Key Takeaways
• EdTech is short for education technology. It combines hardware and software to enhance teacher-led learning and improve educational outcomes.
• Examples of EdTech include classroom tablets, interactive whiteboards, online content delivery, and MOOCs.
• The goal of EdTech is to personalize education, improve student outcomes, and reduce the burden on teachers.
• Concerns about EdTech include potential data tracking, impersonality in teaching, and challenges in accommodating diverse learning styles.
What Is EdTech?
The term "EdTech" is a combination of "education" and "technology." It refers to hardware and software designed to personalize teacher-led learning in classrooms and improve students' education outcomes.
EdTech is still in the early stages of its development, but it shows promise as a method of customizing a curriculum for a student’s ability level. It provides interactive tools and online course delivery. EdTech introduces and reinforces new content at a pace the student can handle.
Many praise the use of technology in the classroom, but others fear that it's impersonal and can lead to data collection and tracking of both students and instructors.
How EdTech Works
The creators of EdTech emphasize the enhancement potential of the software and technology, freeing up the teacher to move into more a facilitator role. By automating the assessment of ability and adjustment of difficulty, EdTech can potentially lead to better outcomes for individual students and the class as a whole.
Technology in the classroom experienced two waves of implementation. T
he first was the introduction of hardware into the classroom. Many of them are cloud based and pull on educational research to set algorithms for how slowly or rapidly to advance a student along different learning objectives.
Massive Online Open Online Courses (MOOCs) use technology to reach a vast number of online students around the world. While these courses also have issues, such as low completion rates, they are an attempt to provide education in a way that suits the user.
Challenges in EdTech
Many of the fears about EdTech are looking farther into the future where entire courses could potentially be managed by software. The current state of the field uses analytics to judge a student’s competency in different areas of the curriculum, allowing the student to move ahead more quickly in some areas while taking more time to reinforce areas of weakness. As each student works through a customized curriculum, the teacher acts as a facilitator and trouble shooter with insights provided by the EdTech software on a student’s strengths and weaknesses.
In practice, EdTech is still in the early stages of development for even basic subjects like math or reading and composition skills. There are a variety of design challenges for EdTech. The biggest hurdle is adjusting for different learning styles in the classroom.
Currently EdTech is usually delivered through a laptop or tablet, resulting in a read-and-respond learning experience.
However, EdTech faces additional social hurdles. Students, and even more so the parents, look to a teacher to create a social environment that enables group learning and other dynamics that aren’t currently within the scope of EdTech.
Avinash MK
Digital Marketer
Maieutic Edutech private ltd
