Have Teachers Reached App Overload?

Ten years ago, I used Outlook, Microsoft Word, Aeries for attendance and grades, and a raspy overhead projector in my classroom. 

Currently, to make it through a week, I need Canvas, Aeries, Google Workspace, RTI Scheduler (for targeted intervention), and Ellevation (data management for English language learners). There’s also Minga, a campus management system, Securly for monitoring student web activity, i-Ready for testing benchmark data, ParentSquare for classroom messages (or Remind, if one prefers), and Band, a workplace social network that a colleague keeps asking everyone to join.

My experience isn’t unusual. A 2022 EducationWeek report found that, as schools returned to in-person learning, saddled with more tech than ever, nearly two-thirds of surveyed teachers, principals, and district leaders said they were exhausted by the volume of tools they were expected to use. Similarly, when researchers from Spain’s University of Seville parsed over 15 years of research—from the very early LMS era to the dramatic 2020 pandemic surge in demand—they reported in a 2021 study that teacher stress around learning and using classroom tech had increased “exponentially” over time.

Meanwhile, teachers who used a learning management system (LMS) like Canvas or Schoology reported that rather than streamlining their jobs, the platforms made them more tired, frustrated, and vulnerable to burnout. “Instead of being used to replace old ways of completing tasks, [they] were simply another thing on teachers’ plates,” the researchers wrote in 2025 in The Conversation, noting for example that many schools required teachers to upload lesson plans to the LMS, while still requiring paper lesson plans, essentially doubling the workload. 

It’s an evergreen issue that’s only become more pronounced, but when I interviewed teachers, no one complained about having to adopt, say, a universal digital program for collecting attendance—a straightforward goal for any teacher. The sticking point is not so much figuring out how to use products that teachers might find inherently helpful but accommodating the cascade of tools that aren’t.

“There’s a gap between who does the work of teaching and who decides which tools are useful: someone in a district office in charge of procurement, who may not have been a teacher for long,” said Dr. Antero Garcia, a Stanford University education professor. 

To teachers, that disconnect dismisses their considerable skills and expertise. “I don't think tech is marketed to people in a classroom,” said Gabriel Kahn, a middle school humanities teacher who describes himself as tech-savvy. “It’s not attuned to the needs of teachers. The knock-on effect is another hoop to jump through.”

Taking a stronger position, Steve Wright, a veteran high school computer science teacher describes the edtech industry as “totally unmoored from anything teachers want.” Wright worked in the tech sector for ten years, including a stint at Salesforce. 

Technology isn’t going anywhere and Stanford’s Garcia says he’s not suggesting that we completely reject all of the tools. “I am urging for more caution. Even the seemingly benign resources we might use in our classrooms today come with tradeoffs,” Garcia wrote in a 2023 article for the Stanford Report. “Every Wi-Fi-connected ‘smart’ device utilized in schools is an investment in time, money, and expertise in technology over teachers and the teaching profession."

Fine Line Between Coherence and Chaos

The business of education is a ripe market. The global education technology market was valued at $76.4 billion in 2019, and the sector is expected to grow to around $738 billion by 2029. According to HolonIQ, a data analytics platform, the market is currently 2.5 times larger than it was seven years ago.  

Districts that are part of this dramatic growth often purchase tools that teachers haven’t requested, Garcia and Kahn say. Wright, the high school computer science teacher and author of the substack Being Conches, notes that tools that feel momentarily prescient can rapidly become ineffective tools too expensive to jettison.

In my own classroom, I begrudgingly relied heavily on Canvas during the pandemic year of remote and hybrid teaching, and it’s remained a hub for my English classes to this day. While imperfect, it helps organize class for students, who always know where to find scanned texts and weekly agendas. The LMS hasn’t rewired my teacher's brain, but I now find it far too useful to abandon. 

This is not the case for many tools.

At a recent meeting, a colleague stood to announce a winter fair event that student government was eager to promote. “We’ll push the details out on Minga,” she said, referencing the digital hallpass system that the school adopted the previous year—with features that include announcements and a rewards program. 

Using Minga requires an open laptop and a log-in, a teacher to check their computer, and for a pass to be assigned and then, later, closed on the interface—not a fluid process when at least a handful of kids want to leave over a 90-minute period. The joke around campus is that most teachers have quietly reverted back to paper hall passes. “You guys are still all on Minga, right?” our colleague asked. Chuckles erupted.

This workplace comedy crystallizes a challenge. A piece of edtech that one is required or, in this case merely strongly encouraged to use, can address a legitimate issue—like students wandering hallways—but if it’s a vampire for energy and time, teachers will stop using it. Over time, teacher frustration hardens to bitterness when tools don't work well.

Kahn, for example, bristles at one widely used student information system’s “joke of a standards-based grading protocol.” He’s modified his gradebook to make categories for each individual learning standard, but because of the constraints of the platform, he can’t efficiently assess and study each student’s mastery.

Similarly, Carla Aiello, an Oakland elementary teacher, says that her school’s benchmark testing platform isn’t aligned with her school’s standards. Students often score comparatively poorly when their skills actually meet grade-level expectations. “The computer doesn’t listen to them read,” Aiello said. “How do we know they have fluency? There are a lot of missing human pieces.” Aiello gives the tests and studies the data anyway, but to arrive at conclusions about students’ abilities and needs, she has to consciously balance those results with what she observes through her own activities and assessments. 

Discrepancies make for more work. Concerns about no-stakes testing notwithstanding, the issue is not that a benchmark testing platform is generally unhelpful; it’s that, if such a platform is not highly compatible with standards and objectives, relying on it feels absurd, what Kahn meant when he referred to “an extra hoop,” something that might need to be explained to concerned parents at a conference—and requires hours of additional work for teachers. 

“A school needs a coherent program and I’m open to any tool that'll help us do it,” said Alykhan Boolani, principal of Life Academy in Oakland. “Many tools are temporary fads. If Pear Deck helps you achieve language acquisition goals, I respect that. We can have a coherent program with [such] tools but at what point does it become incoherent?” 

Balancing Tech with Human Connection

Schools aren’t abandoning learning management systems and benchmark testing programs anytime soon. A school ecosystem has to evolve to reap the benefits of improving technological innovations while refusing to sideline the person-to-person interactions that make educational experiences matter to students and teachers alike. There’s a real risk here. When students’ test results, hallway movements, and internet use are documented and preserved, a “platformed” education can potentially dehumanize children. “Schooling becomes a logistics problem,” Garcia told me. “You center efficiency, you lose the human element. Children become disembodied from their minds and their hearts.” 

In the elementary grades, many apps designed to teach math, for instance, use a points-oriented paradigm that young students find as addictive as video games, says Carla Aiello. Teachers can end up teaching to meet students where the apps have nudged them, and students may struggle to apply their skills to other contexts. “It reduces the way teachers think about their role as instructors, and it’s radically reshaping schools,” said Garcia.

Writing for Edutopia in 2025, Kathi Kersznowski, an education technology specialist, emphasizes that clearly defined learning objectives and a decision about the ideal demonstration of learning have to come before a decision to use a particular piece of technology. 

A teacher’s approach to students unavoidably changes when technology becomes the conduit for interaction. “I still find it creepy to walk into a reading intervention classroom and see that a teacher is watching students write on a screen and responding,” Boolani said. It’s useful to track progress, he believes, but why should eight kids sit around a table but only connect with one another and an instructor through an interface?

I listened to Boolani and agreed. At the same time, I’ve often sat in a silent classroom and written comments at a bullet-train pace on student drafts while messaging with the authors. That tech-enabled process allowed me to have more meaningful and cogent interactions around student writing in a packed class than face-to-face conferences, which can distract nearby students. I still have those, of course, but in this case, an interface assists in the meeting of a perpetual objective, making it more likely that more students will end up showing growth. It’s hard to argue with that—even if my classroom wouldn’t look in those moments, to a visitor, like an interactive environment.

In a tech-congested school setting, students also learn to sacrifice privacy. Participation in the mini-society of school means any teacher potentially observing via a digital hall pass that you pee more frequently than others or, through a web monitoring platform, that you’ve searched for an immigration attorney. The Securly platform, for example, lets you watch a grid of students potentially watching soccer highlights, playing games, or shopping instead of writing on school laptops. Does a teacher’s desire for student focus warrant the intrusion?

I connect Garcia’s points about tech molding schooling instead of adapting to its needs to Minga, which, to compliant students, grants points redeemable for gift certificates and school gear. Established digital hall pass privacy issues aside, platforms and apps like Minga seem to prioritize incentives over good teaching and learning. For what, then, would school be, if not the celebration of community, the granting of opportunity, the delivery of content, and the facilitating of discussion?

A Slim Toolkit

For many, the tech world is associated with bold innovation and problem-solving, while education is often associated with funding crises and stifling bureaucracies. These are stereotypes, but increasingly, Garcia argues, schools look away from school to solve schooling, as if those who have risen to positions of authority do not trust themselves or teachers with the job of fixing problems inside the school building.

I get solicitous emails from fledgling and established platforms—most recently a note from a Bay Area AI startup focused on K-12 grading, offering to grade one assignment for me using my own rubric. The message felt clear. A teacher’s work is laborious. Wouldn’t I rather be doing something else? 

Not necessarily. 

For the first reading and writing diagnostic of my senior English class: a current event response, in which students select and summarize a news article, explain why they picked it, and persuade a reader that it’s important. I can assess reading comprehension, critical thinking, and approaches to multiple writing modes—plus, gain a perspective on values and interests. This is useful data for a teacher looking ahead to units that will flounder without student buy-in. After I read responses, I sort them, identifying class trends and making notes by students’ names.

I could do this quickly with AI, but there’s something meaningful (and irreplaceable) about marinating in the first ideas produced by a new batch of students.

Instead of hoping tech can lighten loads, administrators should carve out as much time as possible for lesson planning, said Gabriel Kahn, who does a diagnostic similar to mine. Investing in teachers—the Garcia recommendation—and reducing class sizes would require a monumental and unfortunately unrealistic increase in public funding. Imagine: a teacher with three sections and 50 percent of their work time dedicated to planning, evaluations, case management, and individual and small group review. It’s far cheaper, in the end, to pay for software licenses, combing through what edtech throws at the wall, hoping that something sticks.

“The best fertilizer is a farmer’s footsteps,” quipped Kahn, repeating a maxim he first heard from a friend—an actual farmer. “I could be better and faster,” he admitted. “But every minute I'm wasting on an app is a minute I could provide student feedback on work to which I am directly professionally attuned.” 

Instead of being burdened by subscriptions and unwieldy programs that overcomplicate classroom management or data analysis, teachers should have as few universally mandated essentials as possible and then access to discrete technological tools that suit their teaching philosophies and unique classroom needs. Those should be shaped and regularly reviewed by departments—groups of colleagues aligned by subject. Media teachers may like CapCut, a video editing program. English language learners may benefit from Pixton, a comics-making platform. I know science teachers who swear by Kahoot! for spirited review sessions before tests. 

To borrow Kahn’s line, the farmer’s footsteps can still do the fertilizing—because technology merely enhances the planning, execution, and assessment of learning experiences, instead of granting shortcuts or a pathway to outsource the work altogether.