Edvolve

Audience: School leaders, teachers, administrative teams, IT and digital leads, and anyone involved in choosing or managing school technology.

Education Technology

Technology has a practical job to do

Schools rely on technology for an increasing number of everyday tasks, from communication and administration to attendance, records, finance and access to information. Each system may have a clear purpose, but the experience of using several systems at once can be very different from the experience of looking at each one individually.

A platform can work exactly as intended and still contribute to a more complicated working environment if staff have to move between several systems to complete routine tasks or find the information they need.

How systems accumulate

It is easy to see how this happens though, as when a school identifies a particular need, they find a product designed to address it and introduce another platform. Later, another requirement comes along and another solution is added, and so on.

Over time, staff may find themselves managing several logins, different interfaces, separate notification systems and information held in different places. The individual products may all serve a useful purpose, but the overall experience can become difficult to manage. The issue is therefore not always whether an individual system works well, it's how all of the systems work together.

The work that sits behind the technology

There is also a considerable amount of work involved in managing technology that is not always immediately visible, whereby, someone needs to administer each system, manage permissions, keep information up to date and help colleagues when they cannot find what they need. Staff may also need to enter the same information into different systems or check several places before they have the complete picture. Each task might only take a few minutes, but when similar tasks are repeated across a school year, the time can add up.

More functionality is not necessarily more useful

There can be a tendency to judge technology by the number of features it offers, particularly when schools are comparing different products. Features are important, but they need to be considered in the context of the people who will actually use them. A long list of functions does not necessarily make a system more useful if many of those functions are rarely needed or make everyday processes harder to navigate.

For schools, the more useful question may be what a particular system helps people do in practice and how well it fits with the rest of the technology already in place.

Looking at the wider picture

This is where it can be helpful to step back and consider the school's technology environment as a whole.

Where are existing systems working well? Where is information duplicated? Which processes still involve unnecessary manual work? Are staff regularly moving between platforms to complete straightforward tasks? Are there areas where parents and guardians are having to use different systems for different parts of their interaction with the school?

These questions can provide a much clearer starting point than simply looking for another product to address an isolated problem.

Technology should support the people using it

Technology will continue to play an important role in school life, but its value ultimately comes down to the experience it creates for the people relying on it. If a system saves time, makes information easier to access or removes unnecessary administration, it can provide genuine value. If it creates another process for people to manage, the benefit becomes less clear.

At Edvolve, we are interested in how technology fits into the everyday experience of a school and its wider community, rather than simply what can be added to a feature list. Understanding how schools, staff, parents and guardians actually work with technology is an important part of developing the product and deciding where it should go next.

Technology has a useful place in school life, but it needs to earn that place by making something better, clearer and/or easier to manage.

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