Craft Category: Strategies

Edtech tools can serve as a channel to involve families in their students’ lives, strengthen the home-school connection, and provide access to teachers for better communication. School leaders should seek to gather family feedback to ensure all stakeholders are aware of these designated tools and their purpose, can access them seamlessly from any device and in their home language, and possess the technical skills necessary to navigate them.

Professional development can be a powerful driver for edtech integration. Collecting and analyzing data around teachers’ technology needs can help ensure that learning opportunities are relevant and targeted.

By utilizing and applying ideas and steps from instructional design, teachers can create better learning experiences that lead students toward rigorous application and more meaningful outcomes.

Cambridge Public Schools created asynchronous learning modules for their teachers to provide training around edtech tools and edtech integration pedagogical practices. Educators can “build their own” professional learning experience by combining modules and completing them at their own pace, and receive professional development credit after submitting a final task.

A district technology team in MA created a process for teachers to propose pilots of new edtech tools in their classrooms

Gill-Montague Regional School District’s Director of Technology partnered with a Spanish interpreter and community liaison to support Spanish-speaking families. The efforts of the liaison facilitated stronger engagement with edtech among Spanish-speaking families.

Teachers can offer valuable insights on whether devices and tools effectively meet student needs for learning, and therefore should be regularly included in the evaluation process for technology decisions.

This guide will help school and system leaders design measurable solutions and then capture data to inform continuous improvements.

District technology leaders can develop asynchronous supports for educators to shift the areas in which they dedicate their capacity.

Districts must carefully consider whether edtech tools are meeting their intended goals by gauging the impact, adoption, satisfaction, and engagement of each product. Districts can utilize a variety of methods to collect data in order to better understand the ways a tool is used and its resulting outcomes.