The benefits of Ed Tech

I believe that Ed-Tech can really improve child outcomes by focusing on improving child teacher interactions. My way of looking at things is that the learning experience is not really just learning — it is teaching, and learning. Every learning experience has to have these two components, because you can have a crappy teacher and an awesome student, and there will be progress, but you can also have an awesome teacher but a crappy student.

Breaking down both components

Teaching is what happens completely at the teacher side — this includes pedagogical approaches, sensitivity to student’s interest, teaching formats, teacher’s abilities and skills.

Learning is what the child actually does — and it all starts with the question: is the child willing, ready, and able to learn?

• Does the child want to learn? are we priming spaces, settings, and contexts that make him or her interested in learning?
• Is the student ready to learn: are his basic needs met so that he is up for the challenge of learning?
• Is the student able to learn: well fed, with some dominion of basic executive function skills (working memory, self-regulation, attention focus, etc)?

Secondary stuff like infrastructure also matters, but more as a means of driving value for both sides of the equation. For example, cool videos/tech can help teacher’s pedagogy; or, well designed apps can promote student attention at a certain challenge, improving learning.

So where does tech fit in?

Tech can improve the infrastructure, for sure — yet focusing only on learning infrastructure limits the impact any investment might have (by definition, it will be more capital intensive).

I believe tech can definitely improve the teaching-learning cycle in any setting by focusing on teacher-child interactions. A child is always learning, from birth — in fact, parent-infant interactions actually shape the developing brain (link: developing child); adult-child interactions continue throughout childhood and are the essential building blocks for learning, growth, and the road to maturity.

APP — impacting child-teacher interactions

We can think about impacting the teaching-learning cycle by working on three dimensions: Access to information, Productivity, and Personalization (APP):

• Access to information — giving less trained teachers, or teachers in remote-er places, quality info that they can use. Technology, particularly mobile and the internet, are essential to democratizing (fancy buzz word here) knowledge. Same argument for students.
• Productivity — freeing up teachers’ time from reports, and bureaucratic stuff, like homework assignments and grading, testing, and reporting, and allowing them to focus on quality interactions and pedagogy. Same argument for students/children
• Personalization — giving teachers’ information that helps them tailor the interactions and nurture the teaching-learning experience; or allowing students to advance at their own pace, to explore content that really interests them (improving engagement, thus learning), and to create their own learning roadmaps.

There are many ed-tech firms out there, but few, such as Khan Academy, have truly had a transformational impact. Let’s hope that firms start to focus on the teaching-learning cycle, building products that really improve the teaching-learning cycle, and foster quality interactions between children and the relevant adults in their lives.

A big prediction: More buzz words? why yes: The consumerization of ed-tech has begun! Think of what dropbox, evernote are doing to the business side of things: by placing productive technology in the hand of consumers, making products that they love and are useful, they drove adoption in the corporate side. In a similar way, several startups are driving products that parents and teachers love, and will eventually push educational institutions to adopt products (or use them, disregarding the institutions’ opinions). I still think that Disruptive breakthroughs in education will only come when we stop thinking about empowering schools and start thinking about empowering individuals (link: Kinedu blog)