Welcome to Ep 163: Low Tech, No Tech Accessibility Considerations with Sarah Silverman. Sarah Silverman, PhD is an independent faculty developer and instructor of Disability Studies. As an autistic educator, she has a personal stake in Neurodiversity as well as extensive college teaching and faculty development experience. Her interests include accessible and feminist pedagogy, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the history of the neurodiversity movement. Her book Classroom Mindscapes: An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press in September. In this conversation, Sarah and I discuss options for faculty members who are considering low tech, no tech, or more analog classroom activities or educational environments. We talk about access friction and decisions that might need to be considered in order to meet the needs of current students with competing access and technology needs. Sarah has been recently working on this topic and will have an upcoming workshop on this on July 21st, 2026. You can find the sign-up or the results of that session in this episode’s resource section below. You’ll also be able to find the other resources we mention throughout the conversation there.
Resources
Reach out to Sarah Silverman via LinkedIn or her website.
To learn more about the July 21, 2026 workshop specifically on low tech and no tech accessibility considerations, see this website post.
Resources Mentioned during the episode:
Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal Design for Learning (2002)
A practical reader in University Design for Learning (2026)
Intentional Tech by Derek Bruff
Transcript
49:10
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Low-tech, no-tech, access friction, neurodiversity, universal design for learning, accessible pedagogy, technology ban, student variability, AI distraction, note-taking, classroom policies, learner variability, inclusive teaching, digital accessibility, faculty development.
SPEAKERS
Sarah Silverman, Lillian Nave
Lillian Nave 00:00
Welcome to Think UDL, the Universal Design for Learning podcast, where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding, and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to episode 163 Low tech and no tech accessibility considerations with Sarah Silverman. Sarah Silverman is an independent faculty developer and instructor of disability studies. As an autistic educator, she has a personal stake in neurodiversity, as well as extensive college teaching and faculty development experience. Her interests include accessible and feminist pedagogy, universal design for learning, and the history of the neurodiversity movement. Her book, Classroom Mindscapes: An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators, is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press in September. In this conversation, Sarah and I discuss options for faculty members who are considering low-tech, no-tech, or more analog classroom activities or educational environments. We talk about access friction and decisions that might need to be considered in order to meet the needs of current students with competing access and technology needs. Sarah has been working on this topic recently, and will have an upcoming workshop on July 20-first. If you’re listening to this podcast before or even after that date in 2020-six you’ll be able to find the sign up or the results of that session in this episode’s resource section, just before the transcript on Think udl.org You’ll also be able to find the other resources we mentioned throughout the conversation there. Thank you for listening to the Think UDL podcast. Welcome, Sarah Silverman. Thank you so much for joining me again on the Think UDL podcast.
Sarah Silverman 02:23
Thanks so much, Lillian. I’m really thrilled to be back.
Lillian Nave 02:26
Yeah, I, of course, follow your work and have gotten to see a lot of your presentations, and think what you have to say is quite interesting, especially in this faculty developer world, and lately I’ve seen an interest in our world about low-tech and no-tech learning environments, especially with a maybe a backlash from AI or ed tech, so those sorts of things are sort of creeping in on pedagogy. So, I know you’ve written and spoken extensively about things in this area, but especially access friction, which is the structural and cognitive and physical friction students encounter when they’re trying to engage with learning materials, but what happens when, let’s say, well-meaning instructors pivot to a low-tech or a no-tech pedagogy, like going using paper only or whiteboards or requiring paper notebooks rather than using a laptop. What forms of access friction are they inadvertently introducing, particularly for just neurodivergent or disabled students?
Sarah Silverman 03:35
I love that you’re interested in the access friction framing, so when I try to define that in like one simple sentence, I’ll usually say it’s a conflict of access needs. So, anytime that two different sets of needs or more come into conflict, and that can obviously happen in regular life. It can happen when you’re on a train car, or in a concert venue, or even if you’re at your own dinner table and you know one person’s voice is very quiet, another person has a hearing impairment or something like that, but it very frequently occurs in the classroom. You can have some have students with different sets of needs and access needs, and those can also even conflict with those of the instructor from time to time. We have plenty of instructors who have disabilities or who are neurodivergent, so one of the ways access friction, I think, pops up in our discussions of low or no tech pedagogy is a lot of instructors that want to explore or pursue this option will think of this decision as actually somewhat inclusive and student-centered and enabling participation for a lot of students, because it helps them, at least from their perspective, reduce distractions and be able to focus on the content and the other people, and maybe even apply some of their emerging and developing skills without the temptation to have. AI kind of help or kind of over rely on AI in some circumstances, and so another way I’ve thought about this is that there are also several disabilities I can think of where people may have challenges that could be helped by reducing technology in the classroom, so I always just like to mention those, so one is either migraine or traumatic brain injury or other disabilities, where looking at a screen or anything that’s backlit or brightly lit can be impossible or difficult or fatiguing in some way. I am a very long time migraine sufferer, and I remember during Covid when we transitioned to being on Zoom and computers all the time. I had a really tough time, and then there’s definitely some forms of neurodivergence. I’m thinking of ADHD specifically, but others might be factors as well, where notifications coming in, lots of different visually engaging content that might be available on a computer screen, or frequently changing backgrounds, and you know, different things like that could, could create a distraction. So there may be a fair number of students whose participation in the classroom is quite supported and enabled by reducing technology when we move towards sort of all out bans on specific devices, or on switching over to just paper and speech, which is like a common version of low-tech teaching that I hear about, you’re also going to make participation more difficult for people with a number of other disabilities or needs, so definitely blind or visually impaired students are going to have difficulty participating with any text-based material, unless it’s in an accessible digital format. I think, additionally, there are a lot of people who will struggle, for various reasons, to take efficient notes by hand, and who are going to benefit from having some typing device. I’ve also seen more and more, and many times, students with hearing impairments who have a device out that is creating a live transcription of things that are being spoken for them, right, right away, and so just that, like, you know, little smattering of detail right there can kind of show, okay, one single decision for the whole classroom about technology is probably not going to be able to create the ideal environment for all students and instructors, and so that’s that’s kind of a summary of what access friction might look like in one of these settings.
Lillian Nave 07:43
Yeah, I can imagine lots of ways that UDL lens would would look at that situation too, because when you said if we make one sort of blanket statement, which seems to be like the first step is, it’s like I don’t like the use of AI, or I don’t like the distraction of phones, or I don’t think that laptops are positive in the class, and so that first step is sometimes the ban, or we’re going to this very low-tech example, and when you do that, as you mentioned, there’s no flexibility, and there’s no choice, and it’s only doing that’s suitable for one kind of student and not for the other, so yeah, automatically we have to first start thinking about learner variability, which is our UDL lens, right?
Sarah Silverman 08:35
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a really great point, and an entry into something I want to mention about my own kind of study of UDL. If anyone who’s listening knows me well, you know that one of my special interests is the history of the UDL framework, and indeed the history of educational theories in general. But I had been reviewing some of my very old, not very old, out-of-print books about UDL that came out in, you know, for example, 1999 or 2000 or 2006 and one of the things I notice about them is that yes, they introduce our basic principles of acknowledging and responding to learner variability and providing students choice and using digitized text to provide flexibility in how students interact with materials, but one thing is that they also come definitely before AI, and definitely before social media, and definitely before so many of the qualities of our like contemporary devices that make their use problematic for some students in the classroom as well, and so as we get into our discussion, I just like to hold that tension, which is indeed, as we know from the history of UDL and its impact technology, it really like forms the basis of accessibility in education by providing materials that can be used flexibly and on the. Their hand, we now have technologies that, for many students, are not conducive to learning, and the same device can provide both, if you know what I mean.
Lillian Nave 10:09
Yes, absolutely. It makes me think about, like, so many of those things that I started out with, with UDL, which is like engagement. Okay, so let’s get people talking to each other, let’s, you know, have some active learning that is, you know, happening in the classroom, and that seems to me also creates some of that access friction with neurodivergent students who maybe have a social anxiety too, or a processing delay, so if you want people to talk quickly, then you’re preferencing those students who do not have a processing delay, and you know, like, okay, we’re going to just sit around and talk about these things, or I’m going to, you know, you’re in this group, and then I want you to switch up into another group, maybe like a jigsaw type of learning activity, or active learning, which is again this very concrete, maybe low-tech or no-tech kind of student activity that a professor or instructor might plan, but then I can also see access friction, right, for there if we’re not allowed to have, maybe I need to, I might need to process this down, might need to write it down first, I might need to type it up before I’m able to say it right.
Sarah Silverman 11:24
It’s interesting, like as we get into maybe the accessibility of different classroom tech policies, or even different activities, or different things like that. I want to just mention that the access friction lens that I’ve been trying to bring to this. It really builds on earlier work, and we have a lot of really great resources on the selection of a classroom tech policy that works for you, or even selection of the best tools, and I guess one version of that could be selecting no tools in some circumstances, so like even books like Distracted by Jim Lang or Intentional Tech by Derek Bruff are still, even though they come before, like the main AI revolution and everything. I think great resources to kind of examine your own values and your own goals, and you may still come out of, you know, that kind of reflection thinking. I still want to explore this low-tech, no-tech kind of approach, but it’s always worth, like, kind of going back to some of the great resources that we, that we have. Maybe one of the unique perspectives I take is that I’m both very committed to UDL. I’ve been practicing UDL for a long time, and I would say I’m reasonably kind of pro technology for accessibility purposes, but I’ll admit that I’m intrigued, you know, by by the idea of experimenting with reducing devices in the classroom, and so that’s why I’ve been so interested in trying to figure out, are there more accessible ways that we can explore that space? Are there recommendations we can offer to people who are interested in having a lower tech teaching learning environment that can, you know, still make accessibility a priority. So, you know, I’ve been trying to think through that, and a couple of ideas that have come up recently are, you know trying to find a space in between that is not like a full laptop ban or full device ban, but still is kind of inviting students and encouraging them to use their devices in paired down ways, so you know a couple of those ideas might be something like having students turn off the Wi-Fi on their computers if they’re doing a writing exercise, but we want it to kind of feel like, okay, we’re not connected to anything else right now, we’re not looking things up on Wikipedia or asking ChatGPT any questions, we’re writing right now, so that could be one, even the idea of having students specifically bring a device other than a phone for activities or note taking, so knowing that phones constantly buzz with notifications and have social media apps on them, say no, we’re going to be doing an activity, but if you can, bringing a device and putting your phone away during that time could, could be something to look into, and then I’ve also been really interested in the idea of reducing the stakes of note taking. One of the really big things I hear from a lot of students with disabilities is that note taking is very consequential in their classes, especially for more lecture-based classes or content-heavy classes, and the idea that they won’t be able to take all of the notes they need, because you know, perhaps they have difficulty with their hand and writing, or maybe they have a difficulty with processing information and getting it down in writing, the idea that they won’t be able to get all that information from the class I. Have it in a permanent format is very scary, so the idea of like you’re going to ask students to not use a computer, perhaps instructor providing notes or a summary of the discussion or lecture slides to look at at home, so you know that differences in writing or typing speed between students becomes less salient, I guess these are all like trade-offs to consider, but if you do feel very strongly that your classroom will be improved by no people or fewer people typing on laptops the entire time, you might want to, might want to wonder. Okay, if I’m really committed to that, how could I support my students in other ways to make that more possible for them? I’ve also heard of, and I think I heard this on the pod list serve of having a designated note taker, whether that be one student per class or the TA, or even the instructor, kind of volunteering to take down important information, so that people who are only really successful in taking down information and electronic means, don’t have to worry so much about that,
Lillian Nave 16:06
right? And, or you could have, I’ve been thinking about that too, a group document, everybody’s adding notes, right? So it’s not just one person’s interpretation of what that lecture was really about, it could be everybody adding to
Sarah Silverman 16:19
it. Yeah, and this could even be a use of AI that you know could be really helpful to support a lower tech classroom space, so you know if somebody records the whole class or discussion and AI produces like a transcript and summary of that while nobody is kind of forced to have their laptop out and typing notes the entire time, that you know, maybe they’ll choose to, maybe there’s certain people who need to, but fewer people will feel like that’s something they need to be doing if they know they’re getting that transcript and summary afterwards.
Lillian Nave 16:54
I love that, that’s actually like no tech and high tech at the same time today. Yeah, right. So you have that cognitive slowdown during the actual class, but then you use the high tech to help out the understanding.
Sarah Silverman 17:05
Yeah, and I mean, I think even though maybe this sort of policy limits some student choice or options while they’re in the classroom, there’s still elements of UDL that can be enacted. It’s kind of like we’re saying, you know, it will not be at the same time, you know, being able to choose the modality of taking notes in all cases, or you know, maybe you still will allow a certain amount of choice, but there will also be this transcript, there will be the experience of being in the classroom, and maybe they’ll even be a video if people want to record the class, so there are, there are actually quite a few options there.
Lillian Nave 17:45
Yeah, and it’s something that could be you’re more of a curation. It seems to me like the faculty member could be a curator of this, could look at what that transcript is, and even highlight, or, you know, say, well, we kind of got off discussion here. These are the parts that are going to be the most important for whatever we’re moving into next, right?
Sarah Silverman 18:07
Yeah, and I think that that could be really useful for students as well. You know, as we’ve been saying, you create that pairing of kind of being present in the conversation as it’s unfolding, maybe you don’t know exactly where it’s going to go, and then also get that support from the instructor to draw your attention to the most salient points afterwards, maybe summarize those or highlight those. I think that’s great. Yeah,
Lillian Nave 18:28
which is a UDL tenet is to highlight, yeah, those, yeah, big ideas, and help students, mostly our novice students who are not familiar with a particular topic or area or your discipline, are going to think, oh, there’s 25 things that we covered in lecture, and that novice brain will think, well, what’s the most important, or how am I supposed to organize them, and if we have, I mean, another thing that goes along with either a note taker or group notes or an AI transcript would be having a handout with, with some blanks, you know, or some an organized outline that that students are supposed to kind of fill in as they’re listening or following along, and that makes me think of one of the things you touched on before that we talked about was the values or what the faculty wants out of it, and matching that activity with what learning we want the students to get out of it, so a backwards designed kind of thing. What do we want students to get out, and is it that they are really fast at taking notes? Well, if so, then there are certain things you’d want them to do. If it’s not about how fast they can manually take notes or how fast they can use the computer to take the notes, maybe it’s about the discovery of something, right? And so maybe you want it to be somewhat analog or a storytelling kind of thing, so nothing is spoiled, you’re not looking ahead to see the answer to a question that’s supposed to stump you for five minutes or something like that, but then at the end we can find kind of pull out what those. Most interesting points are so being able to match to the goal of what that session is would help determine, I think, what those choices are for high tech, low tech, no tech, or what combination of them, which to me is like that the UDL idea of what’s your endpoint and then what are the flexible means to get there, so that all of your students can kind of get, get there in the way they want, right?
Sarah Silverman 20:26
Yeah, so I, I’ve actually been thinking, maybe this is a good place to share this with you, that there’s actually, I’ve noticed two different approaches or thought patterns among people who are interested in low-tech or no-tech teaching. One is that there are people who just feel like I’m pretty convinced that students using any kind of device in the classroom is like a net negative, and so I’m going to free them up from that, you know, from from the consequences of that by asking them to not use those things, and they might say, if probed well, if they weren’t so distracting, they might be helpful, and I’d be fine when students use them. I’m just so.. I’m just so convinced that that this is a.. that this is a problem. In that case, what I might say to that person is, you might be right for some, or even a majority of students, but if you learn a little bit more about disabilities and accessibility, you might realize that you might be making some assumptions, and that there’s there’s more learner variability in terms of the technology that will enable their participation than you’re thinking. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a conflict now of, you know, how do you manage different needs? So that’s that’s one approach. A different, slightly different approach is that there are people who are sort of saying, I acknowledge that it actually might be a lot easier to, like, type notes or write a paper on a computer, or, you know, watch a recording of something later if you miss something, but what I’m asking students to do is have an experience, almost an esthetic experience or an interpersonal experience of removing some of those mediating technologies and to kind of see what it’s like because we have this constant onslaught of digital information in our lives and bringing devices and even if it’s actually pretty hard and there might be some forms of technology that do support our learning. I want us to have a different kind of experience in this classroom, and what I think is interesting about that approach, as it relates to UDL, is it might be useful if you’re more in that, in that camp, to think about, well, how do I acknowledge learner variability in what students are able to do in those, in those settings, you know, like with the caveat that not every single person can write by hand. If you are asking students to write something by hand, you know, what kind of variability between students are you going to plan for in how much they can write in a certain amount of time, how legible that will be to other people. How long they’ll be able to write for something like that is a really interesting thing to consider if you’re asking people to participate in one of these kind of very low tech or no tech experiences.
Lillian Nave 23:17
Yeah, and I wonder too about the research that maybe we haven’t done yet, I know, and we’ve talked about this before, you and I, about that, that experience of writing things down seems to help a certain subset of, or certain number of students like to actually physically write down notes is helpful for cognition and understanding, however, that may be the fact that as I was growing up and in school, that’s the only method we had, and so we did that, and that’s how I mapped out things. It’s how I learned how to think that way. It was mostly by writing by hand, and now I find more of a facility to type out things and be able to kind of switch things easily on a computer screen with a keyboard, and I’m wondering, how much with a newer generation who grew up taking computer class, take typing class, right? I remember taking typing in high school because I didn’t have it earlier, and I was so terrible at it, but these students have grown up very much, that is, you know, the way that they’re processing things, so I don’t know if there’s, you know, what sort of research there is, or can be, but maybe there’s a different way where I think I’m helping them out, right, by, oh, you’re going to write this down, because that’s really, we have studies that say, so I know it’s true, it’s good for me too, but it might be that there’s a new generation, a different kind of student, that the processing works a lot better digitally, and I’m now putting them at a distinct disadvantage by not allowing the. Way that the processing works, if that makes sense.
Sarah Silverman 25:03
Yeah, I can’t say that I’m an ex, I’m an expert in all of the research on handwriting for retention, but I guess the way that I think about it is, at least for myself, I know that I cannot write by hand fast enough as my thoughts come and things that I want, and it may.. I don’t know if it’s something innate about me or if it’s something about the my lack of practice, you know. Pretty much, I think, since I was like in.. I get definitely since high school, and then all through my education. Since then, I’ve been primarily typing on a computer. I recently pulled out some old notebooks, and it was very, very challenging for me to understand what was in them. I hope it was meaningful to me at the time, so you know, I think maybe another way, another way of thinking of this is that you know we can go through a process of kind of unlayering stakes here, and this is a topic I like to talk about a lot with nerd, with neurodiversity, is that you know sometimes we make a lot of assumptions where we stack up a number of factors for like one activity or one assignment that in aggregate can pose a lot of barriers for neurodivergent students, and if it’s something that you just want students to practice taking notes by hand or writing something by hand, maybe that’s something you could invite people into by making it at low stakes, at least at first. You know, this is not a graded assignment, or it’s just graded based on completion. Maybe it is something that is something they do individually, or with a flexible amount of time, rather than their group members relying on them to write some, you know, write something by hand in a, in a fast fashion, or you know, maybe it could even be that there’s one form of assessment in the class that is written by hand and another one kind of playing into UDL that is done in electronic fashion, so that there’s two opportunities to demonstrate knowledge. I always go back to some, like, really early writings on UDL that make the point that, like, when we only use one single modality, we’re often assessing the student’s facility with the modality rather than their content knowledge, and so just to explain what that means, is you know, if it, if you are asking a student to write a five paragraph essay in response to an exam question, and there’s no other way of demonstrating the knowledge, much of what you will see is how good they’re writing at good they are writing five paragraph essay rather than their knowledge of this, maybe it’s like American history or something, and it’s not that writing and writing a different formats couldn’t be a learning outcome, but you would have to know that that is a learning outcome ahead of time, and so kind of porting that into our discussion, I think it could be really interesting classroom activity to ask students to do things without the help of technology in some certain settings, but you just want to really clarify what the learning outcomes of those activities were, and for me, if I, what if I’m going to try them, it would actually be a lot more about like reflecting on the experience than assuming that that’s like the ideal way for students to write or take notes, or something like that,
Lillian Nave 28:22
right? Yeah, and having the, that choice, the flexibility to try different things at different times, is, I think, you know, a UDL option, and also, like you said, if we just gave them one option, where we’re not really seeing what they know, so I use this thing all the time. We want all of our students to be uncomfortable some of the time, and because there’s that growth edge when you’re uncomfortable, you’re trying something new, you’re gaining some skills, and we don’t want that to be a super high stakes thing. So if every single assessment in my class is a multiple choice test, and you’re not a good test taker, and you have supreme test anxiety. Then I am really just getting a snapshot of your anxiety, rather than the snapshot of what you’re learning in my class. And so we want, I want all of my students to be uncomfortable some of the time, not some, or just the same folks to be uncomfortable all of the time, and I mean that could happen if we do the whatever a technology ban, or if we do, we’re only doing things this way, we’re writing it, and again, a lot of students just don’t have a lot of practice either, you’re bringing that up, about I can’t write very fast anymore, and but I remember blue books, and as an art history student, you had to write so much, and I remember the getting a little knob on my finger, you know, from how hard I held that pencil, so but I got good at it after a lot of, you know. 456, years of writing those,
Sarah Silverman 30:02
yeah, and I think you know that that also brings up the question of, you were kind of saying, like, well, maybe students aren’t as prepared for this, this would be actually a major transition if people were going to go back to doing a lot of, a lot of handwriting, another thing that I have really been wanting to puzzle through is, I think, I think you and I have even talked about this, even if a lot of students and instructors start to feel, you know, really positively about, oh, I come into this classroom and my laptop stays in my bag and my phone stays in my bag, and I have a great learning experience. We know that there are still going to be people who require some form of technology for their participation, so I’m thinking of anything from a device that helps them communicate, or like enables their communication, like I said, somebody who has a device that’s providing live transcription, somebody who can’t write by hand at all and needs a device to take notes someone with a visual impairment that needs things to be either up close or high contrast or something like that, and you know, I worry about creating a situation where you know you see somebody with a device out during a learning situation and you automatically think, oh, that’s bad, that’s distracting, you know, even I wish that person wasn’t here because they’re throwing off the vibe of the class, or something like that, and so I would also love to, you know, kind of be able to explore this space of what does it look like when we pare down the use of technology in the classroom without it starting to feel like anybody who does or needs to do that is creating a distraction for other people, and that’s, you know, that’s a rich area for, for discussion, you know. Let’s just hypothesize for a second that you have a class with, I don’t know, 30% of the people have a need to use technology, and even maybe they’d prefer not to have to use it, maybe they find it distracting in some way to them, but that they need it for participation for some reason, and then the rest of the 70% of the other people are not using devices, maybe that’s their own decision, because they feel like, gosh, you know, that will really introduce too many temptations for me, you know, How should people arrange themselves in that classroom, you know, how, you know, should people take any steps to kind of protect their own focus in that classroom? I’ve talked before about, you know, the idea of someone positioning themselves in a way so that they won’t have a view of someone else’s screen, if that’s challenging for them. Even privacy film that goes on top of computers that makes it kind of less obvious what you’re doing on your computer, like that could be a factor, and I think actually, most importantly, just having that conversation openly at the beginning of a course regularly throughout the course of kind of saying, hey, you know, people have a range of needs in this classroom, and however, we all have ultimately a right to be able to participate and concentrate, and that might take a little bit of work to figure out, so you know, you could even lead an exercise in which people could identify, you know, should I be using a device in this class, some people might say yes, because I need it for transcription of what’s going on, and another person might say probably not. I would probably end up on YouTube or shopping or Twitter or something like, yeah, and kind of say, okay, well, like, how are you going to act on this information, and you know, what can other members of the class do for you to help you, you know, those are all interesting questions to explore. I think,
Lillian Nave 33:43
yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to me that all of the really the conversations we should be having. So we already talked about, you know, telling students, here’s what I want us to get out of it, and so here these are the choices I’m making, the pedagogical choices I’m making, and it’s because of this x y and z, because I want you to be kind of slow thinking through this. I’m asking us to try to be a low tech day or something like that, but also these conversations amongst students, or what the classroom, what are the class norms going to be, and you know everybody is coming in from a different situation. In higher ed, you’ve got students coming from home schools, large public schools, small private schools, you know, and they’re coming from radically different environments where they might come in and think, oh, that person is cheating because they have this device, like that’s the assumption that they’re coming in with, and so it’s like it’s inviting so many more discussions that we probably haven’t been having until these tech, like kind of more tech infusions, not good or bad, so that’s not value laden, right, it’s not. Saying that is either good or bad, but having these conversations to know well, what do I want to get out of it? What does the faculty member want to get out of it? So that’s going to necessitate several choices, but then also, what is the student, how do they want to approach it? Right,
Sarah Silverman 35:12
yeah, 100% And going, you know, going more in depth on your point, that you know, students come from so many backgrounds, and also the landscape in higher education is rapidly changing, and there’s internal disagreement, right? You know, we find a lot of instructors are saying, you know, tech has caused a lot of problems in my class, especially with AI misuse or cheating, and I really want to convert to kind of like no devices in class. Meanwhile, you know, I think yesterday, when we’re recording this episode, University of Chicago just announced they bought a huge contract with Anthropic for Cloud Enterprise for all students and faculty, kind of, and so you know it’s, it’s reasonable that instructors and students might feel like they’re getting conflicted, conflicted messages, and you know, it’s, it might be strange for a student to think through, you know, an instructor telling them, you know, this is kind of this quote sacred, sacred space of learning, and we don’t want the mediation of technology or distractions in any way, meanwhile they’re getting emails from from the university about how they’re supposed to be using quad code, you know, so it’s, you know, there’s, there’s just a lot to that, a lot that’s rapidly changing.
Lillian Nave 36:25
Yeah, and so again, necessitating more open communication between faculty and their students, and between students to figure out what is to be expected in each class, in each assignment, each situation. So we have that feedback from all sides, seems to be pretty good advice, not that I’m saying it’s my advice, but that’s the advice I’ve heard, is you know, good communication is going to help with with this, and I know that students will feel more confident when they know what those, you know, when they’ve had those conversations, so when they know what the parameters are, so am I supposed to be using this tech like Claude on a particular assignment or in this particular activity or whatever, Copilot or Gemini or all of the other ones, and I guess giving space and time for those discussions or conversations, because when there’s so much ambiguity that is one of those times when I think students feel that they’re almost forced into cheating or using a tech that they, they’re not even sure if they’re supposed to. It’s just that, you know, clear is kind, just one of my sayings I’ve really loved in the last couple years, but being kind of more intentional and clear about what that
Sarah Silverman 37:45
is. Yeah, it’s also, you know, it’s also really fascinating to think about how there, you know, there are a lot of tech, there are a lot of technologies that could support like investing in this lower tech face to face classroom space that kind of allow that to be a certain kind of space while providing structure on the side. I was just thinking, I wrote about this on my blog, of just the LMS itself, you know? I was remembering that in the Harry Potter books. I don’t know why I remembered this, but when the professors want to tell the students that they have an assignment, they just yell, I want 12 inches on the parchment on this topic, and that’s pretty much the end of the assignment instructor instructions. Okay, rightly we don’t think about assignment instruct instructions in that way now. You know, we have all of this work on transparency and tilt and all of that great stuff of being really clear with the purpose and the outcomes of the assignment, and if you want to have a low-tech classroom for like discussions or even like lecture and note taking and different things like that, that could exist really well alongside a nice sheet in the LMS with a clear description that students can refer back to over and over again for what the assignment is, what the outcomes are, what they have to do, and I know that if you know, if I were a student and that wasn’t available anywhere, I would want to take up a lot of that low-tech class time just asking the instructor questions about what I was supposed to do, and so, yeah, I think there’s like a lot of forms of balance and accessibility that we can bring to the idea of a lower tech classroom, if we just think more broadly, not about removing tech at every instance possible, but, like, you know, how can we enable the classroom environment that we’re hoping for with other, other options, of course, like I said, I’m not the first person to suggest this in any way. I’ve just been really interested in the intersection between accessibility and what we’re tech teaching.
Lillian Nave 39:47
Yeah, I think it’s.. it’s really.. we’re curators. It’s going to bring my little art historical term in here, but that.. yeah, that’s what we have to be, not just facilitators, but curators of why. We are using, you know, which tech, so I love intentional tech, or Derek Rough. I’ve interviewed him on that. There’s another episode just on that book, but yeah, what? What sort of intentional choices are we making with the tech? Why are we using it? And to be mindful of that learner variability, what conversations are we having with our students, really also with ourselves? I think, like, what do I want? What do I want from this activity? Is it about the experience that I need students to like the fact that we’re actually in a physical classroom, not not online, right? And I want there to be an actual time as it unravels or develops or something like that, and then how would I use technology in that to facilitate that learning that I want. So lots of choices.
Sarah Silverman 40:54
I know we had mentioned the possibility of talking about the instructor side, and how an instructor might experience lower tech teaching and neurodiversity as well, you know, I’m not 100% sure how, if this relates to my own neurodivergence or not, but I actually have a fairly long term experiment running with with no tech in my own personal life, which is that for 25 hours every week on the Jewish Sabbath, I do not use any technology whatsoever, and I have a lot of observations about how my mind works during that time, and it kind of relates to teaching, which is that you know a lot of the way that we learn to function in very demanding environments is by kind of using technology to organize thoughts and workflows and schedules and stay on task, and all of that, and I know for a fact that when I have none of that available to me, my mind wanders very, very far, and in that case, it’s kind of okay, I don’t have anything else that necessarily needs needs doing at that time, and I do think it’s interesting to think, okay, if somebody has a class to run and potentially materials to refer to, and to keep multiple student groups on task, and make sure that certain activities get done within the hour or hour and 10 minutes that you have together, it may create a kind of strange situation where instructors really do need to rely on certain technologies, and maybe some more than others, you know, people who have difficulty perceiving time might want to rely on like timers or visual indicators or something like that, people who might need more of a reminder of like what’s coming next or what to say might rely on like slide projection or something, and you know, I’m curious, what what kind of dynamic that does set up with with students, which say, you know, I would, I wouldn’t want to set up a situation where I was instructing my students, okay, no devices, not even, you know, not even just to take notes, and then you know, I had my entire tech support system, you know, when we were back to record this, we both said our rainbow of different queuing options, and so you know, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to ask something so distinct of my students than I than I ask of myself, and obviously we have different responsibilities in the classroom, you know, they’re responsible primarily for themselves or maybe a group, and I’m responsible for everyone, but it definitely makes me think about how the choice to go to like very low tech classroom environment might not be for every instructor, and even if we think about instructors with disabilities, they might have specific, specific needs that could be really important to take into account.
Lillian Nave 43:52
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and I think we like when I think about low tech, and I say, okay, if I have a completely low tech classroom, I really realized that my vision of the low-tech classroom still has me projecting on a screen, you know, like as an art historian, and showing that I have to have some sort, and you know what, everything is technology, you know. So, a pen, a ballpoint pen, is a certain type of technology that’s better than the reed and the parchment that we talked about from the, you know, medieval times, so it’s, it is that, you know, just being thoughtful, what’s the point, what’s the, what is the goal, and being that curator of the technology, and it probably will change from either one class to another, one day to another, about, yeah, what is it? And same, you know, same with students and distractions. I mean, I think we’re going to have a really great list of resources if people are interested in it. We’ve already mentioned quite a few, but I remember being a student and being in a class, if it was a large lecture hall and somebody had a. Um, like, just seeing what they had, either a laptop or something, because it was before smartphones, when I was in college, graduate school, but there was the very beginning of laptops, and I remember when it was not notes on their screen, I was like, What are you doing? Oh, yeah, what, you’re not paying attention, and then I wasn’t paying attention, because I’m looking at somebody else’s, right?
Sarah Silverman 45:24
Yeah, I mean, like, if, if I had to just say one final, like, final takeaway or word, I’ve noticed that in my conversations with instructors recently, a lot of people have felt like, okay, I actually, I know something about accessibility and UDL, and I, I understand those concepts, and a little bit of how to apply them, but I just feel, I feel so sure that this no-tech thing will alleviate a lot of the problems that I’m facing in my classroom, that I kind of have to do that, and because of that, I’ll have to rely on the accommodation system, basically, for any needs that arise, because that’s just the way things shake out, and I guess what I would say is maybe it doesn’t need to be that black and white, maybe even if you are a person who’s like I’m really committed to trying to pair down, I try to say eliminate, but maybe pare down, you know, the use of devices in my classroom, or have students really reconsider that maybe there’s still an eye you can take with accessibility, or what you know about UDL, and continuing to reduce barriers, even while you’re exploring this approach to technology.
Lillian Nave 46:36
I think that is absolutely a great summing up of this conversation. So, thank you, thank you so much, Sarah, for being on the podcast again, and I really appreciate your thinking through this with me and kind of opening up the conversation, and I know we’ll put in the resources here, you’ve got a few things you’re going to be talking about this, so if people are interested a little later this summer, is that right?
Sarah Silverman 46:58
Yeah, yeah, I’m going to have a workshop on July 20-first, if you happen to be in office or you know available at that time, that’s going to be on Zoom, and it will be about low-tech teaching and accessibility, exploring this topic, talking about what we might do in our own classrooms, and also for people who advise faculty, whether you’re a faculty developer, instructional designer, or like a department chair, or something like that, just different frameworks for talking about this, and I’d love, I’d love for any listeners to join me.
Lillian Nave 47:27
Great, so we’ll have a link to that, and if you’re listening to this podcast after July 21 of 2026 that link will still show kind of what the results were, so, and you’ll get to see even more thoughts on this topic, if you’re still interested, so thank you very much, and check the resources for a lot of info for us, and thanks so much for being on the podcast, Sarah.
Sarah Silverman 47:50
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Lillian. And it’s always a thrill when Think UDL appears in my podcast feed.
Lillian Nave 47:58
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Think UDL podcast, new episodes are posted on social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Blue Sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website, Think udl.org The music in each episode is created by the Oddyssey Quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with two Ds, by the way, comprised of Rex Shepherd, David Pate, Bill Folwell, and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast, and if you call it Appalachian, I’ll throw an apple at you. Thank you for joining. I’m your host, Lillian Nave. Thanks for listening to the Think UDL podcast.