The screen war is here. Here's where Kiddom stands.

I'm building Kiddom through my experience as a public school teacher and department leader.

Before any of these screen bans, I spent years in the classroom during the proliferation of "blended learning." Back then (wow, I sound old), I didn't have "high quality instructional materials" to draw from or modify. Resources like TeachersPayTeachers and Pinterest seemed fine, but I didn't have the money to pay my peers and colleagues. So instead, I spent countless hours every weekend authoring 9th grade algebra curriculum from scratch, making sure it aligned to my state's standards and actually spoke to my students in a way the textbook never could.

I did this as a first year teacher. Please don't ask your first-year staff to do this. It will age them rapidly.

I was also teaching over-age students whom the system had disserviced, so I learned quickly what actually helps young people learn and what gets in the way. Kids learn fast how to cheat, game, or disrupt if you use technology as a glorified babysitter. I believe we as the K-12 industry would've arrived at this moment sooner if it weren't for the pandemic pushing everyone into "distance learning."

That's right, you're reading the subtext correctly. I believe this anti-screen movement is grounded in truth. And yes, I'm the co-founder of a rapidly growing company building learning intelligence technology. Hi.

Sixteen states have introduced legislation this year to limit device time in K-12 classrooms. A school district in Michigan banned Chromebooks in its elementary school last month. Cambridge, Massachusetts is weighing a rule that would end student-facing screens for pre-K through second grade. Parents are opting their kids off school-issued devices and organizing networks to help others do the same.

This isn't a fringe movement. It is a reckoning.

Calling for a device ban is a reasonable first step, not a final answer. The harder question is whether our technology choices have ever truly served teachers and students, and whether teachers had any voice in those decisions. Kiddom is built around answering that question with a yes.

Teachers have known something for eons: the best learning breakthroughs happen in real time, and they generally don't involve all children sitting in rows on their individual screens.

A student writes something in front of their teacher or peers, and turns around with a eureka smirk. A small group working through a problem with manipulatives generates ahas. A young teen reads something intently, marks it up, and then out of nowhere jolts their hand in the air out of excitement.

Screens can interrupt these moments. They can also support them, when they sit in the right place and aren't asked to substitute for the rigorous, teacher-driven work that actually produces learning. 

As Kiddom co-founder, I have the privilege of visiting our customers across the country.

The best classrooms use Kiddom as instructional infrastructure: sometimes invisible, sometimes not, but totally indispensable to brilliant, joyful, and rigorous teaching and learning. Students write in workbooks, sketch diagrams, and talk through problems with each other. A device enters the room purposefully and briefly. Maybe a student interacts with an interactive math manipulative for a few minutes, then returns to paper. The teacher isn't standing at the front. They're circulating the room, personal device in hand, guided by signals their intuition had already picked up. If you pop in during a certain stretch of class, you might only see papers and pencils at work.

Here is what Kiddom could be doing in the background:

• Reading exit tickets from the prior lesson and highlighting misconceptions for the teacher to address
• Flagging which students are behind and grouping them before the next lesson
• Building tomorrow's small-group plan while students submit today's exit tickets
• Drafting next week's re-teach, with teachers reviewing and accepting or modifying the recommendations

The screen time is brief and purposeful. The technology enables the teacher to sustainably deliver on high quality instructional materials, without presenting itself as the core driver of instruction and assessment.

That is what we mean at Kiddom by "Digital Forward, Human First." The digital is quiet, invisible, and powerful. The human work happens in the foreground, face-to-many-faces. Because learning is a social phenomenon, and students are developing as humans in real time. Their connection to peers isn’t incidental; it’s foundational to that development.

The distinction that matters most: the problem with most edtech is not that it involves screens. The problem is how those screens are positioned within the learning experience and whether they align with the pedagogy at hand. 

When screens pull focus away from instruction, the teacher competes and  is often at odds with the pedagogy expected. 

Kiddom is built to serve the teacher and the entire classroom at-large. In support of the instruction, not in competition. 

Our Learning Intelligence Technology operates in a closed ecosystem. It never trains on student data. It never interacts with students directly. It handles the hidden labor of teaching: grading, grouping, prep, misconception analysis. All of it. So teachers can focus on connecting with students, the work no algorithm can do.

What history tells us

We have been here before, many times. And the lessons have been similar each time.

When calculators entered math classrooms in the 1970s and 80s, educators split. One side feared the end of arithmetic. The other saw a tool that could free students to tackle harder problems. A blanket ban never came. What emerged was something more durable: a shared understanding of when and how a tool earns its place. Calculators are standard equipment now. The teachers who use them best were never afraid of them. They were deliberate.

When the Common Core learning standards were authored and launched, legislators handed schools ambitious new standards without asking teachers how to teach them nor creating some kind of criteria by which publishers could use to determine how well their new content was aligned. The rollout became a cautionary tale about what happens when big ideas ungrounded in the realities of classrooms  move faster than professional capacity and teacher needs. Districts that succeeded gave teachers time, quality materials, and room to adapt. Districts that struggled treated the standards as a mandate to enforce rather than a framework to teach. Ultimately, many states abandoned the initiative, though the standards live on as renamed and revised bodies of work.

When the 1:1 device boom arrived, districts spent billions. Los Angeles spent over a billion dollars on iPads before the program unraveled. The device was never the problem. Deploying it without curriculum, training, and teacher support was.

Each episode followed the same arc. A promising program or tool arrives. Adoption outpaces understanding. Results disappoint. Backlash follows. Then, slowly, practice catches up to potential, but only in classrooms where teachers had real support and real voice. 

Teachers have a name for this pattern: initiative fatigue. A new tool arrives with a mandate and a promise. Two years later it is gone. The next one takes its place. And the teacher who was never asked is the one who has to make it work anyway.

There is no silver bullet in education. 

The screen war (today’s silver bullet) will follow the same arc if we let it.

The risk right now is that legislative speed outpaces classroom reality. A blanket ban feels decisive. It is easier to count devices than to measure whether a teacher is supported, prepared, and able to sustain rigorous instruction without burning out.

Interrogate your solutions. If a tool is not enhancing the delivery of your strongest curriculum, remove it. That is a reasonable call. But do not confuse a poorly implemented tool with a broken idea.

The question is not whether screens have a place in learning. The question is whether teachers have a voice in deciding what that place should be. Before lawmakers act, that voice needs to be in the room.

Each of these debates took years to resolve. In the meantime, students lost ground in classrooms that were used as testing sites for top-down policy decisions. We cannot afford the same mistake with screens.

I do not think screens should be banned wholesale. For young students, screens belong in the background, helping their teacher prepare. Not in front of them during a lesson.

That is the edtech I set out to build. That is what Kiddom is. 

It is the infrastructure connecting what is intangible: the curriculum sequence, the assessment design, the pedagogical intent. 

This is the connective tissue that makes a classroom coherent. If you are a teacher navigating the screen pressure this year, we want to hear from you. What do you wish people asked you before banning programs or tools from your practice? What is working in your classroom? What should be done to give you more of that pep in your step that students so desperately need every day from their teacher?