Discover and Decide

Discover and Decide

District leaders should work collaboratively in a cross-departmental team to establish transparent rubrics and required criteria used to determine which edtech products are effective and safe for student use. The team should establish evaluation criteria across instructional and academic standards; relevant federal, state, and local laws; technical compatibility; privacy and security; finance; and evidence of impact. By leveraging third-party certifications, teams can engage in deep analysis of the quality of each tool with in-house expertise and abbreviate review timelines with the support and expertise of partner organizations, especially with new types of evidence emerging. Throughout this review process, teams should center the learners and their instructional needs as identified in the previous step and ensure the selected tools have demonstrated impact for similar learner populations. Engaging in a transparent and thorough review of each tool will ensure the district is strategically allocating resources to best support learner outcomes.

Strategies for Discover and Decide

• Establish evaluation criteria for edtech products in a cross-departmental team that defines requirements and a rating system across academic and instructional quality, legal compliance, technical compatibility, privacy and security, immediate and long-term financial context, research basis, and quality of design for a tool that can be effectively and accessibly used by each student across the district.
• Collaborate with school leaders and educators to elevate their priorities in the evaluation process. This should include exploring how school leaders and educators can be involved in the review process to ensure classroom needs are a key element to the evaluation of edtech tools.
• Hold student focus groups to review evaluation criteria and offer students the opportunity to provide feedback and thought partnership to iteratively improve the criteria.
• Embed third-party validations, including product certifications, into the evaluation criteria to support team capacity with product reviews. Establish plans to share when a tool is rejected through the review process, aimed at gaining shared buy-in for decisions to stop using tools that do not meet district evaluation criteria. Add review results to the product inventory to clearly display whether a tool has been approved or rejected, and include details about how the decision was made.
• When an edtech product that meets an identified instructional need passes the review process, begin with a smaller pilot with clearly defined outcomes to determine if the tool will work for your school or district. If the pilot is successful, there are future opportunities to scale. If the pilot begins too expansively across too many classrooms or schools, there will be insufficient resources to support thoughtful implementation, resulting in a lack of clarity as to whether the tool would drive the learning outcomes initially identified.