Piercing the Ed Tech Hype

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0500

Last week, I got an email from an ed tech company inviting me to a conference that included speakers, a fancy dinner, and ways to explore their products in detail. I get these all the time. I usually don’t click through, but I did in this case and looked at the product. It was an AI-powered graphic organizer for students that had plenty of other things clamped onto it, nothing special.

The thing that stood out to me is that every one of the for-profit ed tech companies that sends me unsolicited emails is making promises that they very likely can’t deliver, and they’re doing it with fear instead of with competence. “Without our product, your students are going to fall behind.” And of course, for people who care about kids, fear is a big motivator. Are our kids going to lose out on something important? Are they going to miss a “game changing” experience if we don’t buy in?

As a technology educator who’s been at this for almost 25 years, it’s really frustrating to see how the for-profit ed tech sector works. It’s become a series of fads, the hype cycle du jour: Interactive whiteboards. The flipped classroom. One-to-one iPads. Virtual reality. All of those were supposed to be essential, and all of them faded away.

One of the biggest fads was the huge push for every student to learn how to program. Coding was supposed to unlock great careers and provide an ability to keep up with today’s rapid rate of technological change. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google poured millions into this and even lobbied lawmakers about it. It was everywhere, and you just couldn’t avoid it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love coding, and I love the type of learning that coding can encourage in young people. But I don’t think every student should learn how to code. The lessons that coding promotes — design/process thinking, problem solving, troubleshooting — are extremely valuable, and I’d love every student to leave school with these skills. They can be taught in lots of other ways, however, and in other disciplines. Coding is a very specific way of doing things, and if it doesn’t appeal to you beyond an introduction, I don’t think you should be required to learn it.

If we look back at the technologies that actually do help students learn, I find that the basics were figured out decades ago. The problem with that, of course, is that if you had a computer that did everything you needed it to for 20 years or more, you wouldn’t need to keep buying technology. The operating system on your computer gets upgraded, often for good reasons, like security updates, but now your old software won’t work. You need to buy an upgrade. New software has to justify its cost, because we wouldn’t pay for the same old functionality, so new features get added, whether they’re useful or not. Over years, the bloat can become overwhelming. This is the flywheel we’re all on, and never asked for.

I’ve seen this with Adobe’s software. At the beginning, they were standalone applications that met specific needs, and they were great. Photoshop was for image editing, Lightroom was for image management and processing, and Illustrator was for vector graphics. We often held off on upgrades for years because it wasn’t worth it. Then, they moved to a subscription model. You had to pay for everything, whether you needed it or not, regardless of the quality of their upgrades. They also moved saved work to the cloud by default, so we became enveloped by their walled garden. Our files stop opening if we stop subscribing. We’re locked out, even if we’ve been giving them our money for years. Thank goodness for things like Photopea and Affinity Studio!

Those are perfect examples of free and cheap alternatives to the flywheel model. You just have to know enough to go looking for them. Some of my favorite applications have moved to a model where you pay for a year of updates when you buy it, and if it does everything you need when updates expire, you don’t have to keep paying. I have other software that I bought once years ago, and the developers keep updating it at no cost because they care that much about their craft and the software. Those are the tools that I love to use and promote. Granted, a lot of this stuff isn’t slick or fancy, but I don’t care much about that. It gets the job done.

Google is an interesting hybrid. They offer Google Workspace for Education for free. It includes lots of great learning tools, like an LMS (Google Classroom) and Google Docs, and they have their ecosystem of low-cost Chromebooks. Our school uses these things even though we understand that Google is doing this because they hope that when people go into their private lives, they’ll continue using Google products. That’s where they really make their money, by surveilling us and selling ads. But because of the value that we get from it at my school, I fully support our decision to use it.

Here are the categories of ed tech tools that I think actually support student learning:

For creating: a word processor for notes and writing, a simple database (like Google Sheets) to do calculations and store information, something to create graphics, and tools for audio and video editing.

For communicating: presentation tools, a place to give and receive feedback, and a way to collaborate with classmates.

For assisting: calculators (numeric and graphing), text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and spelling/grammar checking.

For organizing: research collection and organization, file storage and organization, task tracking, and assignment tracking.

These are all basic. None of this is super sophisticated, and every one of these categories has simple free or low-cost options.

You may be wondering, since it’s most of what I write about here: what about AI? It’s definitely the fad du jour. The hype cycle and FOMO are through the roof, too. It’s not surprising that most of the stuff I have evaluated looks like crap. It’s either the same old thing with AI bolted onto it or something that makes promises it can’t keep. The compelling thing about AI is that it’s adaptable, not one size fits all. When you build a product, you want it to appeal to the widest possible base of users, but that comes at a cost. These products don’t know our students or what they need, and that limits them.

I see AI being useful when professionals use it deliberately, for something specific to their own personal practice. They take the time to get to know how the technology works, and use it to support the unique contours of their students’ needs. That requires more work, not less, but the outcomes are worth it.

The other part of it is the whole idea that Ethan Mollick talks about, the “Best Available Human” standard. AI gives you access to information and learning that you might not otherwise have access to. It’s never going to be as good as a person, but it’s certainly going to be better than nothing. I also love that AI lets you build your own tools, like Babbleborg, which I created to be a learning-centered LLM chat interface, and posted a build guide so that anyone can make their own, for free.

In my experience, when humans remain at the center of AI work, making the decisions and adapting as they go along, it’s better. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. So it all comes back to a core set of tech tools, and great teachers. Let the teachers stay in control, give students access to a basic set of tools, and you’ll have everything you need to succeed.

Coding on tomgromak.com

Piercing the Ed Tech Hype