The title is, on the face of it, an odd claim. PedTech clearly is a thing — there is a book about it, a series of posts on this blog unpacking its implications, and a growing body of practice around it. So what does it mean to say PedTech is not a thing?
PedTech is not a thing in the way that EdTech is a thing. It is not a tool. You cannot pick it up, deploy it, or choose between versions of it.
EdTech is the technology
EdTech, educational technology, refers to the technology itself: the apps, platforms, and digital tools used in educational settings. It is a straightforward noun.
Which means you can use it in exactly the ways you would expect. You can ask: "Which EdTech should I use?". You can say "I used EdTech as a lever to change how my pupils collaborated" or "I tried this EdTech and it did not work". In each case, 'EdTech' works because it refers to something you can point at. Notice, in the diagram, that EdTech sits in the centre as a discrete, identifiable component, which relates to the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.
PedTech is not the technology
PedTech is not the technology. This is where the confusion starts; the naming convention is parallel, so people assume the referents must be parallel too. They are not.
PedTech (as explained in From EdTech to PedTech (Aubrey-Smith and Twining, 2024)) is an approach to thinking about your practice. It is a framework for reflecting on what you do, why you do it, and how digital technology fits into that picture*.
Look at where digital technology appears in the PedTech framework. It is present, thinking about how and whether to use digital tools is a genuine part of a PedTech approach, but it is one element in a broader framework, not the centre of it. And critically, the whole framework starts somewhere else entirely: with your values and beliefs.
This has an immediate grammatical consequence. You cannot say "I used PedTech as a lever" or "I tried this PedTech". You cannot ask "Which PedTech should I use?". Each sentence treats PedTech as a deployable tool. That is not what it is.
What you can say is "I am taking a PedTech approach to my lesson design" or "A PedTech approach helped me see the mismatch between my stated values and what I was actually doing". PedTech functions correctly as a descriptor of a way of thinking, not as a thing you wield.
Why it matters
The way you name something shapes how you think about it. If you treat PedTech as a tool, you will expect it to behave like one; you will look for the right PedTech, try to deploy it, and evaluate whether it delivered results. None of that makes sense.
A PedTech approach instead asks you to start from your values and beliefs about learning. As I argued in an earlier post in this series, this is why a PedTech approach does not begin with the learning intention, it starts with the pedagogical stance that shapes everything downstream. That starting point cannot be handed to you. It has to be worked out.
EdTech is a technology. PedTech is an approach. Keeping those two ideas distinct is the first step to understanding what From EdTech to PedTech is actually asking you to do.
This post is part of a series addressing common misconceptions about PedTech.
For a full account of the PedTech framework, see From EdTech to PedTech (Aubrey-Smith and Twining, 2024).
* This image was replaced with a corrected version on the 1st June 2026. The original version confused Purpose and Mission.