Ken Eastwood—superintendent of Middletown City School District, NY, a member of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools—shares four key points to consider when trying to implement a successful edtech plan.<\/p>\n
“Given the enormous potential of edtech to assist teachers in highly diverse classrooms to truly personalize learning and obtain significant student academic growth, why are we seeing such consistent and large-scale edtech failure when it comes to gains in student academic achievement?<\/p>\n
My answer is simple: the failure occurs because when we introduce edtech into our classrooms, we continue to focus on things rather than on the process—on devices instead of on good pedagogy.<\/p>\n
Successful and sustained edtech implementation requires that good pedagogy must first be in play within the classroom. Few school districts realize the need for this instructional requirement and assume that the technology will make for a better teacher, when just the opposite is true. A pedagogically skilled teacher leverages and manages edtech to maximize instructional efficiency and effectiveness.”<\/p>\n