5 Essential Tech Talks to Have With Students

In many K–12 classrooms, the combination of one-to-one devices and internet connectivity allows teachers to provide students with “access to knowledge, communities, and opportunities that they would never have been able to reach before,” associate professor Sarah Schneider Kavanagh and science teacher Tess Bernhard note.

That access—via tools like email and video conferencing, web browsers, and apps that can unleash students’ creativity—can become overwhelming, like turbulent white water rapids, or, if managed wisely, feel more like a tranquilly flowing stream. What determines the flow is the guidelines and guardrails you set up, explains educational consultant Jamie Knowles.

Clearly defined policies, routines, and expectations can “help students use class time most efficiently” while helping you get the most out of teaching with technology, Knowles says. Having conversations to lay out your policies can also provide space to co-create norms alongside students, which can increase their engagement. Enlist their voices where possible and students are much more likely to take “ownership over the way the class is run and its daily culture.”

Here are some suggestions for how to have these conversations with students at the start of the year.

The AI Playbook

AI is one of several big challenges educators face. Many teachers are learning about this evolving technology alongside their students without a lot of definitive resources, professional development, or training. An informal poll of 1,935 educators conducted by high school teacher Chanea Bond on X (formerly Twitter) revealed that 79 percent felt they didn’t know enough about AI to “teach students how to use it responsibly in a classroom setting as a professional responsibility.” But that’s exactly what a lot of teachers are being asked to do.

Whether you allow or prohibit the use of AI, students should know what to expect. “Students need to understand the rationale for these kinds of decisions as part of their own emerging AI literacy,” science teacher Jen Stauffer and middle school history teacher Jonathan Gold write. AI adds another layer to conversations around integrity and “what good work looks like inside the classroom,” Gold told me in a recent interview. It’s helpful to add AI to topics you already go over, like documenting your sources or resource research.

Gold doesn’t spend much time talking about student use of AI initially: “AI tools are a second semester tool,” he tells students, focusing at first on norms of trust, reliability, and the classroom’s intellectual culture. These need to precede the introduction of AI, he says: “You don’t get in the car on the first day of Driver’s Ed.” Gold tells students AI is something they will eventually experiment with and advises them not to use the tools just yet. When you’re ready to introduce AI, a simple “red light, yellow light, green light” system can help guide student usage.

Bond uses a different approach in her English classes—“AI generated or enhanced writing is not permitted,” she says, and she takes time to explain why. Bond’s policy, the starting point for her class discussion, is one that other teachers can use: “In this class, your job is to grow into a better reader and writer. In order to do your job, you must read and write a lot. My job is to provide feedback to help you grow in your abilities. In order to do my job, I need to read YOUR writing. I need to know YOUR voice.”

Phones or No Phones?

The earlier you set up cell phone expectations, the better, writes Liz Kolb, a clinical professor of education technologies and teacher education at the University of Michigan. Especially in schools without access to one-to-one devices, smartphones remain a tool that teachers can use to benefit learning—but they need clear policies to avoid the ever-present possibility that the devices will be distracting.

In classrooms where students can use their phones for independent work or research, educator Sarah Said suggests communicating the “boundary for when phones can and can’t be out.” A stoplight management approach “allows teachers some flexibility to use cell phones when the situation warrants,” Kolb explains: Posting a red button on the door tells students that devices will not be used that day. Have a conversation to engage students in thinking critically about the cell phone’s role in the classroom: “Ask your students to help you develop social norms for what is and is not appropriate cell phone use during green and yellow button times,” she says. “Should they be allowed to go on their social media networks during class? Why or why not? Talk to them about what to do with their devices in different social scenarios in the classroom.”

In some districts, students may have had a rude awakening if their school or district established a policy banning cell phones. Staff development teacher Christopher Klein advises “treating students with empathy and providing respectful, humane solutions” as you navigate this transition together. At Luxemburg-Casco Middle School, teachers began the year with a review of the school’s “away for the day” policy, which has students keep their phones in their lockers from the first bell of the day to the last. In other schools, cell phones and smartwatches are to be turned off and kept in Yondr pouches, students’ backpacks, or hanging phone caddies during class; once again, this needs to be consistently communicated to students.

Klein suggests elevating these discussions of classroom norms with reflection: “Each September I show my students a video like this one to spark thinking about their relationships with their cell phones, survey students about their technology use, and provide self-help strategies for when students recognize the need to limit the amount of time they are spending on their phones.”

Guiding Students to a Richer Understanding of Tech

Children “have many opportunities to interact with new technologies” but rarely get to create with them, writes Mitchel Resnick, a computer scientist and LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab. That’s because computers are viewed by people of all ages as “information machines,” whereas Resnick argues they should be seen as more like paintbrushes. 

Discuss with students how they can use technology to engage with curricular content on a deeper level and to show what they know. Let them know that using technology creatively to demonstrate their understanding is not only accepted, but embraced. This gives kids license to explore active uses of technology and motivation to think outside the box. In Amy Szczepanski’s ninth- and 10th-grade science classes, students choose their own final—from the topic to how they will demonstrate their knowledge. One student used the popular sandbox video game Minecraft to make a model of DNA, a callback to an earlier assignment where he had used the game to build a model of a cell and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. 

Similarly, occasionally allowing students to craft podcasts or video essays analyzing a concept or topic has a lot of overlap with the process of writing an essay, says Tanner Higgin, a senior researcher at WestEd. Such assignments provide a chance to discuss not just the creative possibilities of technology but also what makes a piece of writing effective or powerful.

Tending to Your Tech

When the bell rings, many older students get up and walk out of the classroom almost without thinking, Hedreich Nichols, a district educational technology integration specialist, told me: “That’s where we lose so many devices and things get broken.” This can often lead to computers becoming “beyond use six months into the school year.” 

Explaining your expectations can prevent a lot of problems, Nichols says. “You have to tell kids how to hold their laptop if they’re walking with it,” she explains. “Tell kids how to make sure it’s cleaned and wiped down each day, or if you do it once every three days. You build routines around what to do and not do.” Curriculum Principal David LaMaster loops families into that conversation. Each Sunday, he sends a nudge via school social media accounts and the learning management system to remind middle-grade students to bring their devices—fully charged—to school: “Parents and students frequently tell me how much they appreciate the reminders,” he writes. 

Students can be very hard on devices, and to mitigate wear and tear, Nichols suggests dedicating the first and last couple minutes of class to having students check their devices over. “Just as no one would require a science teacher to start and end lab instruction without proper setup, breakdown, and cleanup as a part of the instructional block, similar protocols are vital for teachers who now essentially provide daily instruction in computer labs,” Nichols says. 

Digital Citizenship 101

While Digital Citizenship Week is celebrated in October, the first few weeks of school are a great time to set some ground rules around smart online behavior and digital decorum, notes teacher and edtech consultant Rachelle Dené Poth. It’s particularly important as technologies like AI gain traction, she says—students should be careful not to enter personally identifiable information or simply accept an output from generative AI as objective fact. 

Poth suggests that teachers at least emphasize that students should think before they post on social media, explain what is and isn’t appropriate to share in online spaces and why, and model how to properly cite and use information that they access through the internet. Broader conversations should show students “the impact of one’s digital actions,” she says, including how to keep themselves safe online, protect their privacy and respect the privacy of others, think critically about and analyze information they encounter, and engage respectfully with both people they know and those they don’t. 

Poth has students “create PSAs to share information about one of the elements of digital citizenship they selected” to display in the hallways. Pam Fierst, an eighth-grade ELA teacher, discusses the potential issues and dangers of cell phones with students. What these exercises have in common is that they guide students to discuss responsible and irresponsible practices when using the internet and their devices. They are also a great way to remind students of general guidelines that they sometimes forget or ignore, like the fact that playing games on school-assigned devices is prohibited without permission, or that harassing or cyberbullying a peer has consequences.