Education Week - Navigating the Ed-Tech Marketplace - S9

AUDIO: Chicago school principal
Barton A. Dassinger talks about
evaluating ed-tech products.
WWW.EDWEEK.ORG/GO/DASSINGER
other types of trial runs throughout the year, as well
as during after-school and summer programs.
He keeps a detailed Excel file on his computer that
attempts to track the impact of individual products
on student achievement. Down the left side of the
screen, students' names, grades, and homeroom assignments
are listed. There's information indicating
whether they belong to English-language-learner or
special-needs populations. Across the top row, there's
a list of companies whose products are being tried-
recently, the names included classroom tools by Compass
Learning and aleks (assesment and Learning
in Knowledge Spaces), a McGraw-Hill Education
product.
director of Innovate NYC Schools, a program within
the 1.1 million-student New York City district whose
goal is partly to give vendors insights on the needs of
educators and other district officials.
Superintendents and curriculum and technology
officials want to get a good price and avoid costly and
embarrassing mistakes, Mr. Hodas said. But they
also want to be bold. And buying technology brings
its own set of temptations and complications for district
leaders, he said, one of which is that so many
devices and programs seem impressive and cutting
edge at first glance.
Students' scores on various tests-district, state,
and subject-specific-appear in green, red, and yellow
colors, linked to each product, showing how academic
progress has changed over time. Companies often ask
to be evaluated by metrics of their choosing, but Mr.
Dassinger wants to be able to judge them by the same
tests and metrics against which his school-which
serves an overwhelmingly Hispanic and socioeconomically
disadvantaged population-and its students
and teachers are judged.
The process is not perfect, he acknowledges. Chávez
school officials can't know for sure, for instance, if students'
academic gains or declines can be attributed to
any ed-tech product or to other factors.
But when combined with the feedback he gets from
teachers about how they view products, and how students'
respond to them, Mr. Dassinger is confident
the process is helping him evaluate technology in a
systematic way.
"It allows us to filter out some of the field, to get
to some of the best companies out there," he said. In
reviewing the products, "if students are not engaged,
or they don't understand a technology, that's kind of
a red flag."
Competing Instincts
Part of the dilemma school leaders face
in weighing the value of digital tools
is that those leaders are often
torn by different, competing
instincts, said Steven
Hodas, the executive
Barton A. Dassinger, the principal
of Cesar E. Chávez Multicultural
Academic Center, a pre-K-8 school
in Chicago, has set up a process
for his teachers to evaluate
products offered by education
technology companies.
"In the presence of bright and shiny, people tend to
make bad decisions," Mr. Hodas observed.
To avoid problems, he said, it's critical for school
leaders to clearly identify the problem they hope
technology will help solve and to involve principals
and teachers early and often, since those educators'
acceptance of ed-tech products will go a long way to
determining their success.
At the Chávez school, some products go through the
review process and come out winners. One such product
was st Math, developed by the mind Research Institute,
an Irvine, Calif.-based nonprofit that has won
good reviews from the school's classroom teachers
and appeared to show positive academic results since
it was introduced a few years ago. That tool, which
stands for spatial-temporal math, is game-based instructional
software that seeks to build skills through
visual learning.
The performance of various reading products, however,
has been mixed at best.
Mr. Dassinger recalled one company's initial showing
with a reading product as a "disaster," replete
with a lot of black computer screens.
"The teachers just gave up because there were so
many hands going up [from students needing technical
help]," Mr. Dassinger said.
But even that error produced lessons. One teacher
continued to experiment with the product, and the
vendor that developed it asked for another chance.
The company has since boosted its support
for the school's use of the program,
and it has become popular
among students, Mr. Dassinger
said.
PAGE S10 >
His organization is helping lead a new program called
the Learning Innovation Hub, which aims to foster a freer
exchange of information and feedback between ed-tech developers
and classroom teachers.
You're going to be mostly
wrong a lot of the time
Schools Evaluate Products
Efforts to evaluate educational technology in more sophisticated
ways are also playing out in individual schools.
Barton A. Dassinger, the principal of the Cesar E. Chávez
Multicultural Academic Center, a pre-K-8 traditional public
school on Chicago's South Side, had grown used to hearing
companies make rosy promises about how their products
would improve student learning and school efficiency.
So he set up a process that allows his school and its teachers
to test individual ed-tech products, monitor their performance,
and decide whether to keep using them.
Mr. Dassinger, in consultation with his teachers, chooses
supplemental classroom materials for pilot-testing and
NAVIGATING THE ED-TECH MARKETPLACE
> www.edweek.org/go/edtechmarket
EDUCATION WEEK * June 11, 2014
[when starting innovative tech
projects]. You learn more from
being wrong than being right.
You have to build that
into your process."
STEVEN HODAS
Executive Director
Innovate NYC Schools
| S9
Alyssa Schukar for Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/go/dassinger http://www.edweek.org/go/edtechmarket
Education Week - Navigating the Ed-Tech Marketplace

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