Dec. 9 WEBINAR with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath and Emily Cherkin on Jared's new book: "The Digital Delusion"

How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning-- and How to Help Them Thrive Again (and we nearly broke zoom because so many people showed up for this LIVE!)

On Tuesday, December 9, 2025, educational neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath joined me in conversation for a webinar to discuss his new book, “The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning— and How to Help Them Thrive Again.”

A few things:

1. I read the entire book in 24 hours and annotated it heavily. I am and was a teacher, I know a lot about learning and the art of teaching, and I still furiously made notes in the margins and underlined important concepts as I read. (Also, I know Jared highly approves of me both reading the paper version of his book and using a pen to annotate as I read, because, as the book shows, we learn better when we read on paper and write with a pen or pencil— as he says in this interview, “Handwriting is identity.” How beautiful is that?)

2. Jared is the person who first told me about the science of “flocking”— the reason behind why it takes more than one fish to shift the direction of the entire school and the story behind why I named this Substack “First Fish Chronicles” and refer to myself and other allies in this fight as “first fish” and why we need those second and third and fourth fish and GOOD NEWS, GUYS it’s WORKING! because…

3. We decided on Dec. 4 to host this webinar on Dec. 9. So we had five days to actively promote and advertise it during the holiday season, nonetheless. And yet over one hundred people showed up and I had to upgrade my Zoom account in the first few minutes of the webinar to open the event to more people! (So thanks to my paid subscribers on here— that’s where the money went this month! HA!)

4. Jared’s book is easy to read, which means you can’t claim it’s “too academic” or “overly complicated.” No. Again, I read it in 24 hours. It’s so easy to read, in fact, and makes so many compelling arguments for why EdTech has completely failed, that you should contact him and buy a box of his books in bulk and pass them out to every school board director, administrator, educator, and parent you know, tomorrow. The reviews on Amazon are already glowing.

5. We kept the chat off until the end (it is so distracting to be talking and see comments pop up— and if you read Jared’s book you will know that multi-tasking is simply awful for learning!), but at the end I opened it up and there were SO MANY amazing questions. I tried to get to as many as I could, but it is hard to talk/read/facilitate at the same time (ahem, multi-tasking). So I may do a future post on the questions or save them for next time— if I do, I will link back to it here. But really, so many of the questions can be answered by reading the book! So start there in the meantime.

6. I shared this analogy in the webinar: If I were the person who designed a surgical tool used in open heart surgery, I wouldn’t follow the surgeon into the operating room and tell her, “Hey, let me do this! I built this tool! Therefore I know how to do open heart surgery!” Yet hundreds of tech companies are marching their products into schools every single day and telling teachers how to teach and administrators how to lead. No thanks.

Jared is brilliant and amazing and so interesting to listen to. Watch this webinar, share it with everyone you know, and MARK YOUR CALENDARS because we’re going to do this again for Part 2 on Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 at 9 AM PST/12 PM EST/5 PM GMT.

If you have any questions, comments, or thoughts, please add them below.

Thank you again to everyone for attending— there were so many first and second fish in the audience tonight, and watching the attendee numbers climb as new people logged in was just thrilling. THINGS ARE CHANGING! KEEP SWIMMING!

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