Adapting Instruction as 1:1 Technology Access Shrinks

I began teaching after the pandemic, so I don’t know a classroom without some level of technology use. It’s been a part of pretty much everything I do. But like a lot of you, I’m now in a district that’s pulling back from one-to-one devices. High school students still have their devices;t those of us in middle school are the ones faced with change.

This isn’t a return to the classrooms a lot of us grew up in, where you went to the computer lab once a week and that was it. It really means teachers get more say in how technology is used and when it’s actually worth it. Here are the challenges that I face in my classroom and how I work around them.

The Challenges

In my room, we have a laptop cart. Students can grab a device whenever I need them to during class, but nobody takes one home. These are some of the challenges this presents:

Absent students lose access. This is the big one for me. When a student is out for a digital learning day, in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, or just sick, what we’ve all been trained to do (post it online so everyone has equitable access) no longer works. So now I’m printing, and I have a lot of students, so paper and time add up fast.

Supports don’t follow the student. If a student has accommodations or tools set up on their device, those now have to be added to every laptop that student might end up using. In my middle school, that can add up to seven laptops per student.

Transitions eat up time. Passing out laptops, getting everyone logged in, someone’s password doesn’t work, someone got a dead device, and then putting them all back and plugged in at the end is exhausting and takes a real chunk out of instruction time. Some days, it’s 10 minutes I’m not getting back.

So, What Can We Do?

When decisions like this hit your district, it is easy to feel frustrated, but at the end of the day we have to pivot. These are some realizations and actions that helped my classroom.

Survey students and families early. At the start of the year, find out what kind of technology and internet access students have at home by sending home a paper survey or using an online site such as Google Forms. I was honestly surprised when I did this; fewer than a third of my sixth graders have a laptop at home. A lot of them have a phone, or maybe a tablet they share with siblings. Knowing that early told me that a lot of what I did the year before—when I didn’t need to think about how much or how little technology was used—wasn’t going to work.

Blend traditional activities with purposeful technology. Sometimes that just means letting students use laptops to look up information or find images. But it can also mean thinking past the computer. My school has robots, drones, and microscopes, and those are easy to forget about when technology only means laptops in our heads.

We have used drones and robots during our interdisciplinary STEM activities, which allowed students to have hands-on practice that they could later reflect on in their writing. Students get more excited about a drone than anything on a computer anyway.

Plan on paper, publish on screen. I teach English language arts, so I assign a lot of writing. Last year, I saw a lot of AI use, more than I want to admit. Now students do most of their brainstorming, drafting, and planning on paper, and the AI use has dropped a ton. I can see their thinking on the page, messy as it is. Then when they type the final version, it’s actually theirs.

Combine print and digital resources. Multimodal texts are new to our state standards, so working with videos, books, images, and print and digital texts together is just normal now. Moving some of that off the screen has made it more meaningful, and honestly more accessible for students who struggle on a screen.

Gallery walks with images on topics we are learning about, where students discuss what they are looking at with the students next to them; centers where students engage in crafts connected to lessons, with maps of places we are reading about, and surveys to spread ideas; exhibits where students share their stories and artwork—these are all instances where students get up, move around, and talk to each other.

Offer multiple ways to show learning. Giving students options helps with equity and gives them more voice. Project-based learning (PBL) works really well for this. PBL lets students make real connections to their community, and while a lot of PBL can live online, if you get a little creative, you can mix it with offline work or skip the laptops completely—posters, models, interviews, presentations, whatever fits.

Use technology when it adds value, not as a substitute for teaching. When students are on laptops, they should be building real skills: how to format a paper, how to find a file they saved last week (harder than it sounds for sixth graders), when and how to use a spreadsheet. Every kid already knows how to play the popular gamified apps. I even use them sometimes. But maybe the better approach is plugging in when it matters and unplugging for fun, connection, and communication.

For example, I love getting my class outside to work in our garden, finding ways to work with other classes (one of our favorite things to do is increase community by reading the stories we have written to students in other classes), and inviting experts to ask questions face-to-face (we did this with a local illustrator).

Where This Leaves Us

Most states have gone, or are going, cellphone-free in the classroom. And I think pulling back on other devices can be a good thing too, even if it doesn’t feel like it at first. Laptops still have their place… I’m writing this on my laptop now. But the silver lining is that fewer devices means more teacher autonomy. We have to get creative with what students make and how they show what they know, and that’s the part of teaching that most of us got into initially, anyway.

It’s not perfect; I’m still printing too much and losing minutes to the laptop cart. But I’m seeing more of my students’ actual thinking than I did last year, and that’s exciting!