4 layers of Education Technology for Schools
How should a School make its EdTech strategy?
Join 507 School Innovation Enthusiasts
I am so sorry but before talking about the 4 types of education technology in schools, I would like to start with this satire, yes, most school leaders opt for
Education Technology as a Fashion
Please do not be offended, let me prove my point, I mean why I am saying this?
If you are from the education circles, I am sure you can recall this picture
This is from a recent speech by Sophie Winkleman.
She talked for almost 20 minutes about how wrongly we have impacted our children by excessive usage of edtech, devices, and social media?
But it is funny to notice that only a small clip of that whole speech is going viral where she is talking about how Sweden abandoned computers from their schools.
People are treating it as if It is an official statement by Sweden, while she is actually a British Actress and that entire speech was actually about the british schools
She is not from Sweden, she is not any ways connected to the Government of Sweden
She has been married into the royal family of Britain and Sweden was just a reference in her speech to show path to British Schools
As a matter of fact, when Sweden actually decided to re-examine the excessive usage of computers in schools and decided to oust it by putting the books back in the schools, many international media platforms already talked about this news years ago.
The question is, If that was an old news and it was not even coming from an official source of Sweden government, then why this clip is a rage among the education leaders circles, here in India, be it on whatsapp, facebook, twitter or any other place
Not only social media, people did webinars across the internet, panels were invited in conferences across the nation, newspaper articles were published
All because one clip from one talk went viral
and an entire nation started considering it as a new news
I just want to put a humble submission that our education leadership really need to think, are they in the business of journalism, if not why they are trying to be the first to talk about things without even checking the relevance
why are we making a ruckus now on an old news?
This thing is just to tell you that digital media is influencing all of us and I do not want you to take decisions based on content in fashion
Choose EdTech as per your needs and do not become a victim of fashion that digital media suggests
Are you ready to learn about the technology at school?
Education technology at school
But before we start looking at these 4 types of technologies, I want you to do 2 things for me.
Actually I am planning to host a series of interviews as substack Live and the first one I am planning is around Artificial Intelligence for school educators in second weekend of April (You will get the link to join in our next edition that will be released on Fri Apr 4th, 2025)
The first thing I request you to send us questions along with your name and details
and then second, please respond to this poll
and now after responding to the poll, lets come back to 3 types of technology in schools and how to optimise it.
4 types of Education Technologies for Schools
Technology Labs - So all those Tinkering Labs, Robotics Labs, STEM Labs, types of technology products are considered under this category
Efficiency Improvement Technology - This is usually your ERP, sometimes it is also done through multiple different apps, Basic Spread Sheets, Accounting Softwares and even simple Registers.
Classroom Technology - When you try to put in projectors, screens, panels in your classes, or you are buying content for these classes, or if you are using computers in a class to teach academics, it will graduate to classroom tech.
Learning Beyond Classroom Technology - Any technology like LMS, or other mobile based software that children use beyond classrooms, MOOCs, Curated list on the internet, Social Media, all comes under this category.
Now
if you are overwhelmed with tech,
or if you have limited budget and want to pick a sequence
or if you are not sure from where to start a revamp
I can give you rule that even a layman would be able to apply
So whether you want to upgrade, audit, or revamp education technology at your school, the first priority must be
tech that saves time for your teacher
then comes the tech that gives your students experience
and in last comes the technology that gives your students visualisation (as a matter of fact, you may completely skip this tech, if you want)
So ERP, LMS, AI to empower your teachers, assessment mechanisms for your students are the kind of tech that should be on the top priority
but always remember, ERP does not work good without defined SOPs and Data Flows, like wise LMS is not good if you are not using it to measure the improvement in each child.
So the first focus is to empower your teachers and save time for them and that is why, while I may not support
Technology Labs
We really see a huge gap here. Most school leaders do not know that they can develop their own STEM Labs, Makers Lab, or Tinkering Labs for their school with almost no money. If you are a budget school and want to start a lab here, we would love to do a pilot project at your school.
Efficiency Improvement Technology
Never buy ERP without fixing your SOPs and Data Flows. We will soon develop a mini-course on understanding the data flows and SOPs.
I would also very strongly support the BYOD for teachers as you need to heavily deploy technology for teachers to manage their time (and you will need a lot of training for them with both carrot and stick else they will not migrate to technology)
If you can fix operations, 50% of improvement of your school is done.
Classroom Technology
This is my least favourite of all. I am not saying, I will not invest into it, but it will be for sure the last priority out of all the tech. This is exactly the types of tech that Sweden stopped using and you can too.
So these screens in classroom can be escaped, these panels, these clickers, these tabs, all these can be and should be ditched.
Learning Beyond Classroom Technology
This should be used selectively. For example a good school should ban social media as it is doing no good to children.
Then comes things like LMS. I am supportive to the idea to improve cognitive performance of students.
You may use curated or created content but must be in a limit.
If you try to understand why that story of Bill Gates supporting Salman Khan (from Khan Academy) was sold to you, because it helped Microsoft to sell their software to hundreds of thousands of schools.
So do not fall prey to such propaganda.
The Way Forward
The theme for the next week is The VUCA School where we will talk about preparing children for the future. Stay Tuned as I will talk about Entrepreneurial Skills. Do you know, what are these? I rarely find a school Leader who really understands it.
So next week, we will talk about, how to build a successful Entrepreneurship Development Program for your students?
Hit a like button to encourage us and share our post
And yes, so far we can see 2 of our subscribers on our Leaderboard.
These are the people, who may have taken their referral link from the Leaderboard and may have invited their friends.
One is Lata mam, our contributor
and another one is Anonymous, If you are the one, please write back to us, we would like to feature you on our newsletter.