| I worked in a school's IT department a few years ago and the way the approach to tech worked was downright frustrating. It basically culminated in teachers request XYZ and us providing it. No one, not even our director, took the time to find out what the actual needs were for teachers. All they did was throw money and technology at the teachers and said "here, use it". I get really uncomfortable when people without any experience inside of a school try to solve problems by just throwing technology at it. There is so much more to a classroom then just having a tablet or chromebook and wifi. The biggest hurdle is always going to be our curriculum set up and how incredibly inflexible it can be in schools; not to mention how many of them are downright jokes when it comes to K-12 tech education. Edit: Going to go an extra further here and say no solution for education with tech is valuable unless you can provide a way to make the administration, teachers and parents understand the value in. This means not only making it known why they should try your new startup, but also providing some top notch on-boarding and training. Far too many companies come in and make a product look like gold, but then bail when the time comes to get some continued training on something. Also understand that a lot of schools have very constrained budgets. It's simply not easy to justifying projects in the XX-XXX thousands range of a budget. So if you're doing this also be sure to figure out some steps on how to work with the school to find ways of justifying the finance, or perhaps grants from the state, to implement this. Be mindful of state curriculum guidelines as well. Every state has their own guidelines for the different subject areas of education. There are bulleted items that schools must hit to meet them so you need to consider this. You simply cannot come in and say "here's some VR headset to use for history". Work with teachers and administration to have boilerplate lesson plans to meet the criteria of the curriculum. They've been doing things for years and are already busy. The last thing they'll have time for is sitting down to re-write lesson plans to fit a piece of technology in. Some will be eager to do it, but a higher percentage will probably be resistant. These are all issues and observations I saw when I was getting my education degree and then working in schools for 5+ years. Things have changed a bunch since I left (2011) but I'm sure a lot of these headaches still remain in various ways. There is so much to what makes a classroom work and work well that isn't just in the tool. Teachers, administration and parents have to buy in 100%. |
There's a general reluctance to switch to another way of doing things, even if it's proven to be great, unless the cost-benefit is exponentially way better. Then there's another hurdle to overcome - re-training teachers, producing new classroom materials, changing lesson plans etc.
Perhaps it's no accident that the most popular edtech that we hear right now is Clever. (Or maybe that's just because we're on HN, haha)