I have been building education tech for a long time, and when teachers tell me they are ready to ‘digitally disconnect’, I listen. The recent reporting about teachers burdened by mandatory apps — forced to juggle a patchwork of platforms for attendance, assessments, meals, reports and more — is not noise. It is an alarm bell for how we broke the promise of technology: to simplify teaching, not complicate it.
What I’m hearing from classrooms
Across contexts the story is familiar: schools layered app after app during the pandemic; different vendors solved narrow problems; nobody owned the long view. The result is fragmentation. Administrators may feel they have “a robust suite,” but teachers and parents often feel they have an impossible to-do list of logins, duplicate entries and cross-platform housekeeping that eats into teaching time and family life. Reporting and surveys make the point clearly: mandatory, poorly integrated apps add administrative overhead and cognitive load instead of reducing them (GovTech, eSchoolNews).
This isn’t just an efficiency problem. It’s a professional-respect problem. When teachers are forced to spend evenings reconciling data across five different platforms, we’ve implicitly signalled that their primary duty — teaching and mentoring children — is secondary to bureaucratic compliance.
Why ‘digital disconnect’ is a predictable, and defensible, reaction
- Fragmented workflows impose a cognitive tax: every app is a new context switch, a new login, a new place for errors. That drains attention and time.
- Compulsory after-hours submissions create an “always-on” culture that corrodes work–life boundaries and teacher wellbeing.
- Parents get overwhelmed too; multiple apps mean fractured communication and frustrated families.
When teachers say they will disconnect, they are pushing back for professionalism and sanity, not Luddism.
Practical steps I wish districts would take — now
These are low-to-medium cost, high-impact fixes that respect teachers’ time and preserve the benefits of digital tools:
- Consolidate before you multiply: evaluate platforms against interoperability and pedagogical fit. Prefer a unified portal or single-sign-on over dozens of single-purpose apps.
- Stop mandating after-hours reporting unless it is a true emergency. Create clear SLAs for responses and a policy that gives teachers permission to disconnect.
- Hire or train dedicated data operators for routine uploads so teachers don’t become unpaid clerks.
- Run a sunset review: retire redundant apps and migrate the data cleanly to the chosen system.
- Invest in onboarding and ongoing training that is practical (not a checklist) and tied to classroom workflows.
- Measure impact, not usage: track whether an app improves learning or saves teacher time — not just whether it was adopted.
These are not technical miracles; they are governance choices.
My own earlier arguments and where they connect
I have long believed we should start technology projects with a clear user-first lens — not from procurement or feature lists. See some of my earlier reflections where I argued that teacher-facing tools must serve teachers first and students secondarily (for example: “The Teacher App” and my piece on device access and pedagogy) The Teacher App · One Student, One Table, One Computer. Those ideas still hold: tech should reduce friction, not produce more of it.
A final note on values
Technology is a means, never the end. When digital policy in schools forgets that — when it privileges data collection over human connection — we should expect resistance. Teachers demanding a right to disconnect are not rejecting progress; they are asking for humane, accountable adoption of it.
If we design with humility and measure what matters (student learning and teacher time), we can restore trust. If not, the ‘digital disconnect’ will be one of many symptoms of a system that digitized first and thought later.
Connect with me: Hemen Parekh (hcp@recruitguru.com)
Regards,
Hemen Parekh (hcp@recruitguru.com)
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