Today's educational leaders have unprecedented access to educational technology products, but there is no clear way to determine the quality or effectiveness of a product for learning. How can decision makers know if a product meets learning standards and drives student achievement without a shared definition of what makes a product usable, valuable, and effective?
Based on extensive user research and pilot testing, the Teacher Ready edtech Product Evaluation Guide helps educators and decision makers reliably evaluate educational technology products, ensuring they select high-quality, effective solutions that lead to the best teaching and learning experiences.
The research behind Teacher Ready
ISTE takes research and development seriously. In creating the Teacher Ready framework and evaluation tool, we completed several research activities to ensure that the tool was firmly rooted in both professional scholarship and the lived experience of teachers and educational technology decision makers. To do this, we:
- A review of academic and professional literature on educational technology usability and user experience design was completed.
- “Think aloud” observations were completed, observing teachers using educational technology that they knew well and had never used before.
- It convened an advisory group of experts in user experience design, learning design, equity and justice, and evaluation of educational technology products.
- I pilot tested the framework several times with teachers, edtech decision makers, professional edtech product reviewers, and product vendors.
- Full psychometric analysis of pilot data and analysis of qualitative feedback from pilot evaluators, including practitioners and product vendors.
The result of that research is a tool that reflects what matters most to teachers and educational leaders when it comes to the usability of educational technology.
