10 FACTORS FOR EDTECH SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Participants have reached the next stage of the EdTech Genome Project, an initiative to understand why education technology works in some schools and districts but not others. Led by the Jefferson Education Exchange, a consortium with more than 100 education organizations in research, advocacy and ed tech development has published a list of 10 factors that play into success and failure of ed tech implementation.

The 10 variables identified by the consortium are:

• Adoption plans, the processes and resources used by the school or district (or the state) to evaluate and select technology before its purchase and “full-scale implementation”;
• Competing priorities, the extent to which the district has other initiatives running–including those that are non-technical in nature;
• Basics in place, such as hardware, software and internet access, support and financial resources;
• Implementation plans, those processes that a district uses to deploy ed tech after it is procured–and over multiple years, including the monitoring of usage, tracking of engagement goals and measuring of effectiveness;
• Professional development and support for teachers and staff that are running the ed tech;
• The culture of the school and district, including the way teachers and others work together and the “set of beliefs, values, and assumptions they share”;
• The administrative support provided by the district administrators to those who are implementing the ed tech;
• The autonomy of teachers, including how much they’re involved in the decision-making for ed tech adoption and implementation;
• Teacher beliefs about the use of technology in learning; and
• The vision for teaching and learning with technology, and, specifically, the extent to which that vision expresses how ed tech is leveraged as a tool for supporting instruction and student outcomes.