Evaluating technology

In this video, Iesha Small, Author, Consultant, and Innovation Leader interviews Dr Alison Clark-Wilson, Principal Research Lead, UCL EDUCATE, UCL Institute of Education and Dr Kristen Weatherby, Researcher, UCL EDUCATE, UCL Institute of Education.

Educate is a programme designed to support education technology companies in using research evidence to inform their products. Their work emerged from the observation that technology companies can often overstate what their product is able to achieve and this can lead to ill-informed decisions being made in schools about where a technology can be used and for what.

For some further practical advice from Alison and Kristen, you might like to take a look at their article for the Chartered College of Teaching about piloting and evaluating education technology in schools.

It’s worth considering how piloting and evaluation of impact can be addressed in the current context where schools may have been, or are still operating very differently due to COVID-19. It’s important to acknowledge that any online learning experienced at this time is ‘emergency remote teaching’ rather than ‘online learning’ and its impact and efficacy should be viewed through this lens. This article outlines this.

The video outlines how useful it might be to systematically pilot an education technology rather than making a snap judgement after a single use. Alison suggests identifying which class it might be trialled with, for how long and what goals you’d like to achieve by making use of the technology so that you can then evaluate how well it has met your goals. You may like to share with others how often systematic pilots are carried out in your school. How might they be useful when applied to education technologies?

When you have watched the interview and shared your thoughts in the comments, click the ‘Mark as complete’ button below and then select ‘Case studies’ to begin learning about how schools are implementing technology change in research-informed ways.