Fifteen years ago, I mentioned that my school district was receiving 20,000 email messages per day. That was four times the email volume that we had seen five years prior. At the time, we were switching to Google for email, and we were planning to provide email accounts to students for the first time.

That kind of growth is impressive, but it’s not unusual. Nearly all areas of technology have experienced exponential growth for my whole career. Over the long term, bandwidth use in schools has increased an average of 54% per year since schools got Internet access in the mid-90s. Moore’s Law guaranteed that every time we replaced computers in schools, the new ones would be twice as powerful for half the price. And the sheer volume of information available online has grown at a rate that is beyond our comprehension.

But this year, I noticed a couple things. Our bandwidth use for 24-25 actually declined compared to 23-24. I’ve never seen that before. We have more students. We have more devices. There aren’t any new filtering rules or bottlenecks or changes in how we use technology that would explain this. But we used less Internet this year than we did last year, despite the fact that we usually increase a LOT year over year.

So I took a look at the email volume. I can’t compare our current numbers to 2010. For one thing, I’m not working at the same school. We have fewer students and a different model for how we use email. But looking historically at the email volume in my current school, we increased an average of 72% per year from 2015-2019. In 2017-18, we processed about 8,000 messages per day. The following year, that level jumped to 12,000 messages per day. Then, we were at 16,000 messages per day the year after that. That’s the kind of growth I would expect.

But this year? Our email volume has increased 1%. Last year, we handled about 8.8 million messages. This year, we’re on target to hit about 8.9 million. Since 2021, the yearly increase in email has been a relatively flat 3.6%.

On the hardware side, we’re not seeing the huge increases in memory and storage that we had a decade ago. Many of the Chromebooks that schools are buying have the same memory and storage as the ones we bought when we started the 1:1 program a decade ago. The processors are faster, but the appetite for resources isn’t what it once was.

Have we finally reached the saturation point? I’ve often used Chris Lehmann’s simile for educational technology: Technology in schools should be like oxygen: it’s necessary, ubiquitous, and invisible. I think we may be reaching the limits of ubiquitous. It’s there when we need it. And when we don’t, we set it aside and it doesn’t get in the way of other things. We’ve moved past the idea that technology is the shiny gadget that solves all of our problems (well, except for AI: that’s still magic and awesome). Technology is one of many resources we use to best meet the needs of our learners. And we finally have so much of it that access is no longer a limiting factor.

I don’t know how to plan for this. Maybe we don’t need to replace our wifi network in a couple years. Maybe we don’t need to upgrade classroom a year or two after that. Maybe students and teachers don’t need new devices quite as often. It’s a very unfamiliar place for me. But it’s satisfying to know that we have finally solved the access problem.