Thoughts on Evaluating New EdTech Tools

The annual ISTE conference is occurring this 7 days. This is when most of the huge businesses in the U.S. academic technological innovation industry unveil their new offerings and smaller sized organizations consider to make a mark for on their own.

Heading to the ISTE conference can be an exciting time to see all of the new “shiny” items. Regrettably, I won’t be attending this year. I will be pursuing #ISTElive on Twitter to see what people today are enthusiastic about. It’s periods like this that it&#8217s significant to try to remember to appear at new edtech goods with a important eye and feel about how these solutions can basically improve students’ learning encounters.

The framework that I have employed for decades to consider new edtech products and solutions is a easy a person of Discovery, Dialogue, and Demonstration. I discussed this in detail in this movie that I revealed a few of a long time in the past. The most important factors are summarized under.

Discovery

Does the solution or support aid college students learn new-to-them data? If so, I&#8217ll invest time investigating it to see if it merits applying in a classroom. Some merchandise and expert services that healthy this class are Google Textbooks research, many augmented and digital reality applications like those from Merge Cube, and digital map platforms like ArcGIS Tale Maps and Google Earth.

Discussion

Can the support or product enable teachers aid discussions further than standard in-classroom conversations? These are resources that can give shy learners a voice and give chatty college students a spot to categorical them selves, also. Flipgrid does this properly, as does Synth.

Demonstration

Can the instrument or service aid pupils showcase their knowledge and capabilities in a new and exciting way? For some pupils this may well be as basic as a new Google Slides or PowerPoint aspect that allows them give a improved presentation. For other students this may possibly be creating eco-friendly screen films. And for other students it could be acquiring their personal game titles or cell apps to clearly show their know-how or programming ideas (the MIT App Inventor is excellent for that, below&#8217s how to use it).

Could this be accomplished just as effectively without the need of tech?

A ultimate believed about assessing new edtech products and solutions that I shared in a personal webinar last 7 days. The framework is excellent, but an even easier way to believe about new edtech goods is to check with by yourself, “could this be carried out just as well without the need of tech?” If the solution is yes, then that product or service may not be value shelling out a whole lot of time on.

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