Module 5: V.) Resources to Help You Choose Software

So we've talked about what different types of software are out there and how you choose them. So now let's dive into the resources that help you make that choice.

Yeah, and in edtech, there's actually some new entrants that are making this kind of interesting. And the one approach is to have sort of an editorial voice. You think about Consumer Reports, I would rarely buy a new piece of electronics before going over to CNET and reading what the experts say about it. But because the edtech space is actually quite small right now, it's actually hard to imagine any one organization building up the resources to staff it the way a CNET would. So you can have the editorial voice, and that's good, but we might need another version as well.

So we're seeing a second option also arise, which is leveraging this notion of crowdsourcing. And what we mean by that is actually taking the reviews of actual users themselves, parents, teachers, even students in some cases, and saying, how did this software work for you? What are its potential upsides as well as what are its drawbacks? And now this approach itself has some upsides and drawbacks because it can be really useful in harnessing the wisdom of the crowd. But it also might, as we've seen on certain travel sites, not always give you the best information. It can be gamed in certain ways, or quite frankly, maybe your review isn't going to be applicable to me in my situation.

But compared to having nothing at all, these are really good, helpful tools for educators. And we're going to point you towards two particular new resources for Common Sense Media and Ed Surge. Now, Common Sense Media is well known for their reviews of children's television and movies and giving parents information they need to make good decisions about that kind of entertainment media. They've also now launched a new product called Graphite, which is trying to do the same thing to provide teachers and parents information about edtech software.

So EdSurge is also doing something like this. It's well known already for its newsletters that basically give you a weekly update on all that's going on with EdTech in the world from K12 through higher education. But what they're starting to do is create this thing called the EdTech index. And this is a place for the same sorts of activities where teachers can actually review these products and say what's working or not for them. Now, a couple other resources that are also out there are Learning List and Edge Shelf. So basically, we're just seeing the early emergence of a lot of players trying to use this crowdsourcing to help you make better decisions in picking your software. Both Graphite and edsurge are combining elements of the editorial review with crowdsourced feedback from actual educators to help you make these decisions about what products are right for you. And both are really new resources, and yet they're promising. So if you're starting to think about a blended learning model and trying to pick the right software, we recommend that you check them out as starting points. Now, as a good exercise in the resources section, we've linked to their reviews of the same product, st Math, so that you can get a sense for how they treat these reviews in different ways and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Now, we believe that good homework is always authentic and based in the real world. So we created this week's assignment to try to get you on these platforms so you can see how they're doing reviews and that you can actually contribute to their knowledge base, if appropriate. And Rob will come back at the end of this video to tell you more about how the assignment's going to work.

Now, schools often are tempted as they get into this work to think, oh, we'll just build our own software to drive our teaching. And you may remember that Summit Public Schools actually did this when they created those individualized learning playlists and they curated lots of content for their students.

Right? And the obvious upside to this is you get exactly what you want. It's customized, you built it. Unfortunately, it's also really, really hard. And it's something that even the experts with dedicated teams can spend months doing. So just like I would not advise a school to go build a customized themselves because they want the perfect transportation option. We generally don't think schools should necessarily get themselves into the business of having their teachers staying up at night learning, coding, and building customized software. However, one model that we have seen work really well is the idea of schools working in closely aligned partnerships with a software company. And when we talked about Summit earlier, they built their new Activate platform with a company called Illuminate Instruction. Illuminate needed what Summit knew how to do, which was how to build really good content and find what students wanted. And Summit needed what Illuminate knew how to do, which was to create really robust software. The interdependence was the key here. So when a new feature was developed, they could get it quickly into the school and the teachers could pilot and try it out. And then that feedback would get back to the software developers who could quickly iterate and create a new tool. And that mutual interdependence has created what we think is a very promising new software product that neither of them probably could have built on their own.

A few years ago, my CAO and I had a vision for what could exist. This was the early vision for our playlists and what might be possible there. But we didn't have the skill or the ability to create this. And while we could imagine it, we had no way of making it happen. We got lucky in that we got introduced to some really thoughtful, committed educational entrepreneurs who wanted to work with educators like us. And so we got into a room, we literally flew down, got into a room and spent about five hours white boarding what we thought would solve a lot of our problems and how they started to think about and could imagine their technology being able to meet that need. From there, a relationship was born. And, you know, fast forward several years we have worked side by side, really in an interdisciplinary team, if you will, to build the Acctivate platform. And this is a platform that we're now making available to anyone and everyone, free by design. We had a common interest, common values, and a real desire to build something that we felt like would enable blended learning and next generation learning for all kids and for all teachers. And that experience has been invaluable for both parties, I believe.

So working really closely with a software company can obviously be great, but the correlate to that is if you don't have these deep relationships, it can be hard to know exactly what you're getting. I had a principal say to me recently that his new rule of thumb is that he believes half of what a vendor says the software can do now, and none of what he says it's going to be able to do in the next release. And I don't share that to be snarky because I have a lot of friends who work in the industry and I think they're doing really great work. But the reality is it's very hard for a school to count on something coming in the future. And it's even sometimes hard to know exactly what these tools can do in their present version.

And one of the reasons for this is that a lot of the companies creating this software are actually startups. And if you know anything about startups, it's really hard to deliver consistently on these product features when you're actually working with just a few employees and you actually haven't built much of what you say you're going to deliver next year.

So they can have the best of intentions, but they might be looking at five different roadmaps for their software could come and you might want version five and they actually decide to go down version three. So we would just say be eyes wide open, understand that we're very early in this movement and the software will get much better, but it's going to take a little time. So you can't rely too much entirely on the software.