Glasses that record conversations and watches that scan your environment were once the remit of action movies and science fiction books; now they’re making their way into classrooms, writes Gary Henderson
Technology quietly slips into our lives long before we realise how dependent we’ve become on it. Smartphones arrived that way, as did cloud storage, social media and now AI. Wearables are following the same pattern. Once niche accessories for fitness enthusiasts, they are rapidly evolving into powerful, always‑on companions designed to capture, analyse and augment our daily experiences. As schools and trusts consider their digital futures, the question is no longer if wearables will appear in classrooms, but rather how prepared we are when they do, if they haven’t already.
Understanding Today’s Wearables
Modern wearables fall into a few familiar categories. Smartwatches remain the most recognisable, offering biometric monitoring, voice assistants, notifications and subtle interaction through gestures or haptics.
Fitness trackers, though often less sophisticated, are deeply embedded in the mainstream thanks to their focus on wellbeing and behaviour change. I myself own a Fitbit for use in tracking my running. Earbuds are another common wearable technology in use today increasingly offering noise suppression, but more recently through AI offering near real time translation of spoken language.
Smart glasses occupy a more experimental space, ranging from simple glasses that record audio, to video capable glasses and those capable of augmented reality. There are also emerging forms: smart rings that can monitor sleep and stress, clothing with woven‑in sensors, or pendants which are worn and capture details of your everyday life as audio, or even video, for AI platforms to summarise, critique and offer feedback on.
These devices are becoming smaller, more discreet and more integrated within our lives. We might make a student hand in their phone, but could we do the same for their prescription glasses or for their AI assistant enabled hearing aid?
And that’s before we even consider the step beyond wearables, whereby the tech is integrated into us, and augments us. For those of a certain age, the six million dollar man and the bionic woman spring to mind.
The Challenges: Integrity, Privacy and Safeguarding
With such capability comes an inevitable set of concerns, particularly in education settings where integrity, privacy and wellbeing are foundational.
Academic integrity is an obvious starting point. Devices small enough to hide in a sleeve or an ear canal create opportunities for covert assistance during assessments. A whispered prompt to a voice assistant, or a field of vision overlay offering hints, threatens the fairness of examinations. And in lessons or learning, constant access to summarisation or answer‑generating tools may erode the development of independent thinking if not managed carefully.
Privacy presents even deeper complexities. Wearables are designed to collect. They capture heart rate, sleep patterns, stress responses, location, audio and increasingly, environmental data. If a student wearing smart glasses can record a lesson with a blink, or transcribe peer conversations without anyone realising, the safeguarding risks multiply. Schools must consider not only the data the devices hold, but also where that data travels and, who has access to it.
Safeguarding, too, becomes more layered. A wearable able to analyse a child’s emotional state could be genuinely supportive, but it also opens questions around consent, accuracy and the unintended consequences of monitoring. There is a fine balance between using technology to protect students and inadvertently creating environments of surveillance or mistrust. Equally, use by students able to record lessons poses a risk such as where content is modified or changed. There are already many cases being reported of images, video or audio being used for the purposes of creating deepfakes of staff or students in schools. Wearables are challenging existing school policies and systems, demanding that we think differently.
The Untapped Benefits and Why They Matter
Despite these challenges, it would be reductive, and potentially harmful, to see wearables only as a risk. The world just isn’t that simple. Their potential benefits, when implemented ethically and transparently, are significant.
One of the simplest yet most impactful advantages lie in capturing learning. Imagine a teacher recording lesson notes hands‑free, or a student replaying key explanations they struggled with. Transcription tools embedded into glasses or earbuds could allow learners to revisit complex material, particularly those with memory difficulties or processing delays. This becomes even more powerful when combined with AI‑driven summarisation that can compress a 60‑minute lesson into a digestible set of personalised revision prompts.
SEND support is perhaps where wearables promise the most transformational impact. Devices could translate speech into text for hearing‑impaired learners, reduce sensory overload through noise‑cancelling modes, or provide subtle cues to help students with executive‑functioning difficulties stay on task. A smart device that gently vibrates to remind a child to refocus is very different from a public verbal prompt; it supports without stigmatising.
Preparing for a Future We Can’t Avoid
The ultimate point is this: wearables are not going away. In fact, their adoption curve is steepening, driven by consumer behaviour far beyond the influence of education policy. Students will arrive with smart devices on their wrists, in their ears, or woven into their clothing long before schools have fully adapted their digital strategies.
Banning is unlikely to be a sustainable or effective solution. It may work with a smartphone, although even here I would say this is questionable, but I can’t see how it can work where the wearables are a child’s prescription glasses, or their hearing aid or similar. And that all assumes that we can detect or spot they have a wearable in the first place. The more productive path is preparation: building policies that are informed rather than reactive, creating clear expectations for students and parents, and equipping teachers with the knowledge to harness benefits while mitigating risks.
Wearables will take their place in the future of learning, whether we invite them in or not.
