Today’s education leaders have unprecedented access to ed-tech products, but no clear way to determine product quality or learning effectiveness. Without a common definition of a product as easy to use, valuable, and effective, how can decision makers know whether a product is meeting learning standards and improving student achievement?
Based on extensive user research and pilot testing, Teacher Ready Edtech Product Evaluation Guide We help educators and decision makers reliably evaluate edtech products, ensuring they choose effective, high-quality solutions that lead to the best teaching and learning experience.
The research behind Teacher Ready
ISTE takes research and development seriously. In creating the Teacher Ready framework and assessment tools, we ensure that the tools are firmly rooted both in professional scholarship as well as in the lived experiences of teachers and educational technology decision makers. We have completed several research activities. To this end, we will:
- Completed a review of academic and professional literature on usability and user experience design in edtech.
- I completed “think-aloud” observations and observed teachers using instructional techniques that I was familiar with but had never used before.
- We convened an advisory group of experts in user experience design, learning design, equity and justice, and edtech product evaluation.
- We pilot-tested the framework multiple times with teachers, ed-tech decision makers, professional ed-tech product reviewers, and product providers.
- We completed psychometric analysis of pilot data and analysis of qualitative feedback from pilot testers, including both practitioners and product providers.
The result of that research is a tool that reflects what is most important to teachers and educational leaders regarding the usability of educational technology.
