EdTech Successes and Failures: Sixteen Years of Both

After sixteen years of teaching, I've had plenty of EdTech successes and just as many failures, and both matter. Successes don't need to be dramatic to count, and failures don't need to derail a lesson if you're willing to pivot. Some of my best classroom moments came from simple tools used well, and some of my worst tech fails turned into genuinely good outcomes once I stopped panicking and found another way through.

Success and failure are just part of life, and after sixteen years of teaching, I've had plenty of both when it comes to EdTech. Let me share a few of each, and why I think neither should scare you off trying something new.

What does an EdTech success actually look like?

It doesn't need to be dramatic. Some of my favourite wins have been genuinely simple.

Early in my career, I had a Year 11 Advanced English class studying Fahrenheit 451. I got the class collaborating on a shared Google Doc, working through techniques and examples for revision. At the time, that felt genuinely innovative to me, still fairly new to Google Docs myself. I still have that document today, and I still go back and look at it. For a first attempt at collaborative technology, it worked properly, and that early win stuck with me.

I think that's part of why it's remained so memorable. It wasn't a polished, fully planned masterclass in EdTech. It was a fairly simple idea, executed properly, at a point in my career when I was still working out what I was doing with any of this. That combination, simple idea plus proper execution, still holds up as a formula years later.

More recently, I've had real success with Google Vids for simple video creation, and with Pixton, which I used to replace a struggling assessment task for a group of mid-to-lower ability, disengaged students, and saw genuinely strong engagement as a result. I also worked with a former teacher librarian using Animoto to create book trailers for our wide reading program, which remains one of my favourite classroom memories.

There have been plenty of others too: Pear Deck, Nearpod, Storyboard That, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams. Celebrate the small wins. A tool doesn't need to produce something extraordinary to count as a genuine success.

I think a lot of teachers hold back from trying new tools because they're waiting for some guaranteed, impressive outcome before they'll commit to it. That's setting the bar in the wrong place. If a tool helps even one lesson run more smoothly, or gets even a handful of disengaged students genuinely participating, that's already worth calling a win.

What happens when the technology actually fails?

It happens constantly, and the key is not letting it derail you.

Just last week, I had an assignment properly scheduled in Google Classroom, everything set up correctly, except I forgot to actually attach the Google Doc students needed. A student put their hand up: "Sir, there's nothing there." I didn't panic. I opened my laptop, fixed it on the spot, and the lesson continued.

Small mistakes like this happen more often than any teacher likes to admit publicly, but they're rarely the disaster they feel like in the moment. A minute of quiet fixing at the front of the room, and the lesson carries on as if nothing happened at all.

Another time, I wanted students to build an interactive timeline using Wakelet, looking at director Tim Burton, embedding videos and other media. I'd modelled it properly, presented it clearly, and then discovered the platform was blocked at school. Students couldn't access it at all. I didn't crumble. I took a moment, worked out an alternative, and moved on.

That one stung a bit more, since I'd put real preparation into the modelled example beforehand. But the lesson still ran, just differently to how I'd planned it. The prep work wasn't wasted, it just got redirected.

What's a good example of a failure turning into a success anyway?

A pre-service teacher I worked with recently, genuinely excellent, embraced EdTech properly, and built a fantastic wrap-up activity for a mini unit on the text Mouse using Wayground.

We'd set it up so students would log in through Google Classroom, but the direct web link was also visible on our main learning display. I warned her beforehand that someone would inevitably ignore the instructions and log in the wrong way. Sure enough, several students typed the link straight into their browser instead, which caused some backend issues and distorted the data we collected.

We didn't finish the lesson that day. But rather than treating it as a failure, she simply duplicated the activity and ran it again the next day. From what she told me afterwards, it worked perfectly the second time around.

I think that's a great example for any teacher, experienced or brand new, to hold onto. The measure of success wasn't whether the first attempt went perfectly. It was whether she was willing to try again properly, rather than writing the whole idea off because the first run hit a snag nobody could have fully predicted.

What's the actual lesson in all of this?

That success and failure are largely about how you choose to define them. A scheduling mistake, a blocked platform, a login mix-up, none of these need to be treated as disasters. They're just part of using technology in a live classroom with real students.

Don't crumble when something goes wrong. Stop, think, adjust, or pivot to something different entirely if that's what the moment calls for. Sometimes things genuinely go sideways in a lesson, and that's simply part of doing this job well. What actually matters is what you do next.

Sixteen years in, I still don't know what's going to go wrong in any given lesson, and honestly, that's part of what keeps this job interesting. The tools change, the specific problems change, but the underlying skill, staying calm and finding a way through, stays exactly the same.

Want more honest reflections like this, alongside practical EdTech guidance? Explore what's inside the Empowered Educator Hub, built around exactly this kind of real classroom experience.

If you want more honest, practical EdTech guidance grounded in real classroom experience, check out the Empowered Educator Hub. We talk about the failures as openly as the wins.

Tristan