What do you do if you're leading in Educational Technology and other industries?

It`s very important to embrace disruptive megatrends in the industry and be ready for that. so you must be aware and engaged with the R&D section in your company and lead strategies with them for exploring innovative ideas that can fit at a suitable time.

Be prepared to proactively use new technologies as these land into the market. Anticipate new trends and needs in education and adapt your technology. Use other sectors where change arrives first as reference.

Invest in continuous training and updating your team, ensuring they are capable of dealing with new technologies and methodologies.

Take the dive into new learning situations and be part of new learning environments. Whether collaborative, experiential, interactive, immersive or connected, there are many types of emerging learning technologies. Once you have a better understanding of how they work and how effective they are, you will be more confident when talking about any technology and you will always be able to go back to your first experience and compare.

Be adaptable to #change; nowadays #timemangement in using technology properly is a problem for most people. But being engaged in tasks or work using technology will help you develop your values and skills while earning and spending time with your family. #virtualassistant

Implement technology with great UX (no one likes collaborating on chunky or hard-to-use environments) Leverage functionality that increases engagement to foster interaction between users.

Collaboration is an ongoing journey that requires investment, planning, and continuous evaluation. By fostering open communication, trust, and mutual respect, you will be creating an environment conducive to success in Edtech and other industries.

As a leader managing or using an EdTech within your organization, fostering collaboration can present some complexities. Stakeholders and their needs can vary greatly depending on the type of EdTech tool. IT, administrators, and educators are likely stakeholders for all of your edtech tools whereas students, the families, and other educational staff may only use certain tools, like your LMS and learning tools. A stakeholder's role will vary depending on the tool so you might see an educator be a user or consumer of a SIS, but be an administrator and a user for an LMS or learning tool. As such, fostering collaboration starts with creating a map of your users for each application, or application category, to figure out their needs.

By investing in upskilling and reskilling your team, you will be building a workforce that is ready for the future of Edtech and other industries. This is an essential strategy to ensure the competitiveness, innovation, and success of your organization

Apply the #LifeLongLearning statement as a way of living. If you want to lead technology that drives learning and education forward, you need to understand what you need to learn at every stage of the market first.

As a leader, you are only as good as your team when it comes to the skills needed to create/deploy and report on educational technology. EdTech skills are critical for professionals in some sectors, and the investment needed to up-skill staff is not always obvious as technologies and trends tend to change quickly. Maintaining an agile approach to training and partnering with high quality service and solution providers will ensure that your organization is nimble and ready to respond to each new shift.

Lurk in course environments, read user and platform reports and interview participants and tutors in a formal/informal setting. These are great ways to observe and understand the nuances of technology use and its impact on the act of learning.

While transferable leadership skills are valuable, take time to understand the specific needs, challenges, and opportunities of each industry you lead in. Research best practices, emerging trends, and regulatory environments for both EdTech and the other industries.

Give professionals independence in their choice of tools and technologies, and invest in their ability to take full advantage of all the EdTech assets available in your organization. Provide opportunities for collaboration across disciplines and do not settle for one way of doing things. Provide alternatives, allow room for mistakes, treat everything as an experiment, and encourage everyone to have fun and be relaxed about using new technology in a learning environment.

Consider your whole EdTech Ecosystem As a leader, you are in a position to consider all the edtech tools in use at your organization and how IT staff, educators, students and parents will be interacting with each. What is important for your organization to prioritize in terms of user experience, accessibility, security, data privacy, and simple access standards? What applications need to work well together and seamlessly exchange data? Is professional development or other training needed to realize the full benefits of an edtech tool? Answering these questions and more will help you establish requirements and policies to improve the overall digital experience for your organization.