Use an expert assessment of five common indicators to validate ed tech products before you buy.
As technology continues to shift and expand around us, schools and districts are working diligently to keep up. School leaders are challenged to select from a seemingly endless list of ed tech product options, toggling among hundreds of applications already in use, training staff, and orchestrating timely IT support.
For lower-resourced schools, this is an even greater challenge. Fortunately, many school districts have embraced a digital transformation over the last 10 to 15 years—particularly postpandemic—and are integrating equitable technology to seed powerful learning.
New technologies will always have the potential to transform teaching and learning, so how can educators keep up? School and district teams can start by vetting and integrating ed tech products in a thoughtful and ethical way.
A consortium of nonprofit organizations, including Digital Promise, introduced five common quality indicators for ed tech products and services in June 2024 to validate products by qualified experts. Products should be:
- Safe. Ed tech products must include robust data privacy and security measures to protect student and educator data and safeguard against unauthorized access or data breaches. Adhering to industry standards and laws, products must create a secure learning environment and ensure data minimization (collecting only necessary data) and data transparency (users understand which data are collected for what purpose).
- Evidence-based. Ed tech product design, implementation, and claims of effectiveness need to be grounded in rigorous research and evidence-based practices as specified by the Every Student Succeeds Act’s Tiers of Evidence. Suppliers must engage in research-driven design, provide empirical validation, demonstrate effectiveness, and align products with established educational standards.
- Inclusive. Ed tech products must prioritize accessibility, inclusivity, and equitable design to ensure they are acceptable to learners from diverse backgrounds and a complete range of learner variability. Ed tech products must be accessible to all learners, avoid promoting existing stereotypes and creating new ones, and allow students to acquire accurate information regardless of biased algorithms.
- Usable. Ed tech products must be designed to be easily usable by educators and students to ensure a seamless digital experience. If the product is not easy to use, it creates an unnecessary barrier, and educators and students will struggle to use the tool.
- Interoperable. Ed tech products must seamlessly connect to other technologies in a school’s digital ecosystem by adhering to established interoperability standards that ensure the secure exchange and beneficial aggregation of data that inform instruction and personalize learning.
Digital Transformation in Action
What we need to do now is scale these efforts to encourage an intentional redesign of education systems to engage more learners—particularly historically and systematically excluded learners. Elevating the stories of what digital transformation looks like in different communities and how it translates into implementation can create real hope for an equitable, adaptable education system that better addresses the needs of all learners.
Digital transformation is about personalizing learning so that students are at the center of their school experiences. It requires building capacity, proficiency, and infrastructure to shift toward a more competency-based system in which students progress based on their mastery of skills rather than time spent in seats.
A successful digital transformation also requires a comprehensive ecosystem that allows educators, researchers, policymakers, and technology specialists to work together to ensure digital equity and the effective use of tools to support teaching and learning. Before making any purchasing decisions, schools must have a strategy in place that is built around the needs of their student population.
Rachel Arredondo is principal of Reagan Elementary School in California’s Lindsay Unified School District and a member of Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools. She started working in the district in 2005 as it was beginning to transition to a performance-based system.
“I experienced the transformation firsthand,” says Arredondo. “We redesigned the system to be competency-based—where learners have agency and take charge of their own learning. It hasn’t been without its challenges over the years, but we knew it had to be done. We had to change the way students were learning, because they weren’t reaching their potential.”
Key components of the district’s transition included providing 1:1 devices to all learners, free community Wi-Fi, the employment of digital learning specialists at the site and district levels, and a districtwide commitment to educating teachers, administrators, learners, and families on new technology tools.
Preparing for Future Tech Today
Technology will continue to advance, and we must adapt our learning environments to prepare students for emerging technologies and the future. Districts that come together around a digital learning strategy are setting themselves up for success today and tomorrow.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently top of mind because it is a powerful tool with seemingly unlimited potential. We need to understand, evaluate, and leverage it appropriately in school and classroom environments. AI can help teachers enhance instruction, learning, and assessment through personalized, adaptive learning platforms; automate grading and feedback systems; better connect home and school; and design intelligent tutoring systems.
Schools should consider the following when tackling digital transformation:
1. Ed tech procurement that meets your school’s population. Not all technology is created equal, and not all tools have been accessible to all learners. Before making an ed tech purchase, ensure that it is in sync with the needs of your students, pedagogical approach, and assessment model; provides learner variability; is age-appropriate for your student population; and allows for differentiation.
“For us, any tool or program we bring onto campus must align with our performance-based system, must be learner-centered, and give students agency by having access to resources at their fingertips,” Arredondo says. “We work with software companies that are open to adapting their offerings to meet our specific needs and that will provide meaningful professional development throughout the year.”
One example is computational thinking for K–5 English language arts (ELA), which takes a problem-solving approach to equip learners with a foundation to solve problems systematically, whether using a computer or not.
In this project, Digital Promise developed computational thinking routines that leverage four key skills in ELA instruction: abstraction, algorithmic thinking, decomposition, and pattern recognition. They were designed to promote metacognition by providing concrete steps for visualizing thinking processes with the goal of addressing commonly challenging ELA concepts.
2. The four-legged stool of partnership among teachers, students, families, and content. Beyond
Richard Elmore’s instructional core, the four-legged stool includes families because of parents’ and caregivers’ strong influence at the elementary level. By aligning these four areas, teachers can establish streamlined communication with families, align instructional planning with learning on and off campus, and create clarity in classroom routines and personalization. Without digital equity—without closing the “homework gap”—this partnership cannot occur.
At Reagan Elementary, Arredondo sees the district’s learning management system, Empower, as central to operationalizing digital transformation. The district built Empower from the ground up, and “the time and energy has been worth it, because the system aligns learner, teacher, and parent needs around content that is relevant to each student as they move through the school year,” she says.
3. Everywhere learning. As many hours as students spend learning at school, learning outside of the school day is just as important. In addition to ensuring access to reliable internet and devices, schools have a responsibility to educate families on using technology responsibly at home, using resources such as the EdSurge Product Index and Common Sense Media to vet apps. Teachers and administrators also need guidance from district tech support teams to properly vet apps.
Reagan Elementary students have 1:1 devices, and nearly 95 percent take their devices home every day. Empower allows parents to support learning at home, and the district backs it up with tech support.
4. School/district alignment. With the sheer volume of technology at our fingertips, it’s essential to have a districtwide tech strategy that aligns with site-based plans. A district’s IT department should provide regular support to all schools, and if possible, hire school-based IT staff to ensure consistency of support and alignment with the district.
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that technology is non-negotiable. Integrating digital tools isn’t just beneficial to learning environments, but also essential to our resilience in times of crisis and our preparedness for future disruptions.
5. Coherence from the ground up. Classrooms and schools are the foundation for schoolwide transformation as long as structures for communication and collaboration are in place. The teachers and school leaders who are closest to the students and know what activates deep learning should have the power to influence district strategy and policy. Teachers who shine a spotlight on what’s working and what isn’t, include evidence, and offer a plan for action steps with support from the district will be the ones who spur lasting change.
With funding sources tightening, school leaders must take the time necessary to review technology programs, their effectiveness, and teacher/student engagement before making decisions. School districts across the U.S. are starting to use product certifications and cooperative purchasing groups such as the Education Technology Joint Powers Authority to evaluate student achievement and product efficacy when making product purchasing decisions.
The most important feedback will come from teachers on your own campus, however. Hearing their experiences with particular tools and what has been most transformative for them and their students should inform final
decision-making. Arredondo’s advice? Prepare for a full-scale transition that might make you feel like you have been “flipped upside down.” Its specifics might include:
- Investing in a powerful learning management system and training teachers on the technology;
- Ensuring that all learners have access to technology and the internet; and
- Shifting your school’s culture and mindset for continuous improvement, data transparency, and a shared leadership style so that staff are making decisions, too.
When district leadership invests its resources into transforming the learning environment for all learners and prioritizes a cohesive digital strategy that positions technology as a tool for student achievement, the entire ecosystem—students, teachers, staff, administrators, families, and the broader community—wins.
Jean-Claude Brizard is president and CEO of Digital Promise, a global nonprofit organization working to expand opportunity for every learner.
