Technology should make teachers’ work lives easier and their impact more powerful, not have kids spend more time on screens, writes Abbas Manjee, co-founder of Kiddom, an education technology company, and a former high school math teacher in New York City, in an eSchool News essay.
Let’s start with reading. When pre-literate five-year-olds learn their letters by writing them by hand, and not by typing, the reading circuits in their brains light up later just from looking at the letters. The act of forming a letter, badly, with a fat pencil and poor control, is what teaches the brain what a letter is. Messiness is the lesson.
In one training study, five-year-olds who learned new letters by hand decoded them far more accurately than children who typed them. On the hardest task, writing the letters from dictation, the hand group roughly doubled the typers. Hand to letter to sound to word. The hand is the first link in the reading chain.
Writing builds memory the same way. Typing is fast enough to transcribe a thought without ever having one. Writing is slow enough to make the brain choose what matters. The slowness is where the learning lives. Even plain comprehension holds up a little better on paper than on a screen.
None of this is an argument against technology. Don’t forget that paper and pencil are technology too. This is an argument about which tools are most appropriate for maximizing classroom potential and productivity.
For all my teaching years, curriculum was part scavenger hunt, part guesswork. I authored lessons after hours against the state standards, pulling from whatever I could find, including prior state exams. Then, whenever I got tired or hit writer’s block, I would go online to fill the gaps. The materials were a patchwork, and the quality was whatever I could pull together late at night. Nearly everyone I knew in the ranks was doing the same or strictly following an outdated textbook.
That has largely changed, and it keeps changing–-fast. Over the last decade, education got serious about high-quality instructional materials (HQIM). Coherent, research-based curriculum, vetted and sequenced so that what a child learns in October sets up what she learns in March. Districts now choose these programs on purpose. It is one of the most important and least celebrated shifts in American schooling. For the first time, we have real agreement on what “good” looks like.
But the best of this curriculum was authored to be executed on paper — books, consumables, trade books, and the rest. That is where the thinking connects and the aha moment lands, at least until adolescence.
So, schools know how children learn. We have the materials worth learning from. The only thing missing is the connection between them. A great curriculum that teachers cannot get all the way through, because they are buried under the logistics of 30 kids and a stack of grading, is a promise half kept.
That gap is exactly the kind of problem modern technology should solve. Not by replacing the page, but by helping teachers act on it quickly.
Picture a six-year-old who works through a formative assessment from a strong curriculum, by hand, the way the science says they should. The teacher moves through the room and, with a mobile device, lifts that student’s paperwork onto the projector at the front of the room in seconds, name hidden, so the whole class can reason through it together. Later, the teacher scans the stack, and it comes back scored in minutes, with misconceptions flagged and strategies to reteach them. The child never touched a device. The curriculum stayed “on paper.” The technology did the connecting and the carrying, the work no pencil should ever have to do, in 2026 or beyond.
When a teacher can see, every week, which kids are on track and which are quietly slipping, and exactly what each one is missing, they can do the part of teaching that moves a child. They can give each kid what that kid needs. Pull the four students who tripped on the same step and reteach it on Tuesday. Stretch the ones who are ready for more. Catch a gap in October instead of finding it on a state test in May. That is how a teacher gets a whole class to grade level and beyond: with better information, sooner.
Paper and curriculum are for the human work of learning. Technology is for the logistics of running a room. For most of the short history of edtech, we had this backwards. We put the machine where the child’s mind belonged and left the teacher drowning in the paperwork. We are climbing out of that now, and it is a powerful thing to watch.
We finally know what great materials are made of. We are remembering how children learn. And for the first time, technology can hold the two together instead of crowding them out. The pencils have not changed. Neither have the kids clutching them. What is different is that the work no longer must disappear unread.
Every warm-up, every activity, every exit ticket, every page, can be seen and acted on before the next bell. Acting on it early can keep a kid from falling behind the class before the gap ever gets serious. That is the classroom now within reach. Not someday, but this year, with today’s teaching ranks, curriculum, and technology.
eSchool News
