Dive Brief:
- With education technology purchases way up in schools, teachers and administrators have to consider when the purchases are a waste of money and when they are truly helping students learn.
- EdSurge reports some advocate in-person observations of ed tech in classrooms to decide whether it’s working and others prefer more quantitative approaches like student mastery checks and test scores, though the best measure may be a mix of both.
- With a 2015 OECD report showing countries that invested the most in ed tech have seen the greatest declines in student performance, administrators wondering why might look to implementation, noting a distraction with the tools rather than best practices in using them.
Dive Insight:
Now that we are far enough into the ed tech revolution, there seems to be a more systematic evaluation of what works and what doesn’t. Making major purchases and letting them drop into classrooms without proper preparation and training on the technology and the pedagogy that should accompany it doesn’t work.
Some schools are seeing success by concretely defining learning goals first and buying ed tech to support them, rather than trying to bend learning goals to fit the platforms they already purchased. Rethinking professional development is another strategy, as schools figure out how best to engage teachers and when to expect them to learn new technologies for their classrooms.
