(This is my eighth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
On the whole I like The Hechinger Report. They have a lenient policy in regards to sharing their articles and they tackle some important issues.
To its credit, the opinion piece only mentions Amplify once, and even then it’s in the author bio at the bottom. It’s trying very hard not to be an ad for the company while still leaving people feeling more favorable towards companies like it.
Which is to say, it’s an opinion piece, it doesn’t hide that it’s an opinion piece, and one should approach it as such as they look for the things with which they agree and disagree. (You’ll find both in there, because we’re human.)
As is my theme for Blaugust, I’m not going to give a rundown of the article and go over what I like/dislike about it. It’s what made me want to write something, but that something is not a review.
I used to be an early adopter. New things came out, I played with them, enjoyed them (or didn’t), and tried to figure out how to use them in my classroom.
(At the time I was a traveling visual art teacher and only rarely had access to a computer lab so how I got to use edtech was somewhat limited, but we had our moments.)
The problem was that not every tech “innovation” is actually that. Sometimes disruptions don’t lead to better things, they just make the things that worked well work less well.
This was either harder to spot or just less common back then. It seems nowadays a lot of the “cool, new things” are heavily branded, commercialized, and/or meant to funnel students towards siloed ecosystems where they’ll spend their adult lives making those companies more profitable.
That motivation is incompatible with my motivation as a teacher. I’m not teaching the next generation of Adobe users, I’m teaching the next generation of filmmakers. There’s overlap, but I refuse to see that Venn diagram as a single circle.
(My own alma mater didn’t get it. At the time, they taught that if you wanted to make digital art you needed 1. A Mac and 2. Adobe products. Exceptions weren’t discussed, and to this day there are teachers in my field who believe this.)
In a few days I’ll be honored to give a short talk to newly hired digital media arts teachers in my district. I won’t be the only one talking, but a big emphasis of mine will be on choice.
They’ll be shown Adobe products for editing video. I’m going to point out Kdenlive.
They’ll be shown generative AI (again, from within Adobe tools). I’m going to point out free, openly licensed content made by humans, and tools that can be used to make more of it.
They’ll be shown products that require subscriptions (ones that my district pays) to be useful. I’m going to point out tools that will never require that, some of which will work in a web browser with all of the editing done client-side.
I can’t guarantee they’ll all walk away from what I believe are the “right” things. I don’t want to be in a position where I have that much authority over another teacher. But I do want them to know there are options.
With those options, hopefully enough of them will pick the more sustainable routes.
30 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have. But then again, I didn’t have someone explain it to me.