“Navigating the Swamp” of Educational Technology: A New Guide

Educational technology is a growing force across the country: investment nationally is at an all-time high, with $427 million in funding going to 74 early-stage K-12-focused companies in 2012 alone (according to the NewSchools Venture Fund). Massachusetts is exploring these exciting new learning opportunities from both a government and business perspective. Governor Patrick declared this past February to be Digital Learning Month, and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved a certificate for the Commonwealth’s first virtual school on June 25^th.

The Massachusetts Office of Digital Learning continues to work towards increasing the Commonwealth’s digital learning capacity, and the Boston area has a burgeoning “EdTech” startup scene, fueled by the new startup accelerator LearnLaunchX.  (MBAE Board member Eileen Rudden is a co-founder of LearnLaunch and the new accelerator.)  But a recently-released report argues that despite this explosive growth, technology has still not had a significant impact on American schools, functioning as an “acquisition” rather than attempt to effect real system change.

Using educational technology on a system-wide level is daunting, particularly as navigating the chaotic abundance of innovations can be overwhelming for educators and policy makers. “Alive in the Swamp: Assessing Digital Innovations in Education” by Michael Fullan and Katelyn Donnelly examines and then attempts to help address this problem.  It provides an innovation index for learning tools, evaluating the technology, pedagogy, and ability to effect system change of a particular creation, with the highest rating going to tools that will yield transformative change in the classroom. The team hopes the index will help consumers of the technology to better understand their options and strategize appropriately, in addition to providing guidelines for entrepreneurs and creators of learning technology.

Not every tool on the market is ideal for school systems, and this index should help highlight the weaknesses of innovations. The report doesn’t recommend or publish evaluations of specific tools, but the authors note that the twelve innovations examined appear to fall into two groups – school-based and technology-based tools – and that innovations often score poorly on some of the three evaluated criteria (technology, pedagogy, ability to effect system change).   In particular, tools are often weak in their pedagogical aspects, and lack strong implementation support strategies. The authors recommend that those “navigating the swamp” of options focus on pedagogy, determining which tools will have a significant, system-wide impact on learning, and ensuring that there is a comprehensive and integrated system of support for the implementation of the technology.

Mindful that schools often have scant resources to allocate, the authors include “value for money” as a criterion for system change potential, with the aim that a given tool will yield twice the learning at half the cost of current methods. The index could serve as a valuable tool for parsing these qualities, and help education leaders make informed choices when integrating digital learning into school systems.