I have a confession to make: I’ve been working with educational technology products for over 20 years. That means I’ve encountered all kinds of skeptical looks throughout my career. Is the company that created this product just trying to profit at my expense? Will this technology take away teachers’ jobs? Will this product take away teachers’ autonomy? Will it undermine the teaching and learning process?

This skepticism is legitimate. After all, there are indeed products that offer no real value, and companies that prioritize profit over providing enriching educational opportunities. With years of experience, I can also say with conviction that these companies don’t last long in the extremely challenging education market.

But what contribution can educational technology products make to the field of education? In fact, the contributions are countless, and it is up to educators to develop their own criteria for evaluating them.

Let’s start by comparing it to the good old teaching materials. It’s not the same set of teaching materials that works for all schools or school systems. Of course, in an initial assessment, teaching materials must be free of both linguistic and conceptual errors. However, beyond that, there are SO MANY factors that need to be considered! Is it engaging for students? Is the language accessible to its audience? Does it offer guidance to teachers that is feasible? Interesting? Appropriate for the audience? Does it cover the minimum required curriculum or allow students to go beyond it? What activities does it suggest for students? Are students able to take an active role as they study, learn, and grow? What vision of society does it promote? Phew! So many questions! In fact, teachers and administrators are already used to these kinds of questions.

The issue gets a little more complicated when we start looking at technology products through the same lens. It doesn’t work. Let me explain why: Unless we’re talking about digital content for distance learning, technology products aren’t comprehensive instructional materials that accompany students throughout the entire academic term in a given subject. They do not serve to structure a course but rather to complement the educational process. And why should we pay attention to them if they are merely complementary? Precisely for this reason: they allow us to do what is not possible in a conventional classroom with conventional teaching materials, relying exclusively on teacher-student and student-student interaction—no matter how effective that interaction may be.

When we evaluate technology products, the main question we have to ask is: What can we do with this product that we couldn’t do without it? The answers will vary widely! Visually rich products allow us to visualize situations that wouldn’t be possible on paper or on a whiteboard; auto-correction activities let students practice familiar and necessary content at their own pace, without holding up the rest of the class; and technologies for personalized, adaptive learning—based on skills and competencies—enable us to support entire classes when students are at different learning levels. Gamified activities keep students’ attention focused on specific topics. Content-sharing and editing technologies enable group work. Creative technologies allow students to create and express themselves. In extreme cases, there are technologies that can teach content and skills for which there are no teachers in the school, neighborhood, or municipality—such as foreign languages, programming, music, or advanced mathematics and physics, among others.

Technologies do not need to be evaluated for completeness. Rarely (I think never) do they set out to provide a student’s comprehensive education. That role always falls to the school and the teacher. Some technologies help with memorization. Some help with creativity. Some promote individualized learning. Some promote interaction. Each will be necessary at a different stage of the learning process, and it is up to the teacher and the administrator to assess this.

Some technologies are paid, and others are free—and the free ones aren’t always more cost-effective for the school district or educational institution. Generally, it’s worth paying for premium products that you want the entire teaching staff—or students in a specific grade—to adopt on a regular basis, in an organized manner, with easy access directly on the school’s website and the ability to track the performance of those involved in the process through data.

The possibilities for supplementing the teaching and learning process with technology are endless. It is important to know how to evaluate them. It is important for teachers and administrators “who are not from the technology field” to assess and observe how much these technologies enable us to do things that would not be possible without them—not even with the best teachers. With this perspective, we can find powerful allies in the world of technology and educational products to help us solve the challenges in education, which have only been growing in recent times.

 

 

 

 

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