Edtech is simply a combination of education and technology and it refers to hardware and software that is specifically designed for education to allow teacher led learning that can helps improves students in the classroom. It is still in its early days but with the movement of teachers and students online they are becoming more and more relevant as learning is now hybrid in, in-person and online.
I found a few articles on the web that talks about
Digital learning: how COVID-19 made edtech a must
Six months ago, millions of people around the world were already using digital learning platforms to master new languages, brush up on health and safety laws or enhance IT skills. More than 300 million people had downloaded language app Duolingo. The already sizeable corporate elearning market was growing at a rate of knots.
The take-up of education technology (edtech) has often been more piecemeal in schools and colleges. Schools have limited resources and countless priorities. Educators already struggling with heavy workloads lack the time to innovate.
Almost overnight, educational establishments around the world were forced to adopt digital learning and quickly came to rely on edtech platforms whether they wanted to or not.
“The pandemic hasn’t so much boosted educational technology, as highlighted just how important it is as a toolkit for teachers to learn to use,” says Dr Steve Wheeler, visiting research fellow at Plymouth Institute of Education. “The pandemic has simply highlighted the need for teachers to become more versatile in their pedagogy.”
But as schools and colleges reopen this autumn, might the great global experiment in digital learning start to fizzle out? When COVID restrictions are lifted entirely, will the wide-scale edtech adoption of 2020 seem like a passing fad?
Ed tech and educational opportunity during the COVID-19 school closures
Through phone surveys of 201 households and a total of 271 primary-school-aged children in February of 2021, we sought to understand households’ educational practices in Chennai pre-COVID-19 and during the school closures.
Our survey data showed that access to ed tech in schools and households before the pandemic was extremely limited and differed by household socioeconomic background and the type of school (government or private) children attended.
Our survey findings indicate that during the pandemic-related school closures, students in private schools and those from high-socioeconomic status households have more access to digital devices and are more engaged in regular educational activities during COVID-19 than their peers in government schools and from low-socioeconomic status households; findings also indicate that girls are more likely than boys to have access to digital devices for learning and to engage in more regular educational activities. Unsurprisingly, parents turned out to be a major source of educational activities of young children during the school closures.
Alarmingly, 1 in 5 children in our sample were enrolled in schools that do not offer any remote instruction during the school closures, and even among the children whose schools had begun remote instruction, only slightly more than half attended all the classes.