This friction has prompted a wave of state mandates and districtwide device bans, but, according to CoSN’s 2025 Blaschke fellow and sixth-grade teacher Cooper Sved from Virginia, these sweeping measures fail to account for the structural realities of modern U.S. classrooms. In Sved’s view, at the heart of the debate is a broader struggle to reconcile the necessity of technical literacy with the preservation of focused, human-centered instruction.
“The tension that parents have with simultaneously wanting access to their kids while also not wanting them to be distracted … it’s just a microcosm of that larger tension that we feel right now towards technology,” Sved said. “I think it speaks to a larger tension that we feel in education, technology, [and] in the technology world as a whole."
Many states and local districts are implementing universal device bans or screen-time limits, but Sved warned that such broad-brush approaches often ignore the reality of instruction in typical classroom environments.
“I think the biggest misconception is that we can find a solution that fits everybody. There is no one way to guide teachers,” he said. “Every classroom is different. Every school district is different. Every school is different.”
According to Sved, a policy made in a state capital cannot possibly account for the minute-by-minute adjustments a trained educator makes. Having taught students ranging from kindergarten to sixth grade, he said, for example, that the needs of a multilingual learner in an urban center are vastly different from those of a student in a rural district or a special-education student with an individualized education program.
“It’s a fool’s errand to try and say that one way of using tech is going to be helpful to more than a single classroom,” he said.
Sved also encouraged district leaders to reframe how they see parent resistance to screen time. While school leaders often view pushback against technology as a hindrance to innovation, he suggested that educators instead view these concerns as essential feedback. He said the role of public education is to respond to the community’s needs, not circumvent them.
“I think sometimes in education we have a tendency to view that kind of tension as … a barrier to our work when I don’t really think it is. It is parents expressing their needs,” Sved said. By listening to those concerns, he said, districts have a better chance of aligning their tech implementation with the values of the families they serve.
He made the point that this alignment is complicated by the fact that many educators share the public’s hesitation regarding the long-term impact of a digital-first world.
“I think artificial intelligence and screen devices can have a strong negative sociological effect,” Sved acknowledged, questioning what these tools will do to human cognition and problem-solving. Yet, he argued that personal hesitation should not dictate educational policy.
“Screens and artificial intelligence are going to be an inevitable part of whatever the next phase of human society looks like,” he said. “We aren’t doing our due diligence as educators if we’re not realizing that that’s what work and life is going to look like beyond this current moment.”
To further illustrate this, Sved pointed to an unlikely digital pioneer: longtime television host, author and producer Fred Rogers. According to Sved, while Mr. Rogers was initially skeptical of television as a medium at its advent, he embraced its ubiquity and inevitability.
“He recognized [television] as a tool and he recognized it as … an inevitable part of what society looked like,” Sved explained, adding that rather than rejecting the medium, Rogers chose to populate it with "meaningful, thoughtful and creative" content. Sved said he believes schools must approach ed-tech deployment in a similar fashion: shaping the technology’s role, rather than simply allowing it to exist or banning it entirely.
In a recent report Sved published during fellowship at CoSN, he argued that in a high-functioning classroom, intentional tech use looks nothing like the passive scrolling found on social media. He instead defined effective use by three pillars: It is responsive, supplementary, and a tool for differentiation.
Moreover, rather than being “the primary mode of delivering content,” effective ed tech allows a single teacher to manage a room where students are entering the year at completely different levels of proficiency.
“One of the most important parts of ed-tech use … is using it as a tool to reach those learners who might not be able to get into that grade-level content … or who are beyond that grade-level content,” he said, adding that flexibility is critical because “intentional tech use … depends on the needs of those particular learners at that particular moment.”
