There’s no getting around it. Choosing the tech tools for a school or district, ones best for the organization’s plans, goals and budget, requires delving into the details of what products do.
Here’s EdSurge’s shortlist of the sources emerging to help administrators work through the complexities of identifying and buying the right tools for their schools:
- EdSurge offers its free product index, a compilation of more than 2,300 edtech tools;
- Common Sense Education offers free teacher reviews on edtech tools and is building privacy evaluations of edtech tools;
- The Edtech Rapid Cycle Evaluation Tools (RCE Coach), a free resource developed with support from the Dept. of Education, helps analyze school level data and evaluate the relevance of technology;
- LearnTrials is a commercial platform helps schools manage their teachers’ evaluations on the edtech tools that they use;
- BrightBytes is a commercial platform that offers a set of data management tools to evaluate effectiveness of tools in a specific school;
- Noodle Markets is building a commercial platform for buying anything in a school, including edtech products;
- Technology for Education Consortium is a non-profit that compiles pricing information on edtech tools.
All such efforts aim to make buying education technology tools more of a science, not just a result of habit or relationships. They are the building blocks of a better functioning marketplace for edtech and—the real goal—better outcomes for students.
