Four Game-Changing Technologies for Educators (Hint: They're Old-School!)

Teachers, principals, and educational leaders are constantly bombarded by entrepreneurs seeking to convince them that the newest technology can yield transformational results. In the 1930s, television was heralded as the tool that would upend traditional schooling. More recently, online programs for “personalized learning” are all the rage.

The truth is, there are no shiny objects that can “fix education” — it is a fundamentally human endeavor. Over 13 years of running a school system, now the seventh largest in New York State, I have met with and researched dozens of ed tech companies. I have yet to see a program that can teach kids mathematical reasoning, analytical thinking, or how to craft a persuasive argument. In the end, only well-trained human beings can teach kids to think — and getting that right is an ongoing, labor-intensive, and inevitably imperfect work-in-progress.

Meanwhile, as ed tech entrepreneurs and would-be reformers trumpet technologies that can take schools and districts “to the next level,” most school districts aren’t even at the intermediate stage of using technology that is already widely available. Some of these common technologies are rarely mentioned in conversations about the “transformational potential of ed tech,” yet they have been game-changing for us at Success Academy. Here’s a list of the top four I would recommend to any school system.

1. Video Conferencing: Education is a team sport. Schools must work together to get great outcomes for kids, and nothing helps educators more than learning from each other. One of the most critical components to our academic achievement at Success Academy has been our ability to identify best practices across our schools and swiftly share them out through collaborative planning and training so that everyone can benefit. Video conferencing is what makes this sharing work possible. Our 47 schools are scattered across four boroughs of New York City and our educators don’t have the time to regularly trudge across the city to meet in person. We happen to use BlueJeans for video conferencing at Success Academy, but there are innumerable platforms that enable this vital collaborative work. Providing VC accounts to every teacher in a district, and using this technology to facilitate sharing across classrooms and schools, is a simple step districts can take to support great schooling.
2. Digital Classrooms: Digitizing the work of educators through systems such as Google Classroom provides enormous benefits for teachers and instructional managers. It saves teachers time, helps students stay organized, and enables real-time feedback — for students, teachers, and principals. I have found it particularly useful for gaining insight into the type of feedback teachers are giving to students, which I can use to inform teacher training. Last year, I noticed that teachers were frequently commenting “Good Job!” on scholar writing — even when the work wasn’t very good. Upon searching for the term across all of Google Classroom, we discovered this unhelpful (and frequently inaccurate!) comment was ubiquitous across student assignments in all our schools. We quickly developed a training series for our teachers to strengthen the feedback they give to scholars. This is just one example of how digital classrooms allow instructional leaders to study and monitor the day-to-day work of teaching and learning, so they can diagnose trends, identify professional development priorities, and provide targeted support and feedback to educators.
3. Audiobooks: Audiobooks are a simple and powerful tool for advancing children’s literacy skills, particularly those who do not come from a language-rich home environment. Listening to books read by masterful actors exposes children to the transfixing power of storytelling and cultivates a love of reading. It also increases their comprehension and vocabulary by exposing them to books that are more sophisticated and rigorous than what they can read on their own. Success Academy elementary school students and families have access to a Tumble Books subscription, and middle and high schoolers have Audible accounts, so they have on-demand access to thousands of engaging reads. Over the past year, scholars across our schools have listened to more than 1000 books each month! We also use audiobooks for read-aloud in middle school literature class, which increases access to rigorous, grade-level texts for students who may still struggle with comprehension, and frees teachers to observe scholars’ reactions as they’re listening to inform their questioning in follow-up discussions. While reading physical books continues to be critically important, and all schools should have well-stocked classroom libraries to encourage this activity, audiobooks are a vital supplement to a great literacy program.
4. Video observation: Teaching is a performance art. Like athletes and actors, teachers can make dramatic improvement when they receive feedback on their performance, and when they can observe and analyze the performance of their peers. Unfortunately, many schools are hampered from this kind of observation and feedback for logistical reasons: instructional leaders don’t have sufficient time to visit classrooms frequently, and teachers rarely have opportunities to leave their classrooms to observe colleagues. Video observations allow schools to overcome these hurdles — and they can be done with tools as basic as a smartphone and video upload platforms like Vimeo or YouTube. Until this year, these are essentially what we used at Success Academy. While this system was better than no video observations at all, it was in no way as efficient or effective as it could be. That’s why I have high expectations for a new tool we recently adopted, Torsh Talent. The technology allows teachers to easily take and upload videos of their teaching to a single platform so that they can receive feedback. They can generate a transcript of the video if they wish, and search exemplar videos from other teachers. Most importantly, instructional leaders can add time-stamped feedback at relevant points as they’re reviewing the uploaded videos, which are archived so anyone can benefit from targeted feedback and coaching on specific instances of instructional practice. The partnership we’ve committed to with Torsh is aimed at improving adult practice over several years: The potential is exciting and I promise to report back. Even if you don’t have the ability to adopt a specialized platform however, the benefits of video observation are clear-cut — so start using those smartphones and video upload platforms!