The tech and AI debate is on and it’s real. Should we be harnessing the power of technology like AI or should our classes be as tech-free as possible? How does tech help or hinder student’s learning? What should we do as language teachers? Which way should we go. Here we’ll dig into this and see what some experts have to say on the subject.

This edition of The TEFLer mirrors a piece in Managing in TEFL, there's some lighter and other bits of heavier editing as we approach it from a teaching, classroom perspective.

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Some of us are early-adopters, some of us like to be at the cutting edge of whatever is going on, whether that's the latest trends in language business management or educational thinking or technology, and some of us aren't. Wherever we are on the scale of adoption, we all know about AI, Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably already using some AI tools, possibly without even knowing it, we’re probably wondering about what more it can do for us, we’ve probably seen talks or attended conferences about AI in education and in business, we’re probably excited and probably a bit nervous, maybe unsettled too.

How can we harness tech and AI in our clsssrooms when we, just like most people, don’t know what to do ourselves? Do have a vision for the use of technology, including, of course, AI, in our classrooms? How can we lean into this space critically and think about both the upsides and the downsides of AI and the use of technology? This definitely isn’t an anti-tech, “good-old-days” kind of piece, it’s more like “what-are-we-supposed-to-do?”

The Disengaged Teen

One thing we seem to be seeing more and more in our classrooms are disengaged, or at least less motivated, students, especially teenagers. We can see that when students are engaged and motivated, they learn. If they are less engaged, it all becomes more difficult, they are less likely to keep coming and over time we have fewer and fewer students.

Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop are educators of international standing and have recently written a book called “The Disengaged Teen - Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better” and in conversation with Ezra Klein on his podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-rebecca-winthrop.htm Rebecca Winthrope and he discuss rethinking the purpose of education. In this conversation they go deep into all sorts of areas and one key issue is around tech and, especially, around AI. There are all sorts of ideas we can take from it which will in turn help to shape our classrooms.

Engaging with tech, engaging with AI.

They talked about the how we need to do things differently in our schools and how AI can help us deal with diversity, encourage self-directed learning and facilitate project work, they talked about how it can help us with motivation and engagement. Is it an educational utopia where with AI students can have effectively each have a different teacher with perfectly personalised lessons for each learner? AI can also be a force for equity as everyone with access can gain the benefits no matter where they are in the world, no matter who their teacher is, everyone can benefit.

Or maybe, they countered, most students learn best together, and  the idea of one screen for one student isn’t what we want. Schools should bring students together to learn, work and play together. Increasingly schools are going for mobile phone bans and moving away from tablets-for-all and then along comes AI and there’s another radical shift. Everyday we read about tech leaders and other experts would prefer to send their children to tech-free or tech-light schools, that's food for thought.

Ed-tech business

Ezra and Rebecca talked about how ed-tech companies exist to make a profit for their shareholders rather than to serve the learners and aren’t concerned about their well-being. As the biggest tech companies rush to get us and our students on board using their AI, huge questions remain around safeguarding and appropriacy of our students using this technology.

We almost all work in language schools that are, hopefully, profitable businesses that keeps us all in work. But profit should never come over our students, of course, our learners’ well-being should always be a top priority.

On the one-hand, ed-tech can help us and our students and drive student engagement, on the other it can potentially do great harm.

What can AI do for us?

The answer to this is ever-evolving, AI can be our personal assistants doing much of the heavy-lifting for us. It can help us busy teachers to save huge amounts of time. It can help us plan, it can help us create materials, it can mark homework and exams, it can plan courses, translate for us, etc, etc. It can be a hugely powerful tool, we just need to know how to use it. Like all personal assistants, we do need to check it's right, we almost certainly know better than it and definitely we know our students and our context better, we need to look at everything it does critically and find the problems. We definitely can't trust it to be error free, it makes some crazy mistakes, especially with maths, it seems.

AI can also help us to include our marginalised students and make our classes more accessible to all, it can be an inclusivity councellor for us. We can ask AI, whether that's ChatGPT (the original), Microsoft's CoPilot or Google's Gemini, a question and it will give us an answer in seconds, we know that the better the prompt, the better the answer. A concrete example of a prompt, “I'm an English language teacher working with primary students. I have an autistic student. How can I help them?” This immediately gives us a full and comprehensive answer of concepts, ideas and actions we can take. For those of us who know something about the area, we will, almost certainly, agree with a huge amount of what it says, we'll be familiar with some of it and others will be new to us. If we're novices in the area, it can give us an amazing place to start. Of course, again, we must be aware that we know ourselves, our students and our context better, and yes, we need to look for errors and most importantly we must approach it critically, but, wow, it can be incredible. Try it with one of your classroom puzzles and see what it does.

AI and cheating

AI is part of our students’ lives, there's no escaping that. Yes, we can channel its use and help students use it effectively yo support, extend and personalise their learning, if we are given the right training and the access to resources. However, we can see how our students use it to do their homework and effectively to cheat.

We know students using tech to cheat is ridiculous. Homework is to help them learn and cheating prevents them from learning, it's a problem. We can probably feel instintively when something has been AI-ed. We can use AI checkers, although that's just an unwinnable game as everything develops. What can we do? We can rethink how we use homework and testing, we can reconsider how we might engage our students.

Using tech badly in our classes

We want our classes to be dynamic  engaging, interactive,  communicative places with students using the language meaningfully as much as possible. Tech can help us but it can also hinder. How many times do we play Kahoot, for example, as a fun activity towards the end of the class? The screen shines, the app loads, the students are excited, it's great, right? Yes, but, it takes skill to make it really work. How often does it lead instead to isolated students pressing buttons on their phones in a sterile, non-communicative and just actually boring ways. “Students love it”, and they might, but how can we develop our use of these tools to really make them doing and help to drive engagement, cooperation and group learning in our classes.

Gaining skills and confidence

AI is only as good as the quality of the input it gets. Many of these tasks will take a huge amount of time and trial and error to make work effectively. So many of us lack the skills and the confidence to make it work.

The same is true for tech in general, its only as good as the teacher using it. We need to think about how to use it skillfully and purposefully.

What do we want for our students in our classes? We want them to gain skills and confidence in language, how csn we harness tech and with AI to help us sll?

Balance

As we rush/nudge/are dragged into AI and increasing ed-tech, let's be engaged, let's be critical and let's always be guided by what's best for for our students.

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