7 Research-Backed Tech Tips You Can Use Today

Veteran teachers are no strangers to the disruptions caused by new technologies. AI is the latest in a long line of tools—from calculators to search engines to smartphones and YouTube—that prompt educators to wonder whether students are still engaged in the kind of deep learning that fosters academic growth.

While a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted—meaningful tech integration must always emerge from sound instructional design—there’s good reason to lean in. “Technological skills are projected to grow in importance more rapidly than any other skills in the next five years,” concludes the World Economic Forum in its 2025 Future of Jobs Report. Over 50 percent of employers deem “technological literacy” a core workplace need, surpassing other crucial skills like empathy, curiosity, and dependability. 

The research also tells a compelling story: When used strategically, and with reasonable restraints in place, classroom technologies like generative AI, accessibility features, instructional videos, and digital collaboration tools can amplify a teacher’s impact.

To help you navigate the complex digital landscape, we’ve put together a list of seven research-backed tips for using technology in your classroom.

1. Auteurs Over Authors

Open the TikTok app and you’ll find thousands of videos of young people sharing their thoughts and opinions—many with high view counts. Ironically, the prospect of delivering an in-person presentation to a much smaller group of their peers often prevents them from showcasing the personality and creativity they display effortlessly online.

248 undergraduate students—working in groups of four or five—were asked to design an experiment on physical mass and heat transfer with a high school student audience in mind. Half of the groups would present their work via a live in-person demo, while the others would create a three- to five-minute video recording. The pressure of a live presentation put a stranglehold on creativity: Students who created video presentations explored a much wider range of narrative techniques, took more risks, edited their thinking, and ultimately demonstrated more creativity. Introduction of the video component also “correlated with higher final exam and control problem scores compared to the previous cohort without the video requirement”—suggesting the video creation not only pushed them to think outside of the box, but improved “material comprehension,” the researchers concluded. 

Consider allowing students to use video to demonstrate knowledge. Presentations, video essays, or debate videos (students stake out a position and argue their point) allow them to use the tools they naturally gravitate to while giving them the space to iterate and juxtapose “video footage, images, audio, and text to make an argument much like a writer would do in a traditional essay,” suggests Tanner Higgin, a senior researcher at WestEd.

2. A Powerful AI Tutor You Can Build Yourself

Everybody loves a shortcut. Our brains are actually “wired to find the most efficient path to an end point,” explains instructional coach Tyler Rablin. So when 1,000 high school kids participating in a 2024 study were left entirely to their own devices (literally)—solving a set of math practice problems with help from either their class notes or ChatGPT—it’s not surprising that a third of student interactions with the bot were superficial and involved them asking a version of “what’s the answer?”

The students’ tendency to use AI as an answer vending machine doesn’t discount the technology’s potential, though. In fact, with the proper guardrails and intentional design, AI can be a surprisingly effective tutor, and the research suggests how to do it.

That 2024 study, for example, included a third group: Students who used a customized ChatGPT tutor, which was designed with help from teachers and had an explicit directive to provide hints rather than complete answers. Students who were tutored by this teacher-approved bot scored 127 percent higher on the initial problem set than their AI-less peers—and scored similarly to their peers who used notes on a subsequent closed-book exam. The finding mirrors what researchers at Harvard observed in 2024: Undergraduate students learned “twice as much in less time” with the assistance of an AI tutor with similar learning guardrails.

You can easily create your own, customized AI tutors using MagicSchool AI’s free tool, or show students how to use AI to create self-administered quizzes in various formats as they prepare for unit tests or big papers. As long as students are using AI in ways that support their own review practices, the tool is capable of adding significant value to a student’s study habits.

3. The Rationale for Digital Reading

While recent research shows that reading on paper holds onto a slight edge over reading on a screen, that’s only after all the digital features have been stripped away. Throw digital tools into the mix—built-in dictionaries, interactive elements, and collaboration tools, for example—and paper’s advantage starts to falter. In a 2021 meta-analysis encompassing 39 studies, researchers expanded the scope of digital reading to better reflect real-world classrooms and concluded that “with story-congruent enhancements, digital books outperformed paper books.”

The upshot? Reading on paper may be superior in a controlled laboratory setting, but in the classroom, the advantages of well-designed digital tools can make up the difference.

High school English teacher Shelby Scoffield had come to expect the usual response to a new novel: lots of complaints and  eye-rolls. Things didn’t turn around until she created rotating stations with tasks such as collaborative text annotation, designing character profiles or movie posters, conducting mock interviews, or recording video reviews. While not every activity involves technology, it’s a regular part of the mix. “Offering diverse, student-chosen activities builds engagement and deepens learning,” she explains.

Using the popular Scrible app to share comments and feedback online, middle school language arts teacher Frank Ward guides students as they collaboratively analyze, annotate, and discuss complex texts and assignments. When younger students struggle with oral fluency, recording apps—teacher Megan Ryder uses GarageBand but a basic voice memo app also works—enable kids to hear where they need work. “We’re going to record your voice,” she tells her students. “You can listen back to how you're doing. It’s going to be really cool, and then we can talk about how we can continue to make great growth.”

4. Your Spotless, Well-Organized Virtual Classroom

Think of your virtual classroom like your physical one—both operate better with clear rules, expectations, and organization. Early on, remind students that even online interactions are governed by your classroom’s code of conduct, and create a getting-acquainted first assignment to help students learn the fundamentals of your online space: how to submit assignments, access feedback, and answer common questions, suggests science teacher Ian Kelleher. 

Unlike in-person classrooms, where a confused look lets you know when students need help, the use of digital spaces is hard to gauge, and students who are lost in a virtual maze may quit in frustration rather than send an email asking for help. 

All too often, though, teachers simply scan and upload their lectures, presentations, and assignments without giving ample thought to the flow and layout of the virtual classroom. But “students value strong course organization,” researchers explain in a 2019 study, and they tend to form opinions about a teacher’s effectiveness based on everything from emails and announcements to online organization and ease of digital access.

To project a clear and well-organized virtual presence, design your learning management system with a clear central hub, grouping essential resources in one place and offering guidance on how to complete recurring tasks like submitting assignments, finding help, or participating in online conversations, says Kelleher.

5. When to Cut Laptops and Cell Phones Loose

The mere presence of an open laptop screen or a cell phone next to a student—even when it’s powered down or in silent mode—is “enough to distract [a student’s] brain from fully focusing on the class activities,” writes Liz Kolb, a University of Michigan professor of education. The academic costs aren’t limited to the technology’s owner, either: In a 2020 study, students seated next to classmates who were alternating between browsing and taking notes had a much harder time focusing on the lesson, leading to a nine-point drop in test scores, while a 2016 study revealed that laptop-toting college students spent a whopping 34 percent of their class time engaged in nonacademic activities like checking their social media accounts, shopping, and watching videos.

Ridding your classroom of technology entirely isn’t the answer; digital devices can “help students discover new things, explore topics that pique their curiosity, and empower them as content consumers and creators,” writes edtech consultant Monica Burns. Likewise, they provide access to accessibility features that can benefit all students, adds Touloupe Noah, an instructional learning spaces coordinator.

Your best bet, according to experienced teachers, is to develop and enforce clear tech usage rules with the support of school leaders. At Rogers Park Middle School in Connecticut, sixth-grade ELA teacher Avery Rourke has students store their laptops in cubbies when they’re not being used, while cell phones stay “away for the day” in students’ lockers from first bell to last at Luxemburg-Casco Middle School in Wisconsin. 

6. The Value Of Tech To Kids With Disabilities

For students with learning disabilities, tasks like reading, writing, and drawing can be cognitively taxing, straining their attentional limits and reducing their processing speeds. Assistive technologies—such as digital pens, text-to-speech software, and embedded tools like captions, on-touch dictionaries, highlighters, and on-screen magnifiers—can help bridge this gap by allowing students to remove friction as they engage with materials.

Digital pens such as Livescribe, for example, are a valuable accessibility tool that can help kids with everyday tasks such as “note taking, content review and test preparation, formative assessment, and testing accommodations,” according to a 2017 study. Text-to-speech tools, audiobooks, and automatic captioning features—standard features in most Apple and Chromebook devices—can be flipped on to aid reading and are increasingly used by teachers to help students with reading and language difficulties achieve “significantly improved comprehension,” researchers explain in a 2023 study. 

Finally, students who have difficulty keeping up with lectures or who struggle with taking notes quickly can benefit from recorded lessons or digital handouts, suggests professor of special education Lusa Lo. They can even transcribe live or recorded lessons using free built-in accessibility tools like Live Captions, giving them a convenient set of notes they can then summarize, refine, and reference as they study.

“Teachers can start by exploring free or built-in features that support text-to-speech, annotation, or visual customization,” says Xin Wei, a senior researcher at Digital Promise. “The key is to match tools to student needs and teach students how to use them purposefully.”

7. Record Crucial Lessons (and Adjust Your Teaching Dynamics)

In a sweeping 2021 analysis, researchers concluded that well-designed videos can “lead to better student learning”—even when compared to face-to-face teaching. That’s because instructional videos not only provide teachers with an opportunity to fine-tune their lessons through editing, but because they allow teachers to draw attention to important details through simple annotations like highlights, arrows, labels, and other visual cues.

The longer the video, the more information students need to absorb. In a 2022 study, researchers discovered that splitting a 55-minute instructional video into several 8-minute ones increased viewing time by 25 percent, while a 2025 study determined that roughly 5 minutes was the optimal length,” since student retention and responses to embedded questions tended to flag after that mark. 

For Kareem Farah, founder and CEO of The Modern Classrooms Project and a former teacher at a Title I high school in Washington, D.C., instructional videos were the key to getting past the “lecture bottleneck.” Adjusting a lecture’s pace never worked for Farah—when he slowed it down most students lost interest. When he sped it up he ran the risk that others couldn’t keep up. 

“In my classrooms now, I build instructional videos to replace my lectures,” explains Farah, who uses most of his time in class to facilitate discussions and help students tackle any issues they come across. 

“It’s essential to chunk instruction such that each video covers a single learning objective or task, and nothing more,” suggests Farah. Break long videos into several shorter ones, and minimize the use of on-screen text while using simple visual cues to highlight key information. Encourage students to take notes during the video lesson, and embed questions using programs like Edpuzzle to improve student interaction while yielding invaluable formative assessment data. “Students should think of video-watching as a task they perform actively in order to learn,” says Farah.