More Devices, Same Questions: What Technology Really Changes in School

More Devices, Same Questions: What Technology Really Changes in School

The impact of digital technology on education, from someone who has seen both the Brainly era and the ChatGPT era

Ask someone who finished school ten years ago what a typical homework night looked like, then ask a student today. The two answers barely overlap. Assignments now arrive on portals, lectures live on YouTube, and a doubt that once had to wait until the next morning gets an answer at midnight from a search bar or a chatbot.

I am a final-year engineering student, so I have been inside this shift rather than just reading about it. Online platforms like Infosys Springboard have let me learn things my college timetable never covered. I have also watched classmates drown in notifications, and I know how many students never get the same chances because the signal drops or the only phone in the house belongs to someone else. So the question I want to look at is not whether technology is good for education. It is who it helps, when it helps, and what goes wrong when we assume it always does.

Strong opinions about this topic are everywhere, but good evidence is harder to find. For that reason I have leaned on reports from UNESCO, UNICEF, the OECD and India's ASER survey rather than on hot takes.

From Brainly to ChatGPT: what I've watched change

When I was in school, Google was every student's first stop. Stuck on a question? Google it. Need a quick explanation of a topic? Wikipedia had a page, and for most of us that page was where research started and, honestly, often where it ended.

Brainly deserves its own paragraph. To see the full answer you were supposed to sign up with your email, but for a split second the answer would flash on screen before the signup page slid over it. Every student I knew had the same reflex: thumb hovering over the screenshot button, ready to catch the answer before the wall came down. It felt like a heist for one quadratic equation.

Some days luck was on your side and the exact question had already been solved in detail by another student. Other days there was no answer at all, and you were back to memorising formulas and hoping for the best. And sometimes you only found a similar question, which meant you had to take that method and apply it to your own problem. Looking back, that last case taught me the most, because you had to understand the steps instead of just copying them.

What still surprises me is the accuracy. There was no ChatGPT and no AI behind those answers, just other students, and in my experience they were rarely wrong.

The other half of the work was reading. If I needed material for a project, I opened several articles, read them properly, and picked the one that actually answered my question. Somewhere in that process I was also learning to tell a good source from a lazy one, even if I would not have put it that way at the time.

Now I watch students a few years younger than me do it differently. They ask Gemini or ChatGPT to pick out the best points and then copy the result. The answer arrives faster and often looks cleaner than anything I could produce back then. What goes missing is the middle step, the part where you decide what to trust and why.

I am not saying my way was better. A tool that explains a concept at midnight is a real gift. But the shift from searching and judging to asking and accepting is the one I think about most. The research points the same way: how a device is used matters more than whether it is there.

Where technology genuinely helps

Let me start with the good news, because there is plenty of it. The biggest change is access to knowledge. A student in a small town can now watch a lecture from a top university, practise coding problems with instant feedback, or read open textbooks without paying anything. UNESCO's 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report says that information and communication technology can support equity and inclusion by reaching disadvantaged learners and spreading knowledge in formats that are both engaging and affordable (UNESCO, 2023). The same report adds that digital tools help systems manage large volumes of education data, which matters more than it sounds when a single office is responsible for thousands of students.

India is a good place to watch this play out. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 surveyed more than 649,000 rural children and found that about 90 percent of 14 to 16 year olds have a smartphone at home, while over 82 percent know how to use one (ASER Centre, 2025). Back in 2018 only 36 percent of rural households owned a smartphone. By 2024 that figure had reached 84 percent. That is a huge jump in six years, and it means a village student can, at least in theory, reach the same video lesson as a student in a big city.

Technology also makes learning more flexible. Recorded lectures can be paused and replayed. Practice platforms can adjust their difficulty. Students who feel shy about asking questions in a packed classroom sometimes find it easier to type them. Even so, UNESCO is careful not to oversell any of this. Its reading of the evidence is that certain tools help with certain kinds of learning in certain settings, and that the proof does not stretch much further than that (UNESCO, 2023). I think that caution is healthy.

The gap behind the screen

Everything above assumes a student has a device, a connection and a quiet place to use them. Plenty of students do not. The clearest picture of this came during the COVID-19 school closures. UNICEF found that at least 463 million schoolchildren, roughly a third of the world's total, could not be reached by any remote learning at all, whether it was delivered by internet, television or radio (UNICEF, 2020). Of those children, 72 percent lived in the poorest households in their countries and about three quarters lived in rural areas. South Asia had the largest absolute number, at least 147 million children.

Having a smartphone in the house is also not the same as having access to learning. The ASER 2024 findings show that among rural 14 to 16 year olds who can use a smartphone, 36.2 percent of boys own one, compared with 26.9 percent of girls (Press Trust of India, 2025). In a home with one shared phone, it is worth asking whose hands it usually ends up in. The same survey found that around 70 percent of this age group had been active on social media in the reference week (The News Minute, 2025), while a little over half had used a phone for something educational (Press Trust of India, 2025). So even where the device exists, it is not automatically being used for studying.

There is a content gap as well. UNESCO found that nearly 90 percent of the material in higher education repositories that hold open educational resources was created in Europe and Northern America, and that 92 percent of the content in the OER Commons global library is in English (UNESCO, 2023). For a student who learns best in a regional language, the free internet is not quite as free as it looks.

When the phone in the classroom works against you

Even where access is solved, technology can quietly get in the way. The OECD's PISA 2022 study tested nearly 700,000 fifteen-year-olds across 81 countries and economies, and it asked them about digital devices in maths lessons. On average across OECD countries, 65 percent said they get distracted by using devices in at least some lessons, and 59 percent said they get distracted by other students using theirs (OECD, 2023). Students who were distracted by their classmates' devices scored 15 points lower in maths. On top of that, 45 percent said they feel nervous or anxious when their phone is not near them.

What I like about this data is that it is not a simple case against screens. Students who spent up to an hour a day on digital devices for learning activities in school scored 14 points higher in maths than students who spent no time on them. Students who spent up to an hour a day on devices for leisure scored 49 points higher than those who spent five to seven hours a day, even after accounting for the socio-economic profile of students and schools (OECD, 2023). The OECD also reports that when students themselves led how devices were used in class, results tended to be worse, while teacher-led or shared use worked better. These are associations, not proof of cause, but the message is hard to miss. How much matters, what for matters, and who is steering matters.

We are short on evidence, and teachers are short on support

One thing that surprised me is how little solid proof exists for many of the products being sold to schools. UNESCO points out that education technology products change roughly every 36 months on average, which is faster than researchers can properly evaluate them. In the United Kingdom, only 7 percent of education technology companies had carried out randomised controlled trials (UNESCO, 2023). Schools and parents are often buying on promises.

Teachers sit right in the middle of this. The same report says many of them feel unprepared and lack confidence when teaching with technology. A tablet in the hands of an untrained teacher is a very expensive notepad. UNESCO also argues that governments need to regulate technology so that learners are protected from its negative effects, and that regulations written outside the education sector will not necessarily meet what classrooms actually need (UNESCO, 2023).

What a sensible approach looks like

UNESCO names three conditions that have to be in place before any technology can deliver on its promise: access, governance and regulation, and teacher preparation. It also recommends that technology enter education only when there is evidence that it is appropriate, equitable, scalable and sustainable (UNESCO, 2023). I find that a refreshingly boring standard, and boring is probably what education policy needs.

For students, the practical side is simpler. A few habits have helped me, and they line up with what the research suggests. Use technology to do something rather than to watch something, so write the code, solve the problem, then check the answer. Keep the phone out of arm's reach during focused study, because the PISA numbers match what most of us already feel. And treat AI tools as a tutor who explains rather than a ghostwriter who finishes the work. If I cannot explain an answer without the chatbot open, I have not learned it yet.

For schools and policymakers, the lesson is less about buying more devices and more about the unglamorous parts: reliable connectivity, teacher training, content in local languages, and honest evaluation before anything is scaled up. The title of UNESCO's report is a question, a tool on whose terms, and I think every school should be able to answer it.

Final thoughts

Digital technology is not the villain of modern education, and it is not the rescue plan either. It is a powerful tool that amplifies whatever is already there. In a well-supported classroom with trained teachers, it can stretch how far a student is able to reach. In a classroom without those things, it can widen the very gap it was meant to close. The students who gain the most over the next decade will not necessarily be the ones with the newest devices. They will be the ones whose schools and families keep asking what the technology is actually for. If we get that right, the screen stops being the point and goes back to being what it always should have been, a way to reach a good teacher, a good idea, or a good question.

References

- ASER Centre. (2025). Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2024. Summary published by the Press Information Bureau, Government of India. https://pib.gov.in/FactsheetDetails.aspx?Id=149118

- OECD. (2023). PISA 2022 Results (Volume II): Learning During and From Disruption. OECD Publishing, Paris. Press release: Decline in educational performance only partly attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2023/12/decline-in-educational-performance-only-partly-attributable-to-the-covid-19-pandemic.html

- Press Trust of India. (2025, January 29). Over 56% children in 14-16 age group use smartphone for educational purpose, says ASER report. Careers360. https://news.careers360.com/aser-report-says-over-56-percent-children-14-16-age-group-use-smartphone-for-educational-purpose

- The News Minute. (2025). 93% of Karnataka students have smartphone access at home, ASER report. https://www.thenewsminute.com/karnataka/93-of-karnataka-students-have-smartphone-access-at-home-aser-report

- UNESCO. (2023). Global Education Monitoring Report 2023: Technology in Education, A Tool on Whose Terms? UNESCO, Paris. https://doi.org/10.54676/UZQV8501

- UNICEF. (2020, August 27). COVID-19: At least a third of the world's schoolchildren unable to access remote learning during school closures, new UNICEF report says. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/covid-19-least-third-worlds-schoolchildren-unable-access-remote-learning-during