Today is Labor Day. That means that tomorrow NYC public school teachers return to work. I mean, not me - I'm still happily retired but still I have many friends going back. Kids come back on Thursday.

Of course, I don't doubt that I'll have a "going back to school" dream tonight.

I'm not going to make any predictions here but there are a couple of big tech related elephants in the room that will be interesting to keep tabs on over the course of the school year.

The first are New York's "Distraction Free Learning" policies. Specifically, a cell phone ban. While students will be able to bring their phone's to school, they won't be able to use them during the school day on school grounds.

It's amazing how embedded cell phones have become in our lives. Twenty Five years ago, I didn't have one, many people didn't and smart phones certainly weren't a thing. I got my first cell phone shortly after 9/11 - a cheap pay by the minute plan. Having been essentially around the corner during 9/11 and since we were going to be relocated to a different school, we thought it made sense that I have one.

Of course now, everyone has smartphones and the kids are on them all the time.

I taught for a couple of weeks at Stuy last March and people asked me if things had changed. Well, the students in my classes were largely the same, and I say that in a good way and the overall feel seemed similar in the school but the big difference I saw was that when kids weren't in class, they had their nose buried in their phones.

Back in the day, when kids were free they'd hang out in groups along the halls. They still do. The difference though was that back in the day, a couple might be doing homework, a couple playing Magic the Gathering, and the rest talking with each other.

Now silence. They're all alone in their phones but sitting together.

A friend told me that fire drills were even worse. Back in the day, the challenge was keeping them quiet and stopping them from sneaking off to Fake Terry's. Now just row after row of phone zombies.

Funny thing is that in class during my two week stay, I didn't find the phones to be a major problem. A couple of kids went to them but since I was a sub, I didn't stress about it.

At other schools, the problems might be reversed.

I don't know how exactly how Stuy or other schools are going to be handling the ban - I've heard that many schools are issuing signal blocking pouches to the kids but I don't know how well that'll actually work but we'll find out soon enough.

I am interested in seeing though if this new cell phone ban is implemented seriously and if it has a positive effect on students.

The other is of course AI for both CS and non CS classes.

While AI has become entrenched as a coding assistant and general assistant, the landscape has overall become more complicated. For college students looking to enter tech, some companies want candidates to use AI in their interview process and others forbid it. When writing up the CSTA conference a month or so ago, I talked about how a founder commented on how students were writing better through the use of AI but on the other hand, the majority of teachers I've spoken to talk about how AI has made their writing worse.

It will be interesting to see how schools and colleges continue to navigate this landscape.

I was thinking that if I were back at Stuy, I don't think it would be that big of a deal within my classes. I mean, other than setting policy. I was thinking this due to the large amount of lab time in the courses I designed and taught. Even with over 30 students per class, we always spent sufficient time with them working on projects during class so that I knew what my students were doing and what they could do. That plus other in class assessments I don't think I'd have to worry too much about AI use beyond whatever the policy was.

At Hunter, or in college in general, I'm thinking it would be much harder. At Hunter, I only met with my students a couple of times a week and it was all class - not a whole lot of project time. The kids did all of that outside of class. That means it would be a whole lot harder for me to assess where they're at.

Like I said up top - not doing predictions here but I think the cell phone policy and AI are going to be interesting to keep tabs on over the coming year.

I'm not sure what this school year will bring for me but I'm hoping that an interesting opportunity or two will pop up so that I'll be able to observe some of this first hand.