Dylan Kane on Resetting His Classroom’s Relationship With Tech

Before Dylan Kane stopped using Chromebooks in his seventh-grade math classroom last year, he had Andy, his school’s IT director, on speed dial.

Then, without warning, Andy’s phone stopped ringing. After several weeks, he reached out. 

“He was like, ‘Hey, I haven’t heard from you. Are you OK?’” Kane recalls. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m just not using Chromebooks anymore. Don’t worry.’”

In December 2025, Kane stumbled across Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion, an influential critique of technology’s expanding role in schools. Curious about Horvath’s sweeping conclusions—particularly his argument that classroom technology is detrimental to learning—Kane devised a simple experiment: he set aside the Chromebooks he used for daily quizzes and interactive activities and replaced them with paper, pencils, notebooks, and whiteboards. On his Substack, he chronicled the changes in his instruction and his students’ engagement. 

Soon, his modest experiment swept him into a larger national debate and he was featured in The Atlantic as an example of a teacher “ditching screens”—making him an unlikely emblem of the movement to restrict classroom devices. 

But Kane never said that all screens should be banished from classrooms. He doesn’t consider himself a technology skeptic or an analog absolutist. Like most teachers, he views digital tools as a convenient way to distribute assignments, administer review, collect data, and reduce friction for students. His experiment, he says, is less of a declaration than a question: Is technology making my classroom as efficient as I assumed?

ANDREW BORYGA: In the national debate over classroom technology, you’ve sometimes been portrayed as an advocate for removing devices from schools. Is that accurate? 

DYLAN KANE: I’m an advocate for teachers to try reducing tech use and to see what happens. I think there's an assumption that all technology is good. I wanted to evaluate whether that was true. I took everything I was using technology for and did it with paper and pencil instead, and the results were eye-opening. 

I’m not saying that is the right approach for all teachers, but I think it’s an exercise teachers should try: challenge the assumptions you make about technology. But I’m not saying everyone should build a bonfire of Chromebooks tomorrow. 

BORYGA: Even before your tech-free month, your students only used Chromebooks about 20 percent of the time in class. What made you suspect 20 percent was too much?

KANE: There are transaction costs to using technology. For example, some students bring Chromebooks that are damaged or they just forget to bring them, so I had to have loaners available or a plan for partner work. Some students aren’t going to charge the Chromebooks, so I had to have a system to charge them. I created specific routines to address these pain points.

When I decided to use Chromebooks less, and didn’t spend as much time on those routines, I realized how much of a time suck they were to maintain. 

BORYGA: Ok, and what did going tech-free require you to change about your day-to-day instruction? 

KANE: Before the experiment, I gave digital quizzes every week. I started during the pandemic. I had my quizzes all made and my system set, and I stuck with it. But when we came back to school in person, I never asked myself: “Is this a good idea?” The experiment helped me answer that.  

I had a system where I let kids do a retake of each digital quiz. It was meant to reduce friction and make it easy for them to keep practicing. Before my experiment, about 20 percent of students took me up on the offer. But when I went to paper and pencil, I realized that the whole endeavor of taking the quiz took a lot less time—thanks to kids not having to troubleshoot tech issues. I also realized kids were more willing to do a paper and pencil retake. Suddenly close to half the students in the class were doing them. 

BORYGA: Why do you think that is? 

KANE: I think paper and pencil actually reduced friction. The piece of paper was right in front of them. There was no login—no hoops to jump through. There was also a human in front of them saying, "Hey, do you want to do a retake right now?" instead of an option to log in and do it some other time. 

I also think it’s easier to engage with feedback from a human with the physical object you’re working on in front of you. It feels like that feedback is coming from someone who cares and wants you to succeed, rather than a digital dashboard telling you that you got number three wrong.

BORYGA: Devices are used for more than just lessons. Teachers also use them to distribute homework, collect assignments, or get absent students up to speed, for example. How did you handle those practical tasks after going device-free? 

KANE: The short answer is that I had to make changes and accept trade-offs. Take homework for example: I stopped giving homework during my experiment. Previously, I had been giving digital homework, and I didn't want to design and manage a new paper-based homework system in the middle of the year. 

However, I found that because paper and pencil things were taking less time, students actually got more practice in class than before. Not only that, but I could better hold students accountable and not worry about who’s going to use AI to cheat at home. All of that justified my trade-off. 

BORYGA: What about when kids were absent from school? How did you address missed work? 

KANE: I tried a couple of different things. One was keeping a stack of paper with the missing students’ names on them. On assessment days, I’d go through the stack and say, "Oh, Jimmy's here today. Here's his makeup from last week." This method is not perfect. It’s much easier to keep track of things digitally. It’s very easy to lose paper. There are some of the same issues with old-school gradebooks, too. 

I probably made more mistakes forgetting about a student's missing assessment and then had to figure out what to do later. So that definitely is a downside.

BORYGA:You told Chalkbeat that one of the main benefits of being screen-free was being more in touch with your students’ thinking. What became more visible to you when students worked in notebooks or on whiteboards?

KANE: All of these digital tools have nice dashboards that show you all kinds of data around student progress. It sounds great, but in my experience it’s overwhelming and can feel very anonymous.

Moving around the room while kids work on paper makes it easy for me to actually engage with students and be present while they’re thinking. It allows me to say to myself, “I want to see how everyone is doing on number four,” and then walk around and get a quick snapshot and give a student who is struggling a quick piece of human feedback: “Hey, watch out for this.”

Screens are addictive—even for teachers. I could do the same thing on a digital assessment, but it's more likely I’ll just stay at my desk and watch their icons on the screen and miss that opportunity for human connection. 

BORYGA: Now that you’re receiving less data, is there any data that you miss? 

KANE: There was definitely data that was valuable. For example, it was way easier to analyze tests and quizzes and to say, "Hey, here are the most common mistakes." I can do that intuitively as I grade them by hand with paper and pencil, and I can also do a bigger analysis of class performance as a whole—but it takes more time. It was easier to look at a tool and quickly say: “Okay, these are the three or four questions I need to address, and these are the skills I need to reteach.” 

The flip side is that, like I mentioned, it is easier to get students to engage with the actual feedback I’m providing about mistakes using paper and pencil. Especially because I’m now only picking out one or two common mistakes, which is a lot more manageable and productive for students than asking them to engage with five common mistakes. 

BORYGA: I imagine teachers can find their own middle ground, right? Maybe once a quarter there’s a longer digital quiz that supports deeper data analysis, for example. 

KANE: Exactly, and that’s the type of thinking I find valuable. What do we want to get out of this? If we’re looking for a detailed data set of all the different skills students are learning and how they're doing with them, then I think a digital assessment makes sense. If the goal is to give a quick quiz, pick one or two questions that are giving kids trouble and have students engage with corrections, I’ve found paper and pencil works better. 

BORYGA: Students were divided about your new approach to tech—and some said math felt harder without screens. How do you distinguish productive struggle from friction that gets in the way of learning?

KANE: I think about it like this: Friction that causes students to think hard is good friction. Friction that happens before they start thinking hard is bad friction. For example, a lot of the friction I was seeing with screens was just to get students started: getting Chromebooks out, plugging them in, logging onto things—all of which is bad friction. On the flip side, there is the friction of writing things out, or going through multi-step problems on paper. That’s good friction. 

BORYGA: Did students buy into that? 

KANE: Yeah. In my experience, students are receptive if you say to them, "Hey, the purpose of school is to learn, and the best way to learn is to think hard about stuff." That makes sense to them. That doesn’t mean they’re delighted to hear it.

BORYGA: When we spoke earlier this year, you mentioned it was too early to draw any conclusions. Now that the school year is over, did you see any indication that students learned more based on standardized scores or other assessments?

KANE: I haven't gotten results from the state test yet. Another measure we use saw results a little higher than average, but the numbers bounce so much that it’s tough to say. Over the course of the year I did see an increase in student effort and engagement with my feedback. Still, I’m cautious not to pitch a return to paper and pencil as a way to transform student learning. Teaching is hard. There are lots and lots of things that matter, and tech use is just one small piece. 

BORYGA: What do you make of folks who suggest that removing laptops from the classroom is a sort of magic bullet solution to increase learning? 

KANE: Well, I can say that I don’t go around telling teachers, “Hey, everyone should cut technology out of their classrooms right away.” My personal choice last year was to go pretty close to tech-free.

But this year, I’m moving down to fifth grade and I have a different set of choices to make. There are going to be some skills I’m going to teach with computers because I’m responsible for a larger part of each student's education. 

BORYGA: I’m curious about that decision. Can you clarify: Why more tech in elementary school?

KANE: My context has changed. For example, I think typing is a valuable skill—and a skill I should be teaching in elementary school. A lot of people assume that because kids know how to use devices that they know how to type, but that isn’t the case. I think it’s valuable in an upper elementary classroom to learn how to type up an essay, for example. 

I think it all breaks down to: What are the specific skills I want students to learn? And when does that skill lend itself to technology? I’ll probably still land on the tech-free side the majority of the time this year, but that is the calculus I'm going through. What I’m not going to do is go in saying: "Hey, I'm going to be tech-free 100% from the beginning." I don't think that is a productive approach.

BORYGA: In interviews with various national outlets you’ve consistently said that you don’t believe that all classroom technology is harmful. Can you give me an example of a really good use of tech in your classes? 

KANE: One example in math is visualizations. If I’m teaching angles to seventh graders, for example, it’s helpful for them to visualize an angle and watch it grow. On Chromebooks, they can actually drag an angle and see, okay, what does 45 degrees look like? What does 90 look like? I can also project these angles on the board and say, “you tell me to stop when it hits 45 degrees” or “guess how many degrees are in this angle” but I think there is a lot of value in the interactivity. 

The times when I brought technology back into the classroom, it was often because of something interactive that I wanted my students to experience, particularly in subjects like geometry or statistics. 

BORYGA: Many schools and districts around the country are currently reconsidering how much time kids spend on computers and weighing things like bans, fixed screen-time, or a return to computer labs. Do any of these approaches make sense to you? 

KANE: I feel torn. On one hand, I think having consistent daily routines is valuable for students and is a good way to reduce some of the friction of dealing with screens. Having my routines was helpful for me when I was using Chromebooks. 

But it also appeals to me to have a computer lab or a computer cart where teachers have to decide: “Okay, this is worth using Chromebooks for today.” I do think there is some value to not having students just carry them around all the time. 

BORYGA: It seems like you were given a lot of lee-way by your administration to make the best choices for yourself though, right? What role does teacher agency play in the equation? 

KANE: A huge one. I’m happy I was given freedom to teach how I wanted to and that my curriculum didn't have a mandatory digital component or a mandatory restriction. A big benefit of that agency is that I was really focused on learning. When teachers are mandated to do things, they often spend less time focusing on learning. Instead, they focus on keeping up with the curriculum or whatever the requirements are. I think that type of thinking is the opposite of how I want to engage with my students and make decisions about what’s best for them.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.