Now, if involved families want to reach out to a teacher, they have to rely on the school or hope an online staff directory is updated. And if teachers want to reach out to families and let them know how their students are doing in school, they need to look up their contact information and hope its up-to-date — or find alternate messaging platforms.

Some class time has also been lost to teachers sitting down with students to manually show them their grades, a teacher at the school added.

The Department of Education has been rolling out its own free grades, attendance and messaging applications, to replace banned third-party software that was involved in a data breach of more than 800,000 students last school year.

Critical Ed Tech Scholars Alliance (CETSA), a grassroots group of educators working in higher ed

“Google established itself as a fact

When you visit a padlet page created by another Padlet user, that page may collect more information than we do and may provide information to third parties that we have no relationship with. We request you use discretion when sharing personal information on padlet pages created by other users. 

In the event that all or a portion of Padlet or its assets are acquired by or merged with a third-party, personal information that we have collected from users would be one of the assets transferred to or acquired by that third-party. This Policy will continue to apply to your information, and any acquirer would only be able to handle your personal information as per this Policy (unless you give consent to a new policy). We will provide you with notice of an acquisition within 30 days following the completion of such a transaction, by posting on our homepage, or by emailing you on your email address on file. If you do not consent to the use of your personal information by such a successor company, you may request its deletion from the company.

First and foremost, you should know that Padlet does not sell or rent your personal information to any third-party for any purpose. 

In a recent poll, 77 percent of responding colleges said they already use or are considering using proctoring software.

prolonged interaction between the instructor and the students

But these tools require we think about their purpose, method, and audience just as carefully as when we design an essay prompt, a problem set, or any other assessment exercise.

graduate teaching assistants

Liss LaFleur

Move away from simply asking whether EdTech is helpful or unhelpful.It’s here to stay, so focus on what pedagogical strategies it can support and how to use it better to improve student learning and other outcomes.

Vendors serve as an invaluable source of knowledge on edtech products and trends for higher education decision-makers, cited as an information source in 80 percent of our interviews. That ranks second only to learning by word-of-mouth from colleagues (96 percent)

quality of partner relationships.

rather than develop their own tools.

It is our failure to internalize the idea that people who work for edtech companies are our colleagues and our partners which is at the root of much of disconnect that I see across the school / vendor divide.

This is not to say that those of us in higher ed are immune from market forces,

We should not conflate the logic of short-term profit maximization with the values of the people who go to work at for-profit edtech companies.

authentic relationships between the the people who work at your company and your customers.  

Your customer-retention strategy should be as robust and intense as your customer-acquisition strategy.

higher ed, as a whole, is a largely relationship-based industry.

The best way to scale your platform, service or product is to get a few schools to sign up, and then spend lots of energy and money making sure the followers know. This means having a sales strategy that is narrow, deep and focused.  

That's why very few of us are likely to sign up with an unproven vendor or adopt a new platform or service unless our peers have already done so.

it requires robust and sustained conversations. 

they talk about their solutions rather than our challenges.  

Should faculty (and even students) have a greater say in which tools the university chooses instead of constantly finding themselves as consumers of those forced upon them by the institution?

In considering considerations, I think it’s important to begin with a thinking (or erasing?) exercise that asks you to forget everything you know or think you know about ed tech and start over.  

“curriculets,” the company’s eponymous term for embedded quizzes, videos and other multimedia elements designed to offer students a richer reading experience and to give teachers data into how their pupils were progressing.

articles and take quizzes,

urchasing often involves department heads, CIOs, and provosts, since the choices made can affect the entire school.

To succeed, they will need to fundamentally rethink their value propositions to take full advantage of the digital medium and consider the entire educational experience.

customization tools to “build your own textbook” from a variety of preexisting and newly created content

texts embedded in the online course

practical tools that supplement core instruction

if someone is willing to commit to talking through hip hop

like the personal API

They are tools like SPLOT, Wikity, Reclaim Hosting, Known, Github, and Hypothes.is to name a few.

At least on dating apps everyone can agree that everyone on the app has the same desired goal: a relationship.

You can listen to the “I Love My Label” playlist on Spotify, but you should support artists by buying their music. Unless it's Metallica. Then share freely.

counterintuitively perhaps less “personalized.”

“Personalization” might sound like it’s designed especially for us; but “personalization” is an algorithm based on a profile, on a category, on a label.

Algorithms and analytics will “personalize” our world, we’re told. The problem, of course, is that the algorithms and the analytics also make everything sound the same.

What happens in the face of an algorithmic education to intellectual curiosity?

I call myself a “serial dropout,”

Little by little the subversive features of the computer were eroded away: Instead of cutting across and so challenging the very idea of subject boundaries, the computer now defined a new subject; instead of changing the emphasis from impersonal curriculum to excited live exploration by students, the computer was now used to reinforce School’s ways. What had started as a subversive instrument of change was neutralized by the system and converted into an instrument of consolidation.

Once something sells, than we hear it and echoes of it again and again and again and again.

No one – well, except my parents, I guess – knew how many times I played that 45 of Autograph’s “Turn Up the Radio,” how many times I rewound the cassette to replay Guns & Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” But now the software knows

predict hit songs

ed-tech as data-extraction, control, surveillance, privatization, and profiteering