Ashok Baker 
Ask three people who work in education technology what comes next and the answers rarely land in the same place. At Bett 2015, a schools media executive, the head of a reading program and the managing director of an education company were each asked the same question about the future of education technology: what is next? One looked at the age of the equipment in school computer rooms, one at whole communities in India, and one at the teacher in front of the class.
The interviews are more than a decade old, yet the three answers map closely onto questions district and school leaders are still working through: how quickly schools can keep up, who technology reaches, and whether it makes teachers better at their work.
Closing the gap between schools and industry
Ashok Baker, Head of Media at Schools Media, said the next steps in education technology “are all about, first of all, inclusion.” His concern was the distance between what schools use and what the rest of the working world uses. Technology in schools, he said, is very varied, and the operating systems running a school’s computer suites are “still in some cases a decade behind.”
The goal, as he put it, is “giving schools the opportunity to stay as up-to-date as, say, high-end tech companies would.” He described the lag from both ends: technology schools use now “has probably been around for 10, 20 years, and the technology that’s at the cutting edge now, they won’t see for another further 10 or 20.” What schools need, he said, is the chance “to close that time gap, to be able to move with the times quicker.”
For a district, that gap is rarely about enthusiasm. It is about refresh cycles, budgets that arrive one year at a time, and the work of keeping older devices and software secure. Baker’s point is a reminder that a technology plan is also a replacement plan, and that students notice when the tools at school look nothing like the tools they will meet at work.
Technology that changes a community, not only a classroom
Jamie Fries, CEO of ReadingWise, answered at the scale of a whole community. “Education technology can bring communities together,” he said, and he drew on examples from villages in India, where “education for women in India is sometimes not a priority in communities.”
What he described was a change in values. Groups of women and men, he said, came to see education and literacy as important and valued, “and that shift in a state of mind, if you like, or a value set is massive, and then impacts much more widely across the community, empowers women.” His organization’s ReadingWise program in India, he explained, was looking to help women go on “to employability and employment and jobs.”
Fries called the result “a community-wide culture shift that can be created through scaling, through education technology.” His examples come from a very different setting from most American schools, but the idea carries: the families and adults around students shape whether learning is valued, and a program that reaches them can do more than one that reaches students alone.
Supporting teachers in the classroom
Rick Russell, Managing Director of Optimus Education, said the next best thing in technology “is really happening inside the classroom already.” Teachers, he said, are embracing more technology “through apps and through other forms of technology,” so they can deliver lessons to children “much more effectively.”
Russell also pointed to a second use that gets less attention: using technology “to help evidence their professional development and how well they as individuals are improving.” He described a future in which that information is drawn together “in a far more systematic and complex way,” so teachers have everything they need available “really at the touch of their finger.”
That second idea matters for leaders who plan professional development for teachers. A record of growth that teachers can see and use themselves is different from a log of hours, and it gives coaches and principals something concrete to talk about.
What the future of education technology means for school leaders
Read together, the three answers describe a fuller picture of what education technology is for. Baker’s comments are about keeping schools current; Fries’s are about reaching people beyond the school walls; Russell’s are about the daily work of teaching. A district that pays attention to only one of them can end up with new devices that teachers are not supported to use, or strong classroom practice running on equipment that is years out of date.
For leaders reviewing their own plans, the interviews suggest three practical questions: how long it takes a new tool to reach students, who in the community the district’s technology actually reaches, and whether teachers can see their own progress. edCircuit’s guide to educational technology in schools covers the wider picture, from learning management systems to funding and privacy.
Subscribe to edCircuit to stay up to date on all of our shows, podcasts, news, and thought leadership articles.
Related reading
More on Education Industry Questions
