For those new to EdTech, ‘EdTech’ is education technology, where the application of tools, including software and hardware, is used to enhance student learning.
Here at directprint.io we spend a lot of time talking to educators and IT admins in the Education domain. We exhibit at EdTech conferences such as BETT and ISTE and are constantly amazed by the advances in EdTech that we see.
EdTech has hugely impacted teaching and teaching methods in the last 15-20 years, and shows every sign of continuing its bewildering growth.
I have sympathy for teachers in 2019; not only are they constantly assessed on the academic progress of their students, but from visiting BETT at the London Excel this year, they’re also expected to be experts in robotics, drone technology, augmented and virtual reality…. the list goes on.
Core skills – literacy and numeracy remain the cornerstone but it’s becoming more and more apparent that students nowadays are encouraged to think independently and embrace their natural curiosity.
This is where EdTech can make a life-changing difference.
For some students the gap between academic study and real-world application is huge, I suppose it’s the relevance gap.
Let’s take one of this year’s hot EdTech subjects ROBOTS as an example.
At BETT 2019 robots were everywhere; small ones, tall ones, spinning, walking, crawling, flying, talking, dancing robots. You couldn’t move on the show floor without bumping into a robot.
Used to aid the curriculum, Robots can be a great relevance gap filler.
Whether the underlying fundamental skill is points on the compass, trigonometry or units of measure, making a robot move from A-B can bring degrees and radians, centimetres and ‘head South-West’ to life. And that’s just the beginning.
But it seems that we are asking a lot of our educators:
So, what EdTech tools are currently selling well and how can teachers identify whether or not they’re going to improve learning in the classroom?
Here are just some EdTech examples:
A great way teachers can identify whether or not the technology is worth the investment is to ask themselves some of the following questions:
EdTech is undoubtedly useful in filling the relevance gap for some students and is becoming commonplace in the classroom. We hope that teachers have the time and funding to embrace EdTech to select tooling, practices and technology that works for them, their curriculum and their students.
Our mission at directprint.io is to make student printing more manageable. We hope that helps teachers in some small way…