Over the past few years, criticism of mobile phones in the classroom has intensified – and in schools, it has travelled all the way to ministers’ desks. Denmark has been among the world’s front-runners in digitising education, for better and worse. From genuinely strong moves, like a shared national login for every school, to more reckless ones, where books were swapped for PDFs in a mix of uncritical cost-cutting and local desperation inside ever-tighter school budgets.

The reality in schools today is that standardised digital learning portals from the big publishers dominate, with scattered islands of technology-enthusiast makerspaces. Those portals are, in essence, built on an approach to learning invented in the late 1990s, complete with all the limitations of that era’s IT systems – limitations we have happily repressed. In the portals that municipalities buy by the metre, the system’s main job is to hold a PDF (a digital book), some videos, worksheets and a few quiz questions – enough to be called innovative and interactive. At heart, nothing that couldn’t just as well live in a physical textbook. Most pupils hate it passionately, as a quick look at review sites – or some light ethnographic fieldwork at your next dinner with teenagers – will confirm.

So how did we end up in a place where digital media, which outside school manage to engage, captivate and delight, mostly provoke head-shaking inside school – across groups that rarely agree on anything, like politicians, teachers and pupils?

Noise or learning tool

There are at least two separate issues at play. First, we should distinguish between two very different problems when we talk about digital media in schools: digital media as noise, and digital media as a learning tool. It should be obvious that any activity that distracts from teaching does not belong in a classroom – whether we are talking about phone notifications, browsing shopping or gambling sites, or talking lunchboxes. Rejecting the noise should be an easy call (without trivialising the very practical challenge of dislodging a smartphone from a students’ hand). But that rejection routinely gets mixed up with a rejection of digital media as learning tools – a conclusion that, unfortunately, also often seems reasonable when you look at the quality of what’s currently on offer as digital learning tools.

Digital media,, span a wide range of formats and do not have to get a failing grade like a lot of the legacy approaches dominating today. A natural objection is that building digital learning tools of a quality that can compete with what children meet outside school requires budgets that simply are not available. It’s a fair objection, but not entirely accurate – look at Kahoot, which with relatively simple means built a tool that is hugely popular and effective within the school domain.

A Danish example: the class as the case

A good example of a different path is Telenor’s long-running #digitalpænt programme in Denmark, aimed at teaching pupils about digital wellbeing – particularly mobile phones and classroom culture. The approach is built around a realistic, authentic case about a school class not unlike the pupils’ own. Over the course of a lesson, they help the class in the story by discussing, reflecting and choosing how its characters should act to create the best digital culture.

That may not sound particularly digital – and case-based teaching has a long and proud tradition entirely without technology, especially in higher education. What’s new is that the case is shared on a projector with the teacher controlling the pace, as a common reference point for the whole class. At key moments, pupils decide what the characters should do – and they do it by voting with their phones. The results appear instantly, so pupils can see what others think – and the teacher can see, in real time, what is happening in the room and dose discussion and input where it matters most.

Perhaps most importantly: every pupil gets to engage and take part. They become curious about what the others think and how the story will end. They dare to state their opinion, even when it doesn’t match the teacher’s expectations or the most popular voices in class. That matters most precisely when the topic is sensitive or controversial.

Supporting the room – not dominating it

In this approach, the digital medium supports inclusion, engagement, reflection and discussion in the physical room, through its genuinely unique properties: anonymity, instantly available data, and a story that develops dynamically and gives a sense of agency. What I say, think and do matters – something happens in the room – and we do it together. It is also an approach where digital media don’t take over the classroom, but support it. When the room divides the learning starts.

Hopefully we will see many more solutions of this kind, where the digital is tightly coupled to the classroom and contributes something genuinely new – rather than just being a book with a power cord.

An earlier version of this article was published in Danish as an op-ed in Skolemonitor. Lightly updated and expanded here.