To answer this question, understanding why educational institutions around the world invest in educational technology is a good place to start. When we research trends in the sector, we find studies such as the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs,” which identifies the essential skills for the professionals of the future. When you look at the top skills, you’ll find “Solving Complex Problems,” “Creativity,” “Leadership,” and others that are essential for the future.

To foster these skills in students, we need to design new learning experiences, expose students to content in different ways, and promote autonomy and active learning, with the student at the center of the learning process. To achieve all of this, everything seems to point to the use of technology.

The need to integrate them into teaching processes seems to be common sense in our society. However, we still see thousands of schools across the country with little or no technology, and they do not seem to be in a hurry to discuss technology or change this situation. This is precisely due to the issue raised in the title of this article, which leaves schools and families uncertain about adopting technology in education.

The question in the title of this article is so important that we invited Emerson Bento, Chief Technology Officer at Colégio Bandeirantes, and Pedro D'Incao, from the D'Incao Institute of Education, to discuss this topic on SejuntaCast.

One of the factors that drastically increases the likelihood of failure for an educational technology project and reinforces the uncertainty surrounding its adoption is the project’s lack of alignment with the school’s strategic objectives. In other words, it is not enough to simply introduce various technologies into the school; their adoption must be planned beyond the pedagogical level, with clear objectives, metrics, a timeline, and indicators of success.

There are three fundamental pillars of an educational technology project:

Technology: choosing the best technology to achieve educational goals and ensure targeted, managed, and safe use by students.

Educational: To provide professional development for educators so they can make the best use of technology in the classroom, integrate it into the curriculum, and develop new learning experiences using this tool.

Leadership: Align technology adoption with the school’s long-term strategic goals, define success metrics, and monitor project data to make data-driven decisions.

These three pillars are essential to the success of any technology project in a school, and the absence of any one of them can completely undermine it.

When an educational technology project is planned and designed to align these three pillars, the institution begins to see a return on its investment. In the June 2022 annual report “iPad and Mac in Education: Results,” for example, hundreds of schools around the world share metrics that demonstrate the success of adopting technology in education and the return on investment. These are examples of schools that have successfully implemented and integrated the three pillars, demonstrating improvements in Motivation and Engagement, Collaboration and Feedback, Academic Achievement, and Productivity and Efficiency.

The effective implementation of these technologies provides direct benefits to school administrators, such as higher student retention rates (Highlands International School in Mexico increased its student retention rate to 96%), better performance on national exams (Colégio de Lamas in Portugal saw student performance 20% higher than the national average), graduation rates (Haywood Early High School in North Carolina, United States, increased its graduation rate from 81% to 95%), among other immediate benefits.

Thus, one of the expected outcomes of a well-implemented educational technology project is to build student loyalty, thereby increasing retention, attracting more interested families, and resulting in more enrollments. Everything is tied together by the strategic plan—from the decision on which technology to adopt to the activities carried out in the schoolyard using active learning methods that place the student at the center of the learning process.

Once we’ve tied all the loose ends together, we can reap the practical benefits of adopting these technologies and calculate the ROI (return on investment) of this initiative in order to also assess the project’s financial return. Therefore, alongside this perspective, we will simultaneously see, on the other hand, a more engaged student who is being prepared for the future through the development of various skills and their autonomy using active learning methods.

After all, does adopting technology in education really work? Sejunta’s mission is precisely to support this planning process and guide educational institutions through their entire journey with technology. We have already supported more than 300 educational projects in Brazil and abroad, fostering responsible and meaningful technology adoption that positively impacts the entire school community.

Want to learn more about how to succeed in an educational technology project? Download the free ebook “Everything You Need to Know to Get Started on Your Educational Technology Project” and make the best decisions for your school!

This article is a call to action for you, the administrator, to take action and join the ranks of hundreds of schools that have seen their performance metrics improve as a result of the effective and well-planned implementation of educational technologies.

Did you like it? Share it on social media: