Education leaders should engage in this work with a collaborative, cross-functional team in the district office that works hand-in-hand with school leaders and educators. The team should begin their exploration of edtech, including AI-enabled tools, by analyzing formative and summative assessment data to define their instructional needs. These defined instructional needs should then be used to determine which research-based approaches demonstrate the most impact for meaningfully closing learning gaps and provide clarity on where technology has the potential be most impactful. Concurrently, education leaders should inventory the edtech products used in any classroom across the school or district to identify whether these tools should be used more broadly to address instructional gaps, as well as to minimize redundancies and increase savings. These efforts will enable districts to approach exploration of edtech tools with intentionality and the ability to determine whether a new product is required to successfully meet their needs.
Strategies for Analyze & Inventory
Create a collaborative team with representatives across departments. Consider including representation from instructional, operational, legal, and IT teams, as well as school leaders, classroom educators, families, and learners. For example, Denver Public Schools’ Cross-Departmental Collaborative Team participating in the evaluation process were divided into four core teams: EdTech, DoTS (Department of Technology Services), Purchasing, and Legal, and 14 content teams: EdTech (content), Humanities, Math, Assessment, Multiple Language Education (MLE), Social Emotional Learning (SEL), Arts & PE, Exceptional Student Services (ESS), College and Career Success (CCS), Career and Technical Education (CTE), Library Services, Science, Early Childhood Education (ECE), and Gifted and Talented (GT).
Use formative and summative assessment data, like state assessment scores, to identify priority instructional needs gaps. Collaborate with school leaders and educators to co-interpret data through a root cause analysis that helps identify the core competencies students struggle with most.
Leveraging research, identify evidence-based strategies to address the identified instructional gaps, including articulating where technology could play a valuable role.
Begin the review process with the products currently in active contracts with the district and schools. Start with usage to identify products being paid for through a contract with zero use across any learners. Then, move into reviewing products with evidence of use.
Administer a survey to all staff to compile the edtech tools used for instructional purposes across the school or district. Define instances of instructional use of technology to ensure staff include use of tools that may not be explicitly “edtech,” such as Google Docs, to create a robust list of products. Enable staff to easily add more tools to keep the list dynamic and all-encompassing.
Engage in focus groups with teachers to review the list of products and learn which tools are most valuable to teachers and why, and which are the most difficult or frustrating to use and why.
Design a dynamic website that houses the edtech inventory, including naming the uses of each tool as described by the staff who use them. Enable the website to allow staff to directly leave comments on the value or challenges with the tools, including comparisons to other tools.
Categorize products with similar use cases to determine how many different tools are used for the same purposes. Work closely with school leaders and educators to understand why they use one of the products over others in a collaborative effort to design next steps in product consolidation.
The National Center for Education Statistics Needs Assessment is a step-by-step process to help you identify gaps between your school’s current state and your vision for implementing new technology.
As part of the district Design II Chapter 2 strategic plan, multiple district teams have worked together to develop new processes for evaluating and integrating digital content and services. This memo seeks to explain these new structures and processes and what you need to do if you are considering the purchase of most types of digital content and services. The goal of these new systems is to ensure that new digital content and services will work as intended for users.
This document considers examples of team goals as the discussion and identification of the team goal (or problem of practice) will drive the discovery and selection of products.
