Where would your district’s benchmarks would be without the implementation of successful, need-based edtech tools? If it weren’t for instructional technology, students’ academics would’ve taken an even larger hit during the pandemic… imagine that. Yet, not every solution is a meaningful one, and education leaders must recognize the signs when they’re not working.
Ross Young, executive vice president of , a company that helps school students and staff develop healthy digital habits, says while the pandemic allowed education technology to flourish thanks to COVID relief funding, too much is too much.
“Many companies have been opportunistic with ESSER funds and have gotten districts to purchase tools to accelerate them into ‘remote learning’ districts,” he says. “However, many of these tools were ‘features’ of mature cloud edtech tools that have contributed to a lot of redundancy in the edtech stack.”
Being able to sort through the noise using data, he adds, is crucial for district leaders to incorporate successful edtech solutions.
“Wrangling in your tech stack is paramount,” he says. “Decisions without data are just an opinion. It’s important to pull data on all of the edtech tools within your districtsthat includes tools purchased by individual schools within a districtto determine the purpose and utilization of these tools. Align this research with the outcomes the district is trying to achieve to assess if they are achieving those goals.”
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He also notes that it’s important for curriculum departments to partner with IT staff to determine how their networks can perform these assessments.
So what are some signs that a particular edtech solution simply isn’t cutting it? According to Young, there are five:
- The district-wide reporting doesn’t provide any useful information.
- The tool isn’t aligned with the district’s plan and/or goals.
- The features of the product can be found in other mature platforms.
- The product does not offer instant tech support.
- The company expects you to onboard yourselves and provide your own professional development.
Choosing the wrong edtech tool will not only fail to benefit students, but it will cost your district time and money that could be allocated toward areas that need it.
“Insufficient tech tools don’t allow you to justify the ROI they are supposed to provide,” he says. “It will consume your budget, not provide data to justify your spending and the opportunity cost is very high. What else could you have aligned your funds to? How much time and demand did the tool require from your staff?”
