Dive Brief:

• San Francisco area charter network Leadership Public Schools teamed up with ed tech vendor Gooru to develop personalized learning software, but only after the schools identified a clear problem to solve.
• The Hechinger Report writes that Clayton Christian Institute for Disruptive Innovation researchers identified this strategy — identifying why digital technology is necessary before deciding how to use it — as key to a successful initiative.
• LPS noticed its students were behind in math and teachers started to personalize instruction, but manual methods of tracking and analyzing student progress were unsustainable, making Gooru’s software development critical to long-term success.

Dive Insight:

Gooru, a nonprofit, focuses on personalized learning technology and it supports an education model that allows students to learn in many different ways, based on their needs, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Teachers have long differentiated instruction by breaking students up into groups in their classrooms, but digital technology provides a powerful way to step up this strategy. Digital tools give teachers access to analytics and they can make tracking student progress easy. And they provide the self-paced lessons students need.

Beyond identifying a particular goal for its tech initiative, LPS set clear expectations for the path to reaching it, using Gooru’s tool. And it provided teachers with targeted professional development to master the technology itself. All of these things are best practices when considering new tech for classrooms.