Dr. Billie J. McConnell 
In this 2016 essay from SEEN Magazine’s Perfect School series, Dr. Billie J. McConnell argues that schools should decide how students learn best and then choose technology, not the other way round. An updated section below adds documented lessons from device purchases, current data on how many tools schools use and what is known about AI tools in classrooms.
This is the second installment of The Perfect School series originally published in SEEN Magazine.
We must start with the “perfect school.” Until we come to an agreement on what students should learn and how they will best learn, we can’t choose the technology that allows us to meet our goals. We must continue to discuss this at the national and state levels, but it must also be discussed at the local level where the decision to buy technology is being made.
For decades we have been assuming, at least by our practice, that our methods of teaching and the format of school was already set, so we have been looking for ways technology would improve it or make it more efficient. We have been assuming that if we get just the right technology we will have more success. We have been working on the assumption that if we keep doing what we have always done, but with a different tool, then we could expect a different result.
Could there be two more controversial education topics? Technology and the perfect school are both topics of debate, research, teachers’ lounge discussions, parent meetings, board meetings, political rallies and countless articles. They cause mild mannered people to go from Dr. Bruce Banner to the Hulk. So, why not put them together in one big controversial article?
It reminds me of the picture of a horse hitched to the front of the Model T delivering mail. How many schools have purchased technology, implemented it into the current system, and then wondered why there was no change in student success or engagement? I can’t begin to count the number of times I have had a teacher or administrator say, “There has to be more to this!” Well, there is. But, it is not about the technology, it is about a school’s learning environment.
We must rid ourselves of the old industrial model mentality and begin thinking about what is best for today’s students. We can’t just tweak, but in the words of Clayton Christensen we must be “disruptive.” School should be about helping each student realize and develop his or her gifts and learn how they can use those gifts to live well and to improve the world around them. We can’t assume that the way we taught and structured schools even 10 years ago will properly prepare students for the world that they will enter.
I believe that we must start with the premise that all students are capable of learning given the right environment, tools and time. In the words of Carol Dweck, we need to develop a “Growth Mindset.” I believe school should resemble how we daily learn as adults and how we initially learned before we went to school. When we need to do something, we question, inquire, discover, try, fail, grow, learn and master. Learning is our daily practice, not an act of achieving a grade or being compliant. Students need to demonstrate what they have learned by accomplishing meaningful tasks through multiple means. Failure is not something to fear, but an expected part of the learning process.
Subjects are not isolated into their own classrooms, but are taught together and integrated into the learning process through real life scenarios and simulations. If it takes six weeks to learn something, then it is because that is how much time we needed to learn it, not because that was the allotted time on the schedule. We learn the basics because we need to know them to solve our problem or accomplish our task. Currently we teach “the fundamentals” first and we do it in isolation and out of context, because we might need to know it someday. Let’s learn what I call “Cyclical Blooms.” Let’s present students a problem or challenge that has a purpose, let them figure out what they need to accomplish it, learn the fundamentals that are needed, and then proceed to meet the challenge through collaboratively trying, failing, learning and trying again until they master it.
Learning vs. Teaching
I have switched my thinking from schools being about teaching to being about learning. For today’s students, teaching is what a teacher does while the students remain passive. Learning is about what the student does. Classrooms need to be re-designed to focus on students being allowed to be active in constructing their knowledge, as opposed to what the teacher should do to disseminate information.
The model of a teacher being the sole dispenser of knowledge has created a generation of students who do not know how to learn, are more concerned about grades than learning, and who often “check out” of school because there is nothing that challenges them. School is boring! When school is about challenging students with meaningful problems and allowing them to discover and develop their skills and talents, then school will become a place that students want to attend.
You could say that moving from teaching to learning is similar to the video game model. I am not advocating that schools should be a video game, but I think video game designers have figured something out that has eluded us educators. In a video game you don’t read a manual and sit through countless 
You may also note that today games are typically played in a collaborative environment and they create and follow a set of societal rules that you must follow if you want to continue playing. Gamers learn from each other and work together to accomplish the goal. If you look carefully at how video games are designed, they meet all of the motivators described by Daniel Pink (Autonomy, Purpose and Mastery) and the players develop all of the ISTE Standards (Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Collaboration and Communication, Research, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Citizenship and Technology Use). School doesn’t have to look like a video game, but shouldn’t it have all of the same characteristics that cause students to keep playing video games?
Meaningful Technology
What about the technology? It has been here all along. If you try to think about technology as a substitute for teaching, then you have missed the point. In the perfect school, technology is ubiquitous and invisible. In the perfect school, students have the tools they need and they use a tool because they need it to accomplish a task. In the perfect school, you see students using technology all of the time and in many different ways, but they are not talking about the technology, they are talking about what they are learning and how they will accomplish their task. Which technology do they need?
The one that best accomplishes the goal. So, if your school doesn’t know what the goal is or what challenges you are going to present your students, then it is impossible to choose the right technology. You design the perfect school and then you choose the technology that fits. What we have been doing for decades is buying technology and then trying to make it fit an old model or, in some cases, changing our classrooms to fit the technology. That’s backwards.I will never forget the phone call that I got one day from a school administrator. They had just bought an iPad for every student and they put 144 apps on each of them. His question was, “Now what?” Now what?! My question was “Why?” I am not opposed to iPads or apps, but don’t buy them until you know why you need them and what you want to accomplish. Technology in the perfect school is the technology that meets the school’s vision of a learning environment that will allow the students to develop the skills they will need for their future.
Original article, Technology in the Perfect School, appeared in SEEN Magazine. Check out more thought leadership profiles in the latest edition of SEEN Magazine!
Technology in schools in 2026: choosing tools after the learning model, from iPads to AI
Technology in schools now covers devices, networks, learning software and, increasingly, artificial intelligence tools used by both teachers and students. In the article above, Billie McConnell argued in 2016 that a school should first decide what students should learn and how they learn best, and then choose the technology that fits. McConnell described an administrator who bought an iPad for every student, loaded 144 apps on each and asked what to do next, and answered with the question of why. The decade since has supplied documented examples of that pattern and new tools that raise the same question.
A documented example of buying devices first
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s iPad program is one of the best-recorded cases. Education Week reported in September 2014 that Apple and Pearson won a $30 million first-phase contract covering 30,000 students in 47 schools, as part of a billion-dollar plan for all 651,000 students. Within a week of the first distribution, hundreds of high school students had disabled the device-management system and bypassed content filters. A school board committee found the rollout rushed, with inadequate planning, unrealistic timelines and no clear evaluation plan or success metrics. The committee also said that no evidence was offered that tablets or iPads were the best device for all of the district’s students. Leslie Wilson of the One-to-One Institute called the practice of handing out devices without a clear academic purpose a “spray and pray” approach.
The lessons the article draws are practical ones for any purchase: balance urgency with careful planning, avoid one-size-fits-all solutions, and keep vendor selection transparent. They also match McConnell’s order of decisions, in which the learning design comes first and the technology follows.
How many tools schools use today
Schools now manage far more tools than a single device program. The 2024-25 EdTech Top 40 report from LearnPlatform by Instructure, summarized by eSchool News in July 2025, found that districts accessed an average of 2,982 distinct tools in a year, nearly 9 percent more than the year before, and that students used about 48 tools each over the year. Forty-five percent of the tools in the report had published research meeting the Every Student Succeeds Act’s evidence tiers, up from 32 percent the year before. The report measures engagement only, not whether tools help students learn, so it cannot say whether more selective purchasing is producing better results. It does show that the number of tools a district has to evaluate, support and protect keeps growing, which is the practical reason to settle the learning goal before a purchase.
Artificial intelligence tools and school policy
AI tools followed the same pattern of fast adoption ahead of rules. In a Gallup survey with the Walton Family Foundation of 2,232 public school teachers, reported by The 74 in July 2025, nearly two-thirds of teachers had used AI in the past school year, and teachers who used it weekly saved almost six hours a week. Only 19 percent worked at schools with an AI policy, and 68 percent said they had received no training on AI tools in 2024-25. The article does not give the survey’s methods in detail, and the time savings appear to be self-reported.
Student use is also rising. RAND surveys reported by K-12 Dive in March 2026 found that between May and December 2025 the share of middle schoolers using AI for homework rose from 30 to 46 percent and of high schoolers from 49 to 63 percent, while only about one in three students said their school had a schoolwide rule about it. RAND recommends that school and district leaders state clearly when AI use is allowed. A tool adopted without such a rule repeats the Los Angeles lesson of a purchase without a plan.
Questions to ask before the next purchase
- What learning goal does this serve, and can teachers state it in a sentence? McConnell argues that a school unable to say what students will be asked to accomplish cannot choose the right technology.
- What evidence exists that the tool works for students like ours? The share of tools with published research is rising, so it is reasonable to ask for it.
- Who will teach teachers to use it, and when? Only 19 percent of surveyed teachers worked in a school with an AI policy, and most had no training.
- How will we pilot it and judge success? The Los Angeles committee criticized the absence of an evaluation plan and success metrics.
- What will the tool cost to support over time, including accounts, privacy review and replacement?
- What rules will students follow, and will they know them?
Districts buying AI products can use edCircuit’s checklist, AI procurement for schools: 10 questions to ask, which applies the same discipline of asking why before buying.
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