whether technology will take over their college and career experience by the mid-21st century.
Many readers will be familiar with the SAMR model pictured above and featured in Project ARC’s guidance for technology use in Authentic Project Learning Experiences (APLEs). Designed in the early 21st Century by Ruben Puentedura, this model assumes that technology will be a tool for teachers and learners to help them do their work in new ways or to do new kinds of work altogether. It does not assume that technology will be a tool that takes over their work. Yet, with the advent of AI, we’re seeing more and more talk about letting technology take over what we and our learners used to do.
Hate writing essays or…anything? Let AI do your first draft or all of it. Don’t have time to design a project? Some competitors believe AI can take over that, so you don’t have to. Don’t want to teach at all? Some (falsely) claim AI can take over for teachers. Yes. Some tools are time-savers, but at what point does a time-saving tool take over from the person using it? What is left of agency for learners and teachers if we leave everything to tools such as AI in the name of saving time?
The SAMR framework never suggests that technology is anything other than a tool in the hands of people making decisions about how best to use it. Perhaps we would do well to keep that framework firmly in hand for the next 25 years of 21st-century learning. For a copy of Project ARC’s SAMR 2025 Guides for Secondary and Elementary APLEs, email us at info@proj-arc.com!
