"There's an app for that...but should there be?" Teaching Students Answers Sometimes Lie Outside Devices

“There’s an app for that…but should there be?”

That’s the question we should be asking instead of always searching for an app to solve our problems.

To automatically look to technology alone for answers, is “tech solutionism.” That’s narrow-minded and dogmatic thinking.

But that’s the mindset Ed Tech has adopted.

But to always turn to tech for answers narrows the possibility for available solutions. 

It’s not thinking outside the box; it’s boxing up the mind into a silicon container.

To teach students to always search for answers in technology is making students dependent upon devices, which is what Big Tech desires.

Big Tech wants addicted users.

To counter that, educators need to be sure to expand their students’ toolboxes beyond the screen.

Our goal, either intentional or unintentionally, should never be to teach students to be “good little consumers of Big Tech’s latest.”

It should be to teach students to be critical and free users of tech WHEN IT IS THE BEST SOLUTION AND WHEN THEY WANT TO USE IT.

To do that, teach them that the answers sometimes lie outside the world of silicon and microchips.

Ed Tech’s problem has always been its inability to see anything but the gleam of gadgets and devices. It always searches for its answers there.

In this always-search-for-answers-in-devices it actually “imprisons” children in a world where the only real answers are found in screens. That’s not reality.

That’s dogmatic, narrow-minded approaches that will forever have students looking for answers from Silicon Valley and Tech. Sounds like device dependency to me!

That’s not growing critical, adaptable, and creative learners.

If there is an app for it, sometimes we need to ask, “Should there be one in the first place?” And “Should I use an app to do this?”

Teach students that and they will be free human beings and not mindless customers for Big Tech and those peddling devices.