Commentary: When Technology Reshapes the Conditions for Learning

By Amy L. Kelly, Ed.D.

Over the past year, conversations about screens in schools have started to shift. Districts across the country have begun reconsidering the role of school-issued devices and digital platforms in the daily experience of students. This is notably happening in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest in student enrollment.

Public conversations about technology in schools often focus on distraction, screen time, or student behavior. But in my work with classrooms and educators, a deeper issue is beginning to emerge.

In many schools, technology is no longer simply supporting instruction. It is shaping the conditions under which learning happens.

Digital platforms now organize pacing, assessment, communication, intervention, documentation, and classroom management. Devices are used not only to access learning, but also to organize the flow of the school day itself. These systems serve important purposes. They can increase access to information, streamline communication, and provide forms of visibility and accountability that districts value. At the same time, these systems also shape instructional priorities, patterns of attention, expectations for responsiveness, and the conditions under which learning takes place.

This concern is not limited to individual classrooms. The 2023 UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report cautioned against allowing technology decisions to drive educational priorities, arguing instead that technology should support clearly defined learning goals. The report challenged the assumption that more technology automatically leads to better learning outcomes and called for greater attention to how educational technology is used and evaluated.

That matters because learning depends on more than content delivery. Research across developmental and educational contexts continues to emphasize the importance of interaction, engagement, attention, and responsive relationships in learning. Organizations such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the American Academy of Pediatrics have long highlighted these foundations, particularly for younger learners. While these ideas are especially visible in early childhood education, they extend well beyond it.

The tension schools are beginning to navigate is not simply whether technology should be used. It is whether the systems that make learning more visible, measurable, and manageable are also supporting the attention, interaction, and relationships that learning requires.

Looking Beyond Screen Time
Too often, conversations about technology in schools focus on screen time alone. But screen time is only one part of the picture.

Two students may spend the same amount of time using technology while having very different learning experiences. One may be collaborating, discussing ideas, and engaging meaningfully with content. Another may be clicking rapidly through isolated tasks with minimal interaction. Looking only at minutes of use tells us very little about the quality of attention or interaction taking place within those moments.

To better understand this shift, it is helpful to move beyond questions of screen time and consider the broader concept of screen awareness.

Emerging from early childhood and media research, screen awareness shifts the focus from how long technology is used to how technology affects attention, interaction, communication, and relationships.

Rather than offering a set of rules, screen awareness encourages different questions. What is this technology asking students and adults to pay attention to? What kinds of interaction does it encourage or reduce? What becomes most visible within this system? What may become easier to overlook?

This perspective also draws from resources such as Fairplay’s Screen Aware Early Childhood materials, which encourage adults to consider context, relationships, communication, and developmental needs when making decisions about technology use.

These questions have also been explored in other fields. In her 2023 book Attention Span, researcher Gloria Mark explored how constant interruptions and fragmented attention affect the way people focus and engage within digital environments. Earlier work by scholar Brandon T. McDaniel introduced the concept of “technoference,” which examines the ways technology can disrupt relationships and communication. Although originally studied in family settings, the concept raises broader questions about how technology shapes attention and interaction in schools.

Less attention has been paid to the ways digital systems influence attention, interaction, and the conditions for learning. Those influences often emerge in ordinary moments that are easy to overlook. 

What Does This Look Like in Schools?
These tensions are not always visible in technology plans, device inventories, or usage reports. More often, they emerge in the ordinary routines and expectations that shape the school day.

When Efficiency Begins Replacing Productive Struggle: One promise of educational technology is efficiency. Tasks become faster, smoother, easier to manage, and easier to complete.

In many contexts, that efficiency is valuable. In learning, however, some of the processes technology removes are the very processes through which learning occurs. Struggle, repetition, retrieval, revision, discussion, and sustained attention are not obstacles to learning. They are an essential part of how learning develops.

As schools increasingly adopt systems designed to reduce friction and streamline performance, they may need to examine whether efficiency is replacing the productive effort that deep learning requires.

When technology begins directing pedagogy: Digital systems do not simply support instruction. Increasingly, they shape instructional priorities. Platforms often influence pacing, workflow, assessment structures, intervention models, communication patterns, and definitions of participation. As these systems become more embedded in daily operations, schools may begin adapting instructional practices to fit the technology, rather than evaluating whether the technology aligns with how students learn best.

This shift is often subtle because it emerges through ordinary operational decisions. As digital systems become more embedded in schools, instructional practices can begin shifting to fit the demands of the technology.

When Systems Normalize Fragmented Attention: Digital systems increasingly shape not only student experiences, but also the attention demands placed on educators.

Teachers are often expected to instruct students while simultaneously monitoring platforms, documenting progress, responding to communication, managing digital workflows, and remaining continuously available across multiple systems.

Each responsibility may serve a legitimate purpose. Together, however, they create conditions in which divided attention becomes normalized within the school day.

This changes more than workflow. It changes interaction. Conversations become easier to interrupt. Responsiveness becomes harder to sustain. Attention is repeatedly pulled toward documentation, communication, monitoring, and digital management alongside the real-time interactions happening within the classroom.

These shifts are rarely discussed as conditions for learning, yet they shape the relational environment students experience every day.

A Governance Question
For school leaders and board members, this creates a broader governance question: What conditions for learning are our systems creating?

Answering that question requires looking beyond implementation metrics, device access, or usage reports alone. It requires examining how technology systems shape attention, interaction, instructional priorities, and the daily experience of teaching and learning.

As digital systems become more embedded in school operations, they begin influencing more than efficiency or communication. They shape what becomes visible, what receives attention, what is measured, and what schools increasingly prioritize.

That may require school leaders to slow down long enough to notice patterns that have become normalized. Not because technology is inherently harmful, but because systems always shape behavior, priorities, and interaction, often in ways that are difficult to see while operating inside them.

Beyond Access and Implementation
For years, conversations about educational technology focused primarily on access, adoption, and implementation. Schools worked to increase connectivity, expand device availability, and integrate digital systems into daily instruction.

Many of those efforts addressed real needs and provided important opportunities for students and educators.

The next challenge may be more complex. Schools must now examine how technology systems influence the conditions under which learning takes place.

That work is not about rejecting technology. It is about becoming more intentional about the relationship between technology, attention, interaction, and learning.

As schools continue making decisions about instructional platforms, communication systems, data practices, and digital expectations, the most important questions may no longer be simply how much technology students are using or which platform works best.

Schools need to ask: What kinds of learning environments are our systems helping create?

Amy Kelly, Ed.D., is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Early Childhood Education at Governors State University. Her work focuses on teacher preparation, reflective practice, educational systems, and the impact of technology on learning environments. She is co-host of the podcast Second Look Education. Resources for this commentary can be accessed via iasb.com/Journal/