Technology encompasses a wide range of tools that facilitate human activities and improve efficiency. It encompasses innovations and systems like computers, the Internet, robots, augmented reality, virtual classrooms, and more. This category also includes tools used to enhance teaching, allowing students to learn in more ways than simply lectures and reading.

For example, coding and AI tools allow students to create and program their own apps or software programs. They also help them learn through games and virtual field trips. These tools can encourage more active learning, help students build 21st-century skills, and provide teachers with data about student performance.

When a new technology becomes widely adopted, it tends to scale the types of behavior that are made easier by it. When TVs became popular in America, for example, they exponentially scaled the behavior of zoning out in front of them, hypnotized by their constant visual stimulation. This is a powerful dynamic, and it means that our decisions about what technologies to use are important ones.

When scholars talk about the nature of technology, they often fall into one of two sharply divergent traditions. The first, which Schatzberg describes as instrumentalist, reduces it to a process of calculating the most efficient means to a given end. The other, which he calls determinist, views it as an unguided force that operates without a moral compass of its own. To overcome this dichotomy, he urges scholars to make a conscious effort to create and popularize an alternative view of technology as a creative force that can inspire moral choice.