Spend some time in front of a classroom and you will quickly recognize the main flaw with most educational technology products: they aren't made by teachers. Teaching is a remarkably distinct skill set. In a typical high school classroom a teacher's classroom tasks include but are not limited to simultaneously taking attendance, watching hallways, monitoring behavior, executing lessons, managing student actions, verifying student learning, differentiating student instruction, and providing students with feedback on their day's work. A teacher is responsible for these tasks and other for up to 7 50 minutes classes a day and as many as 200 students. There is a categorical difference in understanding these challenges via secondhand and firsthand accounts; there is simply no substitute for being in the classroom. It is this gap between knowing and truly understanding what a teacher goes through on a day to day basis that has allowed for the development of many ed-tech products that simply fail to fully address the needs of teachers.
Take for example the TI Nspire Navigator system. While clearly the product of extensive research into education, integrating proven tactics like interactive problems and system allowing instantaneous feedback from students, holes exist in the usability. The process of "beginning" a class, which allows students to "log in" and begin interacting, requires a button press. "Sending a file" requires a right click, a button press, and then two more redundant button presses within an unnecessary popup window. "Collecting a file" requires the same procedure, and grading the file and receive feedback requires a right click, a button press, and then navigating to an entirely different screen. The basic workflow is terribly inefficient and while button clicks may seem relatively easy these processes can add up to 5 minutes of work which is a precious amount of time in a 45 minute class period. Factor in older, slower computers that sometimes leg between button presses, and having to repeat all of these processes in every class period, and the clunky interface for what is otherwise a feature-rich and potentially useful platform makes the entire system practically inefficient to use. TI did it's research and hit all of the right features, so what went wrong? The answer is that the development process for the system was driven by engineers, not the teachers who would use the software on a day-to-day basis.
The solution to this problem is the Teacher-Innovator Model. Organizations like Teach for America, along with many other alternative certification and educational preparation program at colleges and universities, are creating a new generation of tech-savvy educators who use technology to improve their lives at every level and see the potential technology offers. Teacher-Innovators are those who have some experience with technology, perhaps an engineering background, and work with product development teams to build technologies that address the pain points that they experience daily in the classroom. By deploying beta technologies in their classrooms and those of their peers teaching similar subjects, Teacher-Innovators will be best positioned to develop the impactful, high value ed-tech solutions that will define tomorrow's classrooms. The best education technology products start in the classroom, and I am excited to be a part of this movement towards ground-up innovation.
