Holi, Soy Anita. 

Every generation of teachers has believed at some point that the newest thing on their desk was going to change everything. Some of them were right. Most of them were half right. All of them were living through exactly the same story you’re living through right now with AI. 

So let’s take a quick tour. The chalkboard-to-chatbot pipeline, condensed. 

The chalkboard ( early 1800s): the original one-to-many upgrade 

Before the chalkboard, teachers mostly worked with individual states, 1 student, 1 small surface, a lot of repeating yourself. The chalkboard sounds unremarkable now, but it was genuinely disruptive: for the first time, a teacher could show one idea to an entire room at once. Group instruction live problem-solving in front of everyone, discussion built around a shared visual. It wasn’t a small thing. It was the first real “one-to-many” teaching technology, and it stuck around for close to 2 centuries. 

Radio and film (1920s-1950s) : the first attempt at reach

Once radio entered the classroom, rural students who’d never had access to a specialist lecturer suddenly could hear one. Filmstrips and, late, educational television did something similar with images and motion, bringing content into rooms that couldn’t otherwise reach it. None of it was interactive. All of it was aimed at the same problem every EdTech wave since has quietly tried to solve : how do you get good teaching to more people than one room can hold? 

Computers (1980s) : drills, typing class, and the beginning of “the computer lab”

This is the era a lot of us picture first when we hear “ old school Edtech”- rows of beige boxes, typing tutorials, math drill software. It looks primitive now, but it was the first time a machine gave a student individual immediate feedback without a teacher standing over their shoulder. Narrow, repetitive, not exactly inspiring……and still, a genuinely new kind of interaction between a learner and a tool. 

Interactive whiteboards and the early internet (2000s) : the chalkboard learns to connect 

Interactive whiteboards merged the old one-to-many chalkboard model with a screen that could pull in video, the internet, and student response systems in real time. Around the same period, the early internet started making outside resources part of a normal lesson, not a special field trip to the computer lab. This is roughly where “using technology” started meaning something broader than “one specific gadget.”

LMS platform and MOOCs (2010s) : learning leaves the room entirely

Learning management systems centralized grading, content, and communication into one place. MOOCs took the “reach students who can’t be in the room” idea from radio’s era and scaled it to millions of people, for free, from anywhere with an internet connection. This is the point wher “school” and “the building” quietly stopped being the same word. 

Generative AI and chatbots (now) : personalization, finally, at scale

Which brings us to the moment you’re actually living in. AI tutors that adjust to how a specific student is stuck, chatbots that answer a question at 11pm when no teacher is awake to answer it, tools that generate a first draft of nearly anything in seconds. It’s the most personalized classroom technology has ever managed to be… and, same as every wave before it, it’s only as good as the design and judgement sitting underneath it. 

What actually changed and what didn’t 

Here’s the part I find genuinely interesting, now that I’ve had to sit with this history properly instead of just living through the current chapter of it : the tools kept changing shape, but the actual ambition never moved. Every single wave from chalk, radio, computers, whiteboards, MOOCs to AI was chasing some version of the same 3 things : reaching more people, giving faster feedback, and making learning fit the individual instead of the room. 

You are not living through a uniquely chaotic moment in education. You’re living through the same story, several generations deep, with a much faster tool. Somehow that’s more reassuring than it sounds. The teachers doing typing drills on beige computers in 1985 were figuring out exactly the kind of thing you’re figuring out right now. 

If it’s useful to see where your own AI Agent experiments sit in that much longer story, that’s the kind of thread I keep pulling on in the newsletter with The Shine Lab. 

Come along for the next chapter →

— Anita