Technology Brands Should ‘Come Together Right Now’ (For Education)

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Yesterday I tweeted (on @ypulse) a new initiative from McGraw-Hill Education in the education space: The launch of a new “Center For Digital Innovation.” Here’s the quick description from the press release:

…a first-of-its-kind research and development center focused on bringing to elementary and secondary classrooms the same digital environment that today’s young people have embraced outside of school. The Center will be led by McGraw-Hill Education’s talented and experienced team of classroom educators, expert engineers and software developers who are marrying McGraw-Hill Education’s expertise in curricula development and successful record of developing digital education solutions with emerging technology to design new, paradigm-changing PreK-12 learning solutions. These offerings are helping usher in a new phase of cutting-edge digital-based instruction that will help improve student performance and accelerate the development of 21st century skills.

Sounds fantastic — “bringing to elementary and secondary classrooms the same digital environment that today’s young people have embraced outside of school” — isn’t that what many of us concerned about the challenges teachers face when it comes to embracing technology in schools want? Yes…..but. Over the past three years I’ve been watching different companies attempt different education initiatives — Yahoo! for Teachers, Google for Educators and even our Mashup sponsor Dell’s Edu4U initiative. These are all positive, well-intentioned efforts, but my concern is that having so many efforts from different companies (some duplicative, some not), all with the secondary goal of having educators embrace their specific products or brand (aka the “double bottom line”), may not be the best way to solve these challenges.

I’m sure I’m being naive since we are a capitalist country and educators are another fair market to target with all kinds of different technology solutions (may the best one win!). I’ve spoken at one of the education conferences and seen the multitude of vendors lining the trade show floor. Still, I can’t help but think that there could be real power and real change that could come from the power of a collective industry effort. Imagine if Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Dell, Mac, McGraw Hill, EA, etc. actually sent their best and brightest to create a research and development center that set out, with trailblazing educators (and students!), to explore best practices for using technology at school and how to train and support teachers to incorporate them. Practices that were brand/platform/hardware/software agnostic — sure, once they were disseminated to teachers across the country, educators and administrators could decide which tools to buy (and all of the different brands could pitch away), but the practices wouldn’t be dependent on using a specific tech brand.

I am sure some of my readers might be rolling their eyes or mumbling “dream on,” but I believe that a more collaborative approach to these challenges — one that involves technology companies, educators and students — will ultimately have a much greater impact than each individual brand attempting to win over pockets of educators to their vision (and products) for creating “totally wired” teachers.

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Categorized under: Education

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