As an ed tech prof, nothing wrangles me like losing institutional access to a set of curated digital resources without warning! Last semester, my B.Ed. students worked tirelessly on many projects — including an e-book on social media integration in classrooms, Maker-inspired lessons and projects, and two-minute tech tip presentations that we then curated into a very useful spreadsheet, categorized by the pedagogical affordances and constraints of the tools each student had reviewed.<\/p>\n

We did all of this work inside of Google Classroom — but today, when I went to access that space, I discovered that my Google Classrooms had disappeared from my institutional account. Without warning. This is one of many reasons that teachers hate technology. Systems and IT policies can undermine the real educational affordances of digital tools. I assumed — erroneously — that my students would always have access to the classroom we built together. And today, I found out the hard way that that wasn’t the case.<\/p>\n