What do you do if your failures in educational technology become a source of inspiration and innovation?

Failure is a very heavy word for most. To start, reframe failure as learning opportunities. I know this is often easier said than done. From experience, this is almost always the first step towards embracing mistakes!

1. Analyze and Learn: Deeply analyze each failure to uncover key insights. What lessons can be extracted to prevent future setbacks and foster improvement? 2. Foster Open Dialogue: Share these experiences and the derived lessons within your community. Discussing failures openly promotes a culture where learning from mistakes is valued. 3. Innovate Based on Insights: Apply the insights gained to refine existing projects or to innovate new solutions. Each failure provides unique data that can drive creative problem-solving. 4. Document the Journey: Keep records of what didn’t work and how you adapted, turning these stories into learning tools for others in the field.

Also consider your own emotions at this stage. Learning how a perceived failure affects you can help you embrace the next stage. Do you feel anger? Shame? It's OK! You can relate and channel these emotions.

Embracing failures in educational technology as sources of inspiration and innovation involves adopting a growth mindset and learning from setbacks. Reflect on what went wrong and why, extracting valuable lessons for improvement. Encourage experimentation and risk-taking, fostering a culture where failure is viewed as a stepping stone to success. Collaborate with colleagues to brainstorm creative solutions and iterate on ideas. Celebrate successes, big or small, stemming from lessons learned, fueling a cycle of continuous improvement and innovation in educational technology.

Failure is one of life's greatest teachers. In the context of edtech our perceived failure might just be that, perceived. By going to the source, the target audience, educators and/or students we can learn about what problem we did or did not solve. This investigation may yield a diamond in the rough, an unplanned use case that we can invest in more.

What we do at Solve Education! is to do a retrospective meeting with all stakeholders, so that we can not only deep dive into what can be improved/what went wrong, but also have a diverse perspective into what we can do differently.

A culture of innovation is critical to developing meaningful edtech solutions. Such a culture must balance rapid prototyping with constant SME conversations and observations.

Don't shy away from analyzing your failures. Identify the specific areas where the EdTech project fell short of expectations. View these shortcomings as valuable learning experiences. Understand the root causes of the issues and what you could have done differently.