Comments on: Teachers, Ed-Tech Conferences, and Innovation

By: Karl Rectanus

Karl Rectanus — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:01:16 +0000

Stacy – great set of four, and most could be addressed with best practice approaches to connecting the two systems/communities (educators & entrepreneurs) and incentivizing collaborative design thinking together. You mention MedTech R&D in another post — getting entrepreneurial minds in hospitals for study and collaboration, AND doctors/surgeons into design discussions (with mild incentives to collaborate) has resulted in new medtech devices solving practitioner needs.

This has yet to manifest in meaningful ways between educators and entrepreneurs, but it’s the next evolutionary step. In fact, an NC SMT Center and partners recently recommended a “Collaboratory” for education innovation; Ohio and other states are working on their innovation laboratory models through STEMX and the Battelle STEM Innovation Lab. Unlike most Education Startup challenges, competitions and incubators — which often have “geeks” solving perceived challenges, or teachers ‘hacking’ their own tool — the next stage of edtech innovation/incubator should include *accomplished* entrepreneurs fellowshiped into schools for observation, relationship-building, problem identification, and innovation ideation; educator incentives to engage in structured, collaborative design with rapid prototyping resources; and angel-style investment/awards with business, legal, and financial stake to minimum viable product stage. Parts of this are occurring through Startup Weekends, TechStar-style incubators, etc., but not together or focused on the big system of public K12 and the K20 pipeline. The capacity and structure to connect networks of schools (great schools, decent ones, and ‘failing’ ones) with business and technical talent doesn’t have to be expensive, but will change the domain.

Thanks for your leadership! Glad you and your smart team are working on this.

Karl Rectanus
@karlrectanus

By: Dan Car

Dan Car — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:28:05 +0000

Fantastic blog post!

Did you catch the “Modern Family” panel @ ASU? Great discussion there about the differing levels where procurement could happen, & discussion about the risk of losing “cohesiveness” if purchasing becomes too decentralized. I love empowering teachers to make decisions, but I worry about training, profession development and data integration if every teacher is using a separate set of tools.

When I was in the classroom, my school gave me a budget (~$500) for supplies, books, tech, etc. It was incredible.

By: Kevin Byers

Kevin Byers — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:01:02 +0000

Thanks for talking about a vary valid concern.
As an educator, I have often felt as if products, services, or platforms were created and then looked for problems to solve. All edTech companies (and for that matter, all ed companies) should make sure they start with research to help identify a real problem that exists. From here, their main focus should be solving these problems, not just releasing a product to gain marketshare.

By: Heather Chirtea

Heather Chirtea — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:46:57 +0000

Digital Wish has spent the past 4 years implementing 1:1 computing programs in the classroom across 39 schools, and going in weekly to train. There’s a disconnect between the commercial market solutions and what happens at a very grassroots level with technology in the classroom. One of the principals welcomed us on the first day like this, “…they close the door, pick up the chalk and textbook, and continue teaching just like they have for 20 years. The kids have technology everywhere except in the classroom and they disengage.”

Generalizing here, but teachers unfortunately don’t go to ed tech conferences because they don’t have access in their classrooms and they don’t have budgets to buy technology. So it’s not yet relevant. Adding to that, withdeclining budgets and no hope of technology funding, the only way many schools will get technology is through BYOD. Regardless of what MDR data is telling us about student:computer ratios, only 15% of the 39 schools we entered had anything more than 1-3 aging computers in the back of every classroom and a computer lab down the hall. These are average rural schools, and not a “high need” cross-section.

We’ve seen firsthand that teacher resistance stems from the complexity of technology. Every tech-resistant teacher we encounter has repeated failure stories to tell, where they tried to use technology in teaching and something went wrong within the confines of the time-restricted school schedule (the network admin changed the logins, DeepFreeze removed all the icons, the internet went down,) and the educator had just 55 minutes to teach this concept — so without immediate tech support, they were forced to abandon technology and return to their conventional teaching methods.

Technology has to be simple, or it won’t get adopted. Remember the Flip camcorder? It revolutionized classroom video for the average teacher (not just the savvy) because it was “just good enough”. It didn’t have fancy features, just ease of use. Push the button to record, and when you “Flip” out the USB – everyone knew where to stick it. So it got adopted – and in many classrooms, without a single hour of PD. Blended learning needs to follow this model.

When technology is simple, the PD paradigm begins to break down. Teachers don’t need nearly as much training to adopt. Look across the market at the blended learning tools. Even iBooks Author is too difficult for most educators to adopt. It has to be simple.

The ideal teacher tool will allow average teachers (not just the savvy) to create blended content with nothing more than mouse skills – then teachers need to be able to make adaptations themselves and without the necessity of constant PD and tech support – and they need to be able to share content freely or at a price they can afford, out of their own pockets (i.e. $.59 cents) across a network that they already belong to (i.e. don’t make me go somewhere else!). That’s a mouthful!

This is what Digital Wish has built. It’s called the eBuilder, and it delivers blended content as an app to any mobile device that the students bring into the classroom, Apple, Android, Windows, tablet, smartphone. It makes huge strides toward solving both the access and adoption difficulties at the same time. I hope you will add it to your list – it’s launching next month.

All the best,
Heather Chirtea
Executive Director, Digital Wish, [email protected]
P: 802-549-4571