What is EdTech?
The EdTech industry can be a complex landscape to navigate, so we created EdinLabs to bring all the moving parts together.
EdTech stands for education technology. Simply put, it’s an industry that focuses on the study and use of technology to improve education.
Over the past decade, billions of dollars have gone toward providing access to technology. For example, 1 to 1 initiatives across the U.S. give every student a personal laptop, tablet, or chrome-book. However, access to hardware alone isn’t guaranteed to improve student achievement, and research has shown that access doesn’t even guarantee positive results (read more about 1 to 1 results here).
This concept is rather intuitive. If someone handed you a PlayStation, you wouldn’t automatically have more fun every day. First, there’s the matter of training. You would need to learn how to work the controllers in order to use the console. Then, there’s engagement- you’d have to enjoy using the PlayStation enough to voluntarily play with it consistently.
Next comes perhaps the greatest challenge. How do you know which video game to purchase and play? You can go by popular recommendation, but what other people find ‘fun’ might not have the same effect on you.
This analogy frames the current state of the EdTech industry pretty well. In a nutshell, if ‘fun’ in the context of EdTech is ‘student achievement’, the industry is focused on trying to figure out how to measure the effect that educational apps and software can have on students. Hardware alone isn’t enough- there needs to be well researched and developed EdTech apps and software that cater to the different needs of students, teachers, and administrators across the country.
These apps range in type, purpose, subject, demographic, and so much more. To make the search easier and less complicated, we created EdinLabs, so that teachers could very easily express their classroom’s needs and find the exact EdTech products that fit their profile. Our mission is to help teachers to not only better understand EdTech, but also to better understand their needs in the context of what EdTech apps and software are capable of affecting.
Follow us as we work toward this crucial goal.
