We spread EdTech, but is it working?

Edtech is a crucial precursor to "work tech"— the tools that today’s students will need in school, career training and eventually the work environment. In an economy that is moving quickly toward more independent workers executing high level projects for a variety of businesses, exploring an ever changing eco system of new technologies will be a central skill for workers. Students need access to tools that work. Be that as it may, today, the choices teachers make in regards to the tools they use with students depend on hypothesis instead of solid evidence.

School, district, and state leaders make decisions on technological choices every day that will influence student’s tech fluency, also learning results. These leaders burn through billions of dollars on equipment and resources to implement their decisions. The New Schools Venture Fund evaluates that K-12 schools on the whole spend about $9 billion every year on instructional software, digital assessments, laptops and tablets for students and teachers. But how do these pioneers know whether their investments will lead to the students learning outcome they desire? What methods for evaluating whether the tools work will lead to selection of the best tools for learning?

Unfortunately, many of them may never know because there essentially is insufficient research about what works—and good, existing research rarely makes it to the policymaking table. In addition, high-impact practices and technologies remain comfortable at the "pilot" stage, never accomplishing the transformative scale they promise because little is known about effective scaling across different school and district contexts.

The time has arrived to dive in and investigate what works. For much of the last year, roughly 150 researchers, policy makers, business people, educators, investors, and institutional pioneers have been teaming up in 10 working groups (each supported by a professional researcher) to study and discuss data, procedures, and frameworks that show generous guarantee.

This May, these pioneers and another 150 or so partners will met for the first ever EdTech Efficacy Research Academic Symposium, sorted out by The University of Virginia Curry School of Education, Digital Promise and the Jefferson Education Accelerator. At the symposium, we will keep on developing a shared understanding of the concrete steps we can all take to ensure that real research drives the development, determination, and organization of education technology. We hope this will commence a more intense push to advance research that leads to better strategy and practice in both adopting and using technology.

Five factors currently drive this demand for enhancing the quality and scalability of education technology:

1. Higher academic standards nationwide
2. An attention on school and career training readiness
3. The changing role of a diminishing supply of teachers
4. Rapidly emerging technologies
5. Static state budgets.

Rather than thinking of technology as a tool for implementing old forms of pedagogy method, we should expand the notion of what great teaching looks like—and the role of the teacher. Teachers aren't becoming less vital in the period of quickly emerging technology; rather, they're becoming the critical navigators of newly available tools and information. Research and technology communities play an important part in helping instructors and leaders effectively serve that part.

The Alliance for Excellent Education has been addressing the challenge of utilizing new educational technologies to make education delivery better. Working with 60 education partners and the U.S. Department of Education, we at the Alliance for Excellent Education have created Future Ready Schools—a venture that helps school district leaders to actualize digital learning systems that customize learning and better serve the future needs of students and the areas where they will live and work. Up until this point, 3,100 school districts have vowed.

To best help these education leaders as they deploy proven advanced learning strategies, we need to keep continue investigating practices and offer strong proof with respect to the fidelity of new tools and strategies that continually arise. The EdTech Symposium is designed to kick off this procedure and inspire increased cooperation between tool developers who aim at making exciting, engaging technologies and teachers who aim to ensure that each students has access to the high- quality education she or he needs and deserves. By beginning the dialogue, we intend to spur deeper, more research-driven discussions that lead to the educational transformation our country requires.