Crying in the Vendor Hall - Revisited
ISTE is here, and it's reminded me why our stories matter.
Brandon Mowinkel (Mr. Mo!) was one of the best principals I ever taught with. He was open-minded, supportive, and cared about our work. Partly as a result, he was great at celebrating our success and sharing the amazing things happening in our classrooms with the community. He was intentional about this. He would often say: “If we don’t tell our stories, others will tell them for us.” He told ours well.
As we head into the world’s largest edtech gathering this week, I find myself thinking about this again and the stories people are telling about our work.
Last year at this time, the anti-edtech movement was a small ember. I wrote then that we needed to do a better job of engaging with it and grappling with dialectical thinking: Intentionally considering ideas contrary to our own. I wrote that our community needed to get outside of our bubble.
We’re starting to do that. I’m seeing more conversations about pedagogy and efficacy in edtech spaces than I ever have before. Several featured sessions this year (see here, here, and here, among many others) are wrestling with the difficult questions being raised about technology. ISTE President Richard Culatta is grappling with it. Influential edtech funders are too. Holly Clark and I will be co-presenting on it.
I’m heartened to see this willingness to engage with ideas we might disagree with.
How might we get the anti-edtech crowd to do the same?
We can’t do it with empirical evidence alone, try as we might. Quibbling over evidence and validity does little to assuage the emotions of those whose views have been hardened by years of provocative media coverage.
As Mr. Mo would say, others are telling our story for us. And they’re telling it well.
Edtech Insiders spoke recently about why the anti-edtech story is such a compelling one:
It’s scary: It’s about distraction, addiction, isolation, and harm to our most vulnerable population.
It has heroes: parent groups, contrarian researchers, the lone teachers out there “standing their ground” against technology.
It has a happy ending looming in the distance: Banning it all for good.
It’s easy to understand and validating.
To paraphrase a great writer: It’s not that this story is untrue, it’s that it’s incomplete.
There are many other stories about technology in classrooms. There’s a reason thousands of educators, during their summer break, are going out of their way to attend ISTE this week. These teachers have created moments of connection, belonging, and deep learning in their classrooms that wouldn’t have been possible without the affordances of technology. Their stories are real, too. I’ve been excited to see more and more of them of late.
In that spirit and the spirit of Mr. Mo’s advice, I’d like to retell one of ours. I think it speaks to what an amazing educator can do when empowered with technology. I’m excited to hear more of these stories this week:
The following was originally posted in February of 2025.
She waited until no one else was there before walking up to our booth.
“I’m going to try to tell this without crying…”
We suddenly had welled-up eyes, too.
“I teach at a very small school here in Texas. We’ve had several students join our school recently who can’t speak any English. Not a word. And so it’s been very challenging. But we used your tool, and I had these students write their responses in Spanish. And we did it in Chrome, so when they read each other’s writing, their Spanish was translated to English and the English responses were translated to Spanish for them.
I’m glad I didn’t look before starting the feedback part because I’m not sure I would have had the courage to include hers.
One of my new students wrote about how, back in Mexico, she was one of the smartest kids in school. And how she loved school…
…and how, since coming here and not being able to speak the language, people look at her like she’s stupid. And she’s never been treated like that before…
…and her writing was selected by her classmates as the top response…
I think it was the first time she ever really communicated with her classmates. And it started such a meaningful conversation as a class. And ever since that moment, we’ve noticed such a change in her and how she interacts with our school.
I just wanted you to know that story. Because this truly made a difference for that child.”
We got out from behind our table and hugged.
The edtech vendor hall is not typically a place for these moments. It’s too often a place for the opposite: Transactional sales gimmicks and bad fluorescent lighting. Forced conversation. Avoiding eye contact.
It’s funny, then, that maybe one of the most meaningful moments of my career happened in a vendor hall. I’ll never forget that story. Both because of the impact on that child and teacher, and because of the impact it’s already had on my wife, myself, and our work moving forward.
A great educator recently suggested that, in edtech, you either bet on teachers or you bet on software. When you bet on teachers, and design things primarily interested in empowering human-to-human connection in the classroom, special things can happen.
It can be easy to forget that when you spend too much time in the vendor hall.
Beyond the commerce, real human stories are unfolding. Stories of marginalized students rediscovering their identity and teachers bridging impossible social divides. Small moments, “on fire with the same force that lit the stars.”
Her story was a reminder that technology is most powerful when it gets out of the way and makes human connection possible where it wasn’t before. More human-to-human connection is critical for our educators and students. I leave Texas with that on my mind and in my heart.
The Chromebook reseller next to us probably summarized it best.
He leaned over the black metal booth divider after she walked away and whispered, “That was powerful.”
