Education Week - Navigating the Ed-Tech Marketplace - S13

Seton Hall University graduates enjoy successful
careers as Superintendents, Central Office and
Building Leaders in 30 states and 7 countries.
for the 87,000-student district.
Ms. Ray, who is also the chairwoman
of the board of directors
for the International Society for
Technology in Education, or iste,
a Washington-based membership
association that promotes innovative
uses of educational technology,
reported that the district expects
to receive a $1 million increase
in local money this summer to
support the use of new technologies
in classrooms-all because of
instructional and environmental
changes spurred by the Common
Core State Standards. In Nevada,
the 316,000-student Clark County
district has started focusing investments
on performance-based
contracting to help individualize
instruction.
"We have extremely high class
sizes, and almost one-third of our
students are English-language
learners, so if companies say they
have the tools to meet those needs,
we want to build metrics that right
away hold them accountable," said
Jhone Ebert, the district's chief innovation
and productivity officer. "If
benchmarks aren't met, then we'll
part ways."
Some market observers, however,
say it's important to note that the
common core is just one of several
factors driving ed-tech spending.
Mark Schneiderman, the senior
director of education policy for the
Washington-based Software & Information
Industry Association-
whose members include developers
of software, digital content,
and related school technologies
and services-said that while
the common core "no doubt has
supported a spike in that area, it
hasn't shifted any fundamental
long-term technology trends that
we're seeing in states without
those standards."
"Once you start isolating technology
for specific programs, you've lost
the bigger picture," added Wendy
Drexler, the chief innovation officer
for iste.
Digital PD Trends
New technological requirements
in place to meet the demands of
the common-core assessments give
districts greater opportunities and
flexibility in how they use technology.
And Ms. Drexler believes more
attention will shift to pedagogy and
investments in the growing potential
of students to create their own
learning environments.
"There are 3d printers and the
maker movement, and the whole
concept of hands-on and collaborative
problem-solving," she said.
"Think about the implications for
education. Instead of buying tools
teachers can use, why not have kids
make the tools they need to learn?
That's some proactive stuff."
There are unprecedented opportunities
for companies with products
aligned to the spirit of the commoncore
standards, said Bert Bower, the
founder and ceo of tci, a K-12 publishing
company based in Mountain
View, Calif. "This is where you're
going to see innovative companies
come out and rule the educational
world," he said. "The hardware is
the easy, just-scratching-the-surface
stuff."
For its professional-development
services, tci has gone from providing
in-person training 100 percent
of the time five years ago to 10
percent of the time today. Instead,
the company embeds professional
development in 20 different ways
in every piece of content. A teacher
using an html5 slideshow about
waves has access to embedded note
fields that include answers to questions
that pop up on the screen, for
example, or information about common
student misconceptions.
"We've tried to get districts to
use their money for traditional pd,
and they're not interested, and yet
they're on fire for these products
that have embedded pd," Mr. Bower
said. "Everyone wants everything
24/7 now."
Siia reported a steady year-overyear
increase in online professionaldevelopment
spending over the
past few years. Digital and online
professional development was up
more than an estimated 11 percent
in 2011-12 from the 2010-11 school
year, totaling more than half a billion
dollars, Mr. Schneiderman said.
Framing the Future
Despite predictions for what
school districts will be spending
money on in the future, Kathleen
Brantley, the senior director
of mdr's Ednet Insight, said
people should not lose sight of the
fact that a mere 23 percent of districts
nationwide in 2012-13 had
substantially implemented 1-to-1
computing initiatives, according
to an annual survey of technology
directors by the education-related
information-and consulting-services
source, based in Shelton, Conn.
Many districts have far to go on
the technology front and aren't yet
able to focus heavily on the digital
content that would come next, Ms.
Brantley said. "They have a strong
desire for that goal of a 1-to-1 environment,
and they're nowhere close
to that now," she said.
Once districts do reach that goal,
they still have mastered "only the
first piece of the puzzle," said Keith
Krueger, the ceo of the Washingtonbased
Consortium for School Networking,
a professional association
for school district technology leaders.
"In fact, if this is all we do, we
haven't advanced the real potential
of technology in education."
That said, there's only so much
predicting about the potential
of technology in education given
the speed of technological breakthroughs
that wind up as classroom
fixtures.
As Clark County's Ms. Ebert
framed it: "We're going to be getting
into things we don't even know are
being invented right now." n
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Education Week - Navigating the Ed-Tech Marketplace

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