Ed-Tech Usage Levels Are Low: What Should Schools Do?

5 Strategies For Ed-Tech Use

Districts spend millions on educational technology products and services. But many of those products and services are not used by teachers or students as much as you might expect. Here’s some advice from ed-tech experts and educators on how to pump up those usage rates:

1. Give educators meaningful opportunities to offer feedback on potential ed-tech purchases.

2. Listen carefully to educators’ critiques of the ed-tech products and services currently used in the district.

3. After you buy an ed-tech product or service, establish a detailed plan for showing all educators why you purchased it and how to use it. Have a usage plan or goal in place and continually check in and measure progress against the goal.

4. If you expect the software or application to be used for a certain amount of time, or for a specific purpose, make sure that expectation matches what’s actually going on in the classroom. For instance, if a teacher is only going to use a piece of software as an option in a lesson rotation and some students won’t have access to it for weeks, but the vendor is recommending an hour of use per week for each student, it might not be the best fit.

5. Pilot software and structure those pilots in a way that district leaders and teachers can see what the student outcomes are likely to be, perhaps by using a control group and a treatment group. Districts should make sure that they are testing out a particular piece of software or service in an environment similar to where it will eventually be used, since some tools might work well with some types of students but not so well with others.

 

Full Article: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/technology/2019/10/02/ed-tech-usage-levels-are-low-what-should.html