Graham Jackson, Blogs Editor
Featured Graphic by Abigail Dunlap
Technology at NCHS usually works seamlessly. A teacher can easily create and distribute assignments to their students on Schoology, instantaneously update their gradebook on Powerschool and administer tests on AP Classroom. Information zips through the air close to the speed of light, connecting NCHS to the rest of the world in milliseconds. However, earlier this school year, two major digital outages in the United States disrupted these systems and exposed the underlying vulnerabilities in the technology-education landscape.
In late October, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a disruption in Northern Virginia causing issues across the country (temporarily interrupting Schoology, Classlink and Powerschool). This issue appeared as the first quarter ended, disturbing the platforms teachers needed. This happened as they prepared to finalize their students’ grades, resulting in a significant inconvenience.
In November, a Cloudflare (another web services provider) outage ended up interrupting access to AP Classroom (the digital platform created by the College Board). This prevented teachers from administering some online tests and caused students to lose access to important course material.
These failures in digital infrastructure contributed to the wider debate about the relationship between technology and education as well as whether learning and school have become too tech-oriented. With the recent cellphone restrictions taking effect at NCHS along with the blocking of distracting sites (AI chatbots, etc.), this conversation has become increasingly relevant.
District Technology Integrator Emily Hernberg, who helps manage technology-related issues at NCPS, discussed the risks of large platform disruptions. “For that type of massive worldwide outage, the only mitigation is the flexibility to quickly pivot from the impacted technology resources to traditional methods of learning,” she said.
NCPS Manager of Technical Services Ian McHugh, who helps coordinate cyber-infrastructure projects across the district said that “the AWS outage was really hard because it impacted millions of users across the globe.” Mr. McHugh highlights a truth about a lot of digital infrastructure: one small mishap manages to spread through a network like a wildfire.
Mr. McHugh went on to detail the outage’s effects on NCHS: “It had a cascading effect in that our internal systems were completely fine, but since many of our significant 3rd party providers (such as Schoology) rely on AWS for their back end, they went down.”
The fact that many large cyber-infrastructure issues are out of the control of NCPS means that teachers and faculty must take a look at their dependence on technology and prepare contingencies for rainy days.
Recognizing the importance of versatility and flexibility, Ms. Hernberg said “I think it’s really important to remember that technology is a tool. Technology is not learning in and of itself.” This may be seemingly easy to forget in the tech focused world that is 2026. There is scarcely a student in NCHS that would have been old enough to remember what learning was like before macs and chromebooks.
Ms. Hernberg said “As teachers, we naturally build in redundancies, whether it’s simply having paper and pencils available in the classroom or backup activities if there’s a major outage. Experienced teachers know that we have to be adaptable.”
While the shift to pen and paper may be underlined by some concern about cyber-disruptions, the primary motivator is likely an attempt to stave off increasingly complex AI and digital cheating techniques on exams and assignments.
Ms. Hernberg says the shift is “not just a response to the outages; it’s also a response to the increasing prevalence of AI.” Free and paid versions of generative AI chatbots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are readily available to anyone with an internet connection and have been widely used by students for unethical purposes.
She said “some teachers have actually started combining the analog tools of pen and paper with the digital tools like a handwriting transcription bot in Magic School. I believe that teachers are starting to pivot, but it’s not just a response to the outages.”
It is not only NCPS where teachers are changing their classwork to adapt to new technology but also teachers from across the country. According to The Economist, a poll by the research group Intelligent showed that approximately 50% of high school and university level teachers either did or were planning on mandating handwritten work. Of the participants, 66% said that they were altering their assignments in response to the prevalence of ChatGPT.
While it may seem like technology is being regurgitated or outright rejected by educators, it is fundamentally here to stay, and far too integrated into the tech-education space to say a proper goodbye. With next school year’s complete phone-ban looming in the horizon and teachers constantly adapting to new tech, the future of the digital-education space is anything but certain.
