The first instinct of any school meeting a new technology is often to block it. Calculators, phones, YouTube, and now AI. It isn’t necessarily a poor instinct. When you’re responsible for other people’s children, and something arrives that nobody yet understands, a block buys time.
I saw this first hand when I visited Hamilton County, Tennessee; a district that takes STEM seriously, and had invited me out to observe its computer science and maker program. I tried to access ChatGPT on the school wifi, but quickly realized it was blocked. The fix was easy: I simply used the mobile data on my phone to access it instead. Every student in that building would have done the same. This is not a district that’s behind or an outlier. It is doing what the majority of over 13,000 school districts in this country have defaulted to.
