What COVID Actually Taught Us About EdTech (and Why We Let It Slip)

COVID forced schools everywhere to adopt technology overnight: learning from home, video calls, and platforms like Google Classroom becoming essential almost instantly. Once the immediate pressure eased, a lot of that momentum faded and many classrooms reverted to how things worked before. The real missed opportunity wasn't the disruption itself. It was letting that forced adoption fade instead of using it to build something more sustainable.

COVID was real. It was devastating, it upended the world overnight, and I lived through it in schools just like you did. I'm not here to relitigate any of that.

What I do want to talk about is something else entirely: the chance it gave education to change, and how much of that chance we've let slip away.

For a few years now, I've kept coming back to this thought, because it still bothers me. We were handed something no professional learning day or system-wide initiative could have manufactured: a genuine, forced reason for every teacher, in every school, to try something different. And then, largely, we let it go.

What actually changed in classrooms during COVID?

Practically overnight, we had to embrace technology whether we were ready or not. Learning from home became the norm. We were running Zoom calls, recording Loom videos, and leaning on Google Classroom in ways most of us never had before.

That shift wasn't optional, and it wasn't gentle. But it worked, out of necessity, and for a while it genuinely felt like education might be heading somewhere different.

There was no time for a slow rollout or a staged professional learning plan. Teachers who'd never touched a video conferencing tool were running full lessons through one within days. It was messy, and it was stressful, but it proved something important: teachers can adapt to new technology fast when there's a genuine reason to.

Why did so much of that progress disappear?

Once the immediate crisis eased and more people were vaccinated, a lot of that momentum quietly evaporated. Tools like Google Classroom, Loom, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams that had become second nature started slipping out of everyday use again.

We had a genuine opportunity to rethink how we approached teaching, and once the pressure was off, plenty of us said "this is too hard" and drifted back to the old ways. That's the real missed opportunity here. Not the disruption itself, but what we did, or didn't do, once the disruption passed.

I understand the instinct. Change is exhausting, especially change nobody chose, and especially after everyone had already been through something genuinely hard. Going back to what felt familiar wasn't laziness. It was relief. But relief and progress aren't the same thing, and I think we let one stand in for the other for far too long.

I don't think we're getting that exact moment back. We don't get a global pandemic every week, and that particular forcing function is gone. But that doesn't mean the underlying opportunity has to be gone with it.

That's really the distinction I want to draw. The crisis was temporary. The habits we built during it didn't have to be. Somewhere along the way, we treated the tools as part of the emergency itself, rather than as things worth keeping once the emergency passed.

What could we have done differently?

We could have kept building on what we'd already started. More consistent use of tools like Google Classroom and OneNote. More video conferencing woven into everyday practice, not just emergency lessons. A genuinely different approach to how we structure and deliver teaching, rather than defaulting straight back to exactly how things looked before 2020.

None of that required reinventing teaching from scratch. It required holding onto habits we'd already built under pressure, instead of letting them lapse the moment the pressure lifted.

I understand why it happened. Once the immediate danger passed, everyone wanted a return to something familiar. Normal felt like relief. But somewhere in that relief, we let go of tools and habits that had genuinely made classrooms more flexible and more accessible, not just more digital for the sake of it.

Has anything good actually stuck around?

Yes, and it's worth genuinely celebrating what has.

A colleague of mine recently had a class where a lot of students were away for an assessment task. Instead of leaving those students to catch up blind, she recorded herself giving the instructions, so every student, present or not, had access to exactly the same information.

That's a small thing on paper. But it's a habit that simply wouldn't have existed in most classrooms before COVID forced us to think that way. It's proof that some of what we learned did stick, even if most of it didn't.

It's also a good example of what the whole opportunity was actually about. It was never really about using more technology for its own sake. It was about making classrooms work better for the students in them, including the ones who, for whatever reason, aren't physically there on a given day.

Want more examples like that, the small, genuinely useful habits worth carrying forward? Explore the Innovative EdTech episodes on the Tristan Heron YouTube channel for tutorials and tools built around exactly this.

What can I actually do about this now?

You don't need a pandemic to justify embedding technology more consistently into your classroom. You just need to decide it's worth doing anyway, and start.

That might mean recording instructions for students who miss a lesson, the way my colleague did. It might mean actually using the learning management system your school already has, rather than letting it sit half-used. It might mean building video conferencing or recorded content into your normal practice, not just as a backup plan for emergencies.

None of these are dramatic changes. They're the same tools most of us already have access to, used a little more deliberately than we currently do. That's really the whole point. The technology was never the hard part. Deciding to keep using it, once it stopped being mandatory, was.

The opportunity COVID handed us as a profession has largely passed. But the individual opportunity, in your own classroom, hasn't. That one is still entirely yours to take.

I'd rather look forward than dwell on what we didn't do. There's no point spending more energy on frustration about a moment that's gone. What matters now is whether you decide, in your own classroom, this term, to build one habit that makes teaching more flexible for your students. That's genuinely within reach, regardless of what happened, or didn't happen, at a system-wide level.

If you want ongoing support to build these habits properly, rather than letting good intentions fade the way so many classrooms did after COVID, join the Empowered Educator Hub. We'll work through it together, one practical step at a time.

Tristan