School districts access thousands of education technology products every year. Vetting those tools for safety, usability, and accessibility can take hundreds of staff hours.
ISTE+ASCD hope they have a solution that could save every district at least 1,000 hours annually: the EdTech Index.
“There isn’t really a ‘Wirecutter’ version of [education technology] that exists,” said Tal Havivi, the director of R&D at ISTE+ASCD, referring to The New York Times’ product-recommendation website.
As a result, district leaders are devoting precious time duplicating work that’s already been done by neighboring systems, Havivi told reporters June 30 at the ISTELive 25 + ASCD Annual Conference 25 here, June 29 to July 2.
The evaluation process looks similar “from one district to the next,” Havivi said. District leaders are “doing the same thing over and over and over again” when it comes to about 80% of a typical product evaluation, he said. About another 20% of the process is spent ensuring a tool works with a district’s curriculum and context, Havivi estimated.
“We’re trying to make 80 percent of the work much simpler,” he said. The goal: to save district leaders a thousand hours a year now spent vetting products.
Last year, ISTE+ASCD announced a partnership with organizations including Digital Promise, CAST, and 1EdTech to establish a one-stop resource educators can use to quickly determine which products and applications have been examined and recommended by reputable, independent reviewers.
For instance, CAST, a nonprofit education research and development organization that created the Universal Design for Learning framework, examines tools for accessibility.
This year, ISTE+ASCD announced a twist on the effort: Education leaders in four states—Indiana, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia—will promote the index among district leaders and offer feedback to improve it. (ISTE’s partnership on the index with states is not financial.)
What’s more, four major management platforms will directly embed information from the index, including Class Link, Clever, Lightspeed, and SchoolDay. That way, educators can see which applications have gotten which seals of approval without having to check back at the index.
More than half of states keep a list of products that have been vetted in areas like privacy and encourage districts to consider them.
But Virginia doesn’t have that kind of approved ed-tech menu, said Calypso Gilstrap, the associate director of the office of educational technology and classroom innovation at the Virginia department of education.
The index will help the Old Dominion’s district leaders in one especially key area: “safety, safety, safety,” Gilstrap said.
And it will save officials from having to “go to the company website and talk to a salesperson to find out: Does it have a data-privacy agreement? Does it work with our learning-management system? Is there training involved?” Gilstrap said.
The index may also be a boon to Virginia’s wide array of education technology companies. Since the EdTech index is based on the judgments of nonprofit organizations, “small women-owned, minority-owned [ed-tech companies] Virginia, can rise up” and show that they meet the organizations’ standards.
Gilstrap also believes the index will help Virginia districts become more informed consumers of education technology.
“Instead of finding a tool and then being like, ‘How can we use this?’ It’s now going to be, ‘I have this problem and I need to solve it. What are the tools available to me?’” she said. “So, it kind of flips the script on how I’m going to select educational technology.”
