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Ed Tech Developer’s Guide

A primer for software developers, startups, and entrepreneurs

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

http://tech.ed.gov
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Support for the creation of this document was provided by the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI 

International under the contract ED-04-CO-0040/0010. The mention of trade names, commercial products, 

or organizations in this report does not imply endorsements by the U.S. government. This publication 

also contains URLs for information created and maintained by private organizations. This information is 

provided for the reader’s convenience. The U.S. Department of Education is not responsible for controlling or 

guaranteeing the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of this information. Further, the inclusion 

of information or URL does not reflect the importance of the organization, nor is it intended to endorse any 

views expressed or products or services offered.

U.S. Department of Education

Arne Duncan

Secretary

Office of Educational Technology

Richard Culatta

Director

April 2015

This report is in the public domain. Authorization to use, modify, or reproduce this report in whole or in part 

is granted. The citation to use when reproducing this document is: U.S. Department of Education, Office of 

Educational Technology, Ed Tech Developer’s Guide, Washington, D.C., 2015.

This report is available on the Department’s Web site at http://tech.ed.gov

Requests for alternate format documents such as Braille or large print should be submitted to the Alternate 

Format Center by calling 202-260-0852 or by contacting the 504 coordinator via email at om_eeos@ed.gov. 

Notice to Limited English Proficient Persons

If you have difficulty understanding English you may request language assistance services for Department 

information that is available to the public. These language assistance services are available free of charge. 

If you need more information about interpretation or translation services, please call 1-800-USA-LEARN (1-

800-872-5327) (TTY: 1-800-437-0833), or email us at: Ed.Language.Assistance@ed.gov. Or write to: U.S. 

Department of Education, Information Resource Center, LBJ Education Building, 400 Maryland Ave. SW, 

Washington, DC 20202.
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Contents

Acknowledgements 5

Developing for Impact 6

Choosing the Best Opportunity 7

Opportunity 1: Improving Mastery of Academic Skills 7

Opportunity 2: Developing Skills to Promote Lifelong Learning 8

Opportunity 3: Increasing Family Engagement 10

Opportunity 4: Planning for Future Education Opportunities 11

Opportunity 5: Designing Effective Assessments 11

Opportunity 6: Improving Educator Professional Development 12

Opportunity 7: Improving Educator Productivity 13

Opportunity 8: Making Learning Accessible to All Students 15

Opportunity 9: Closing Opportunity Gaps 17

Opportunity 10: Closing Achievement Gaps 17

The Design Process: From Idea to Implementation 19

Beginning 19

Use Data to Improve Your Design 24

Evaluate Impact 30

Ensuring Privacy and Protecting Student Data 31

Networking and Funding 34

Finding Like-Minded People 34

Ed Tech Incubators and Accelerators 35

Other Funding Opportunities 36
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Inside a Typical School District 39

Federal, State, and District Responsibilities 39

District Funding Sources and Budgets 39

Key People 42

Technology Infrastructure 44

Getting Apps and Tools to Users 48

District/School Procurement 48

Sustaining and Growing an App or Tool 52

Software Interoperability and Open Data 53

Early-Stage Interoperability Initiatives 55

Sources of Education Data and Resources 58

Important Trends in the Education Landscape 61

Blended Learning 62

Standards for Learning 62

Testing/Assessment 63

Personalized Learning 64

Project-Based Learning 65

Mastery-Based Learning 65

Teacher Certification 65

Keeping Up with Ed Tech 66
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Acknowledgements

This report was developed under the guidance of Richard Culatta, Joseph South, Katrina Stevens, and 

Bernadette Adams of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology.

Many thanks to those who contributed to writing the guide, including: Marie Bienkowski and Sarah Nixon 

Gerard of SRI International; Shawn Rubin, Cathy Sanford, and Dana Borrelli-Murray of the Highlander 

Institute; Tom Driscoll of Putnam Public Schools; Jessie Arora of Embark Lab; Mike Hruska of Problem 

Solutions; Katie Beck of 4.0 Schools; Thomas Murray of the Alliance for Excellent Education; and Jason 

Hoekstra of Actualize Technology. Stuart Gannes assisted with writing and editing. Edward Metz of the 

Institution of Education Sciences, Steve Midgley of MixRun, Stephanie Castilla of Metryx, Jason Tomassini of 

Digital Promise, Mary Jo Madda of EdSurge, and Zac Chase, Erik Martin, Marcus Noel, and Kathleen Styles at 

the U.S. Department of Education, provided additional content.

Early thinking and editing were provided by Heather Gilchrist of Socratic Labs, Marissa Lowman of 

LearnLaunch, and Alan Louie of Imagine K12. Barbara Means, Robert Murphy, Daniel Humphrey, and Jose 

Blackorby of SRI International provided valuable information on educational research, training, and student 

accessibility. 

James Sanders of the EdTechTeam provided materials regarding the Open Data Initiatives. Brenda Waller 

of SRI International provided administrative assistance. The report was edited by Mimi Campbell of 

SRI International. Kate Borelli of SRI International produced graphics and layout and provided printing 

assistance.

Stories from the field were provided by educators such as Dawn Casey-Rowe of William M. Davies Jr., Career 

and Technical High School, RI; Angela Estrella of Lynbrook High School in Cupertino, CA; Mary Moen and 

Jessica Geremia of the Chariho Regional School District, RI; Brad Waid and Drew Minock of Bloomfield 

Hills, MI; Brian Bennett of Okemos, MI; Kate Baker of Manahawkin, NJ; Jason Bretzmann of Muskego, WI; 

Steven Hodas of the Center on Reinventing Public Education; Brian Baldizar of Providence, RI; and Vanessa 

Waggenheim of Highlander Charter School, Providence, RI. Stories from the field were also provided by 

Ridvan Aliu of EDUonGo; Tess Brustein of Smarter Cookie; Vicki Davis of the Cool Cat Teacher blog; Matt 

Greenfield of Rethink Education; Alex Hernandez of the Charter School Growth Fund; Kim Jacobson of 

Stanford d.school; Michael Staton of Learn Capital; and Alice Wilder of Amazon Studios.
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Developing for Impact

Dear Innovator,

The Office of Educational Technology created this guide to assist you in gaining specialized knowledge 

about the education ecosystem that experienced developers have taken years to learn. Crowd-sourced from 

knowledgeable educators, developers, and researchers who were willing to share what they have learned, 

this guide is designed to help you apply technology in smart ways to solve persistent problems in education. 

It is our hope that this guide will answer key questions and highlight critical needs as you explore 

opportunities to develop digital tools and apps for learning.

The demand for high-quality educational apps is increasing as communities become more connected, devices 

become more affordable, and teachers and parents are looking for new ways to use technology to engage 

students. Yet, many existing solutions don’t address the most urgent needs in education. Opportunities 

abound for software designers and developers to create impactful tools for teachers, school leaders, students, 

and their families.

Creating apps and tools for education is different from other fields. A variety of federal, state, and local 

policies may shape the features you choose to include, and you will need to address some unique questions 

along the way. The aim of this guide is to help you navigate these complexities. 

The guide provides basic information about districts, schools, teachers, and students. In addition, it will help 

you consider questions affecting design and logistics: Do teachers have the training to use your app in the 

right way? How do privacy and accessibilty laws intersect with the features you want to include? Who makes 

the decision to purchase your tool, and how long does purchasing take? Can your app be equally effective at 

school and home? What features are most important to parents?

Developers and entrepreneurs who choose to apply their talents to build tools for learning have the ability 

to help transform education in America and exponentially increase opportunities for all students. I hope this 

guide will help you do that. 

Looking forward to seeing your solutions!

Richard Culatta

Director, Office of Educational Technology

United States Department of Education
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Choosing the Best Opportunity

As you begin the process of designing apps and tools for learning, focus on solving problems that have a significant 

impact on your intended users. Apps that simply digitize traditional practice are less meaningful than apps that 

support more effective approaches to teaching and learning based on sound research. This section presents ten 

opportunities that technology has the potential to address. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents 

some of the most urgent needs that we hear from educators, parents, and students across the country. Each section 

describes the opportunity, shows why it is important, and provides some possible approaches to spark your creativity. 

Many solutions will address more than one of these opportunities. 

Opportunity 1: Improving Mastery of Academic Skills 

Perhaps the most obvious place for apps and tools to be helpful is in providing support for teaching academic 

concepts such as math, science, language arts, social studies, and world languages. New learning activities that help 

students increase academic proficiency are in high demand. In particular, teachers are seeking tools to help increase 

opportunities to practice skills in authentic environments and help students take more control of their learning. Each 

state posts its curriculum standards that show the specific skills that are taught in the state in each content area. 

Learning Powered by Technology

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Education Technology Plan (NETP) presents a vision for learning 

powered by technology. The NETP explains how technology can support personalizing learning to address students' 

individual needs and interests as well as provide access to learning opportunities anywhere and throughout a 

person’s life. The plan describes how technology-based assessments can be unobtrusively embedded into learning 

activities to support just-in-time assistance, measure important student competencies, and provide feedback to 

inform continuous improvement efforts across the entire education system. The NETP also suggests a new role for 

teachers as they shift to connected teaching, joining networks of individuals forming professional communities 

to support student learning and act on insights from data provided by technology. The NETP envisions a learning 

infrastructure that provides access to people and resources at all levels of the education system and a role for 

technology in enabling the redesign and transformation of schooling in ways that increase efficiencies, reducing the 

time teachers must spend on administrative activities.
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Why is this important? Students need to demonstrate proficiency in certain academic skills in order to move 

from one grade to another and to graduate from high school and then from college or other training programs. 

These are skills that are important for students to have to be successful in their careers or postsecondary 

education. Yet international tests like the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that U.S. 

students are falling significantly behind those in other countries in mathematics, reading, and science (see LA 

Times article Are America's Students Falling Behind the World?). 

What would help? Create apps to teach 

academic skills in more meaningful ways than 

traditional textbooks and lectures. Give learners 

an opportunity to practice in realistic settings. This 

might be done through interactive simulations 

(e.g., models of ancient cities that allow students to 

experience history or virtual chemistry simulations 

that might be unsafe to reproduce in a classroom). 

Think beyond delivering content—are there tools 

that enable students to build and create projects 

that encourage deeper exploration of a particular 

topic? Consider merging teaching and assessing to 

pinpoint knowledge gaps along the way to mastery 

through probes of understanding or by identifying 

competencies through formative assessments that are seamlessly embedded in the learning materials. New 

forms of media such as educational games can break traditional molds, allowing students more freedom to 

explore, create, and collaborate, and can open the door to more immersive learning experiences. While research 

has been conducted to identify effective teaching methods for just about every subject, those methods don’t always 

make it into practice in the classroom. Creating apps that put research-based methods into practice can greatly 

impact instruction and learning. 

Opportunity 2: Developing Skills to Promote Lifelong Learning 

Researchers and educators recognize that students need to develop not only academic skills, but also noncognitive social and emotional skills and behaviors that lead to their long-term success. For example, what 

attitude do they have about learning? Do they feel like their abilities in a subject are fixed (“I’m just no good 

at math!”), or do they recognize they can grow (“I can succeed at math, but I will need to learn some new 

strategies in order to approach this problem set”)? Non-cognitive skills such as perseverance, self-regulation, 

and effective strategies for approaching learning enhance student motivation and engagement, and there are 

many ways apps can be designed to support the development of these non-cognitive skills and behaviors, with 

promising results (see Readiness for College: The Role of Noncognitive Factors and Context from the University 

of Chicago and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

Innovate, Don't Digitize

The value of technology for transforming learning is 

lost if it is only used to digitize traditional materials 

(e.g. scanning worksheets makes them digital, but 

doesn't improve the learning experience). Instead, 

think about innovative approaches that allow 

students to engage with content differently. What 

does technology make possible that could not be 

done before? 
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Why is this important? There are many 

non-cognitive skills that are critical for 

an individual to strive for and succeed 

in reaching long-term goals. Researchers 

have found that habits such as tenacity 

and perseverance can have just as strong 

an influence on achievement as intellectual 

ability. There is growing evidence that 

learning environments can be designed to 

foster development of these skills. In 2013, 

the White House Office of Science and 

Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Department of Education hosted a meeting of researchers, practitioners, 

and industry representatives to discuss the impact of students’ beliefs about their academic abilities (see How 

Can We Instill Productive Mindsets at Scale?, a report from leading researchers in the field on the meeting’s 

research agenda regarding instilling productive mindsets). 

What would help? Identify which non-cognitive skills and behaviors you are trying to develop and build 

opportunities to do so into your apps. Growth mindset, for example, is more likely when students believe they 

can achieve and when they believe that intelligence is malleable rather than fixed (see Stanford professor 

Carol Dweck's work on fixed versus growth intelligence mindsets). Accordingly, an app might frame mistakes 

as opportunities to learn and reward students who persist through solving difficult problems. It might also 

Technology Brings “Growth Mindset” to Schools

With funding from the U.S. Department of Education's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, 

New York City-based Mindset Works developed SchoolKit, an app designed to strengthen academic and socialemotional success. Through animations, assessments, and classroom activities, students learn a growth mindset—the 

understanding that ability develops with effort. Pilot research in nine middle schools found significant increases 

in students’ growth mindset, which related to increases in learning goals, positive beliefs about effort, and positive 

academic habits and behaviors 

(such as resilient responses 

to failure and better learning 

strategies). These changes also 

related to increases in students’ 

GPA. Since launching in 2012, 

SchoolKit has been used by tens 

of thousands of students around 

the country, including all middle 

schools in Washington, D.C. The 

app is based on Carol Dweck’s 

research on growth mindsets.

More than Working Harder

Developing grit or perseverance does not just mean working 

harder. Rather, students who display grit have developed 

confidence that they can solve a problem and have 

developed a toolkit of strategies to apply when faced with 

new challenges. 
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support goal setting, allow students to choose learning activities, and encourage achievement against objective 

standards. To improve self-regulation, students may be asked to reflect on their effort and to consider how 

difficult they find the material. Apps that reward hard work and tenacity should be favored over those that 

reinforce simply getting the right answer in order for students to advance to a new level. Game designers 

are particularly adept at motivating persistence, and much can be learned from the methods they use to 

inspire players to persevere in the face of difficulty and frustration. Finally, behavior management is an 

important non-cognitive skill. Teachers, especially those new to the profession, may need help establishing a 

productive classroom environment and climate (see this article on Classroom Management from the American 

Psychological Association), and classroom management apps could reward positive behaviors, potentially 

decreasing unwanted behaviors. 

Opportunity 3: Increasing Family Engagement 

Involving parents and caregivers in the learning process is a key element to ensuring student success. It is particularly 

essential for students who need special assistance, such as those who struggle with learning disabilities. Often 

parents feel left out of the education process, especially those whose work, school, or family responsibilities make it 

difficult to connect with teachers and school leaders during regular school hours. The Harvard Graduate School of 

Education published an article on the benefits of family engagement that included a summary of research on how 

to most effectively engage families. Family and community engagement—for students of all ages—is a focus for 

the U.S. Department of Education, and its family 

and community website provides resources for 

early learning in families overall and in special 

populations like military and migrant families as 

well as homeless children. 

Why is this important? Schools have a 

tremendous role in engaging and supporting 

students, and parents help in many ways, 

including making sure that children start on par 

with their peers. Providing parents with at-home 

activities (as PBS KIDS has done in its Parents 

Play & Learn app and Zero to Three has done in its Let’s Play! app) to support in-class learning reinforces the idea 

among families that not all learning has to take place in school. Parental engagement could come from daily progress 

updates, easy tools to communicate with a child’s teacher, and resources to connect school learning to practical home 

activities. Connecting parents of all backgrounds to school communities empowers them to become active, informed 

advocates for their children throughout their education. 

What would help? Familiarize yourself with ways to engage families (some ideas are provided by the Response to 

Intervention Action Network article) and then think about how to apply those principles to engage families through 

technology. For instance, could your app provide information to caregivers about student progress and homework in 

near real time and in languages spoken at home? Can your tool be used on a smartphone or in an offline mode for 

homes without an Internet connection? Does it help parents stay involved in their children’s school activities while 

Tip: Many Types of Families

When developing your app and the communications 

around it, remember that families come in many different 

configurations, so more general terms like “parent,” 

“caregiver,” or “family member” apply to more situations 

than “mother” and “father.”
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balancing work or other responsibilities? For parents whose first language is not English or who may come from 

cultures outside the United States, can your app better help them understand and navigate the K–12 school system, 

including their local school? 

Opportunity 4: Planning for Future Education Opportunities 

Preparing for college and navigating the application process can be challenging, and the sticker price for 

college can be overwhelming and misleading. For example, a more prestigious college that appears to be 

expensive may actually be cheaper than other options once scholarships and financial aid are factored in. 

Using technology to help students and their families make better decisions about their future education has 

great promise. Many students do not apply to college because they do not know what institutions they could 

qualify for or how to take advantage of financial supports that may be available to them. All students, but 

particularly underserved students, would benefit from tools that engage them long before their final years in 

high school to help plan their academic path to graduate and apply to and complete postsecondary education.

Why is this important? Research, including a recent College Board study, has shown that students who 

graduate with a degree, even an associate degree, far outpace their peers in income generated over a lifetime 

of employment. Even career and technical education programs often require a two-year degree. Yet the process 

of planning for, applying to, and financing college can feel daunting—especially for first-generation college 

students and their families. 

What would help? Financial aid navigators, course planners, remote college counseling, and college-to-career 

maps all can help students plan for and be successful in their future education plans. Additionally, new tools 

and apps targeted at helping school counselors could increase both the reach and amount of support counselors 

can provide students (on average, half the number of counselors are available to high school students as is 

recommended by the American School Counselor Association). Additionally, open state and federal datasets 

can be used to create apps for managing college finances and to identify skills needed for different types of 

jobs. Imagine a “jobs available at graduation” tool that uses labor statistics about job growth. Also needed are 

tools that interface with college course catalogs and let students interactively plan various paths to college 

completion. Imagine an app that lets students identify and communicate with alumni of the institution that 

they are attending (or plan to attend) in fields that interest them so they can gain perspective and advice.

Opportunity 5: Designing Effective Assessments

Understanding what students know and how much they are learning is an important part of education. 

Traditionally teachers have made educated guesses about how much their students are learning based on 

classroom observation and reviewing homework. Teachers often struggle, mostly because of time, with 

creating assessments that truly align with the skills they want to measure. They also spend hours reviewing 

and grading student work that could be better spent preparing lessons and working with students. 
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In addition, information from formal 

assessments is often not available quickly 

enough to inform instruction. Data from 

high-stakes assessments, for example, 

may actually come after a student has 

moved to a new grade and new teacher. 

Even grading quizzes or homework takes 

so much time that teachers often are 

not able to turn around the assignments 

quickly enough to change their 

instruction for the next day. True data 

analysis can also be time-consuming and 

difficult using many current assessment 

practices and formats. 

Why is this important? Well-designed formative and summative assessments provide teachers and students 

with just-in-time feedback on progress towards mastery of content and allow educators to personalize learning 

pathways for their students. With feedback that is almost immediate, educators can strategically adjust 

instruction more quickly to meet the needs of diverse learners 

What would help? Technology provides a variety of new opportunities to rethink the way we assess student 

learning. Tools that help teachers create and share formative assessments, automate grading, and streamline 

providing feedback to students allow teachers to focus more of their time on instruction. Expanding assessment 

item types (beyond multiple choice questions, etc.) can provide educators with a more detailed and sophisticated 

understanding of what their students know and can do. Simulations, heat maps, and ranking are all examples 

of technology-enhanced assessment item types that are beginning to be incorporated into digital assessments. 

Traditionally, education has struggled to develop meaningful assessments that measure non-cognitive skills 

such as persistence, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. (For more information on these skills, see 

the Partnership for 21st Century Skills Framework for Learning.) Consider creating tools that help develop and 

assess these kinds of skills. 

Aligning assessments with learning goals is crucial to success. Make sure you clearly understand what you are 

measuring. It is crucial to measure what is important not simply what is easy to measure.

Opportunity 6: Improving Educator Professional Development

The same personalized, collaborative, anytime/anywhere learning that technology can enable for students 

should be available for educators and administrators. Advances in technology can make just-in-time 

personalized professional learning available to educators wherever they may be, putting teaching tips and 

access to educational experts in their hands. Technology-enabled professional learning can help educators 

find setting-specific answers and guidance for helping their students learn. For more on designing online 

communities of practice for educators, see the Department’s Designing Online Communities of Practice. 

Tip: Assessment Types

There are two main categories of assessments. Formative 

assessments are frequent and ideally embedded within a learning 

activity. They provide quick and continual snapshots of student 

progress over time. Summative assessments generally occur at 

the end of an instructional unit, are generally more formal, and 

are often used to determine a final grade or ranking. Both play 

key and complementary roles in understanding where students 

are on their learning trajectories.
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Why is this important? Educators must constantly learn and improve their teaching skills in order to support 

their students. One-size-fits-all professional development sessions cannot meet the specific needs of each 

teacher in a school or college. Educators need tools that help them tap into the expertise of their peers by 

accessing networks of reliable professional support and resource sharing. This is particularly important for 

new and pre-service teachers. 

What would help? Tools to help connect educators to one another and to expert educational researchers are key 

to effective professional learning in a digital world. In addition, educators need job-embedded, differentiated, 

and on-demand access to content that supports their mastery of effective instruction. To be of greatest use, 

resources to support educators in their professional learning might include ones that:

• connect educators with each other and to educational experts

• help teachers reflect on their own practice 

• provide educators support to master new strategies, techniques and tools

• are available on-demand

• differentiate for a range of levels of readiness and expertise

• curate content so teachers can find appropriate support and ideas quickly

• showcase content-specific best practices

Also consider aligning tools and resources to relevant professional standards (e.g., National Board for 

Professional Teaching Standards Certificate Areas). 

Finally, any tools built for teacher professional development should be designed according to principles of 

adult learning and foster a growth mindset similar to the concepts explained above for student learning. The 

Connected Educators web page features several channels and tools for helping educators connect to colleagues 

across the country.

Opportunity 7: Improving Educator Productivity

In addition to the time spent teaching and interacting with students, educators have enormous administrative 

burdens throughout a school year—preparing lessons, finding teaching materials, grading, reporting, 

communicating with parents, and supporting school functions to name a few. When administrative tasks are 

streamlined, teachers and leaders can spend more time working with students and deepening their professional 

learning. Some ways to boost educator productivity include creating tools that help teachers personalize 

learning for students (adjusting instruction for students who need extra time or different learning approaches), 

make it easier to provide feedback to students and parents, and helping teachers create, adapt, and share lesson 

plans, learning resources, and assessments with other teachers. 

Why is this important? Teachers are a critical factor in student success, and helping teachers reduce time spent 

on administrative tasks enables them to spend more valuable time with students. Teachers, especially in urban 

schools, are at risk of leaving the teaching profession or moving to other schools (as reported in a recent Education 

World article). Teachers need custom productivity tools similar to those found in other professions. With these 
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tools, teachers will be able to spend more of their time and effort focusing on students and their learning. To 

hear what teachers say about their profession and how to reform it, see Educators Lead the Transformation of the 

Teaching Profession from the U.S. Department of Education website.

What would help? Apps and tools to help teachers 

streamline workflow, personalize instruction, 

support needs of diverse students, create and share 

lessons, and communicate efficiently with parents 

and other stakeholders can all help productivity. To 

most effectively adjust instruction, teachers need to 

track student progress and identify areas of struggle. 

Student performance data are becoming increasingly 

available to teachers in real time, but without tools 

to help make sense of the data or quickly identify 

important trends, it can be too time consuming for 

teachers to find the value. Design tools that organize 

data visually for easier interpretation. Especially for new teachers, tools that make it easier to discover, modify, 

and share learning resources aligned with curricular standards would be a huge time-saver.

Words of Advice: Become a School Insider

Steven Hodas is the former Executive Director of Innovate NYC Schools, a New York City 

Department of Education initiative to foster smart demand and innovative solutions. Hodas has 

worked closely with early-stage entrepreneurs and launched two companies of his own.

"Assuming you were not recently a teacher yourself, I suggest that you work hard to get inside the school, inside the 

classroom, inside the day-to-day lives of the educators you want to help. If you’re resourceful enough to get in, don’t 

sell. Don’t demo. Don’t text or tweet. Just watch and listen. Help with a task if you can. Earn the space you’re taking 

up.

Bring pizza to the teachers’ lounge. Sit in on a common planning period. Clean up after lunch. Act as if you know 

nothing, be humble, and soak up school sounds and rhythms. Go to school board meetings. Join online forums for 

parents in your town. Learn what parents and teachers really care about. Until you’ve done these things, it’s arrogant 

to write code, let alone attempt to sell. Unless you’ve done these things, the likelihood that you are aiming at 

something big is small.

Your solution must manifest your deep understanding of educators’ daily struggles and small victories. That 

understanding is the beginning of empathy, without which you cannot succeed." 

Tip: Onboard Quickly

When developing productivity tools, pay careful 

attention to how long it will take teachers to 

learn a new tool (onboarding). Design in such a 

way that time-consuming training or tutorials are 

not required. Support should be readily available 

for educators with questions when using a tool.
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Opportunity 8: Making Learning Accessible to All Students

Many students have differing educational needs that must be addressed—from physical disabilities to acquiring 

a new language—in order to learn effectively. They may need special tools to interpret learning content 

(e.g., decoding mathematical notation and symbols) or support for taking notes or organizing information 

in structured ways. Technology can 

increase the ability for students with 

differing needs to participate in the 

same learning activities as their peers. 

App developers can address these needs 

in three ways. First, functionality can be 

added to all apps to make them accessible 

to students with diverse needs, such as 

the ability to increase the font size or 

have text read aloud. Second, apps can 

be created to address specific learning 

needs, such as providing a digital wordboard to children who can't speak. 

Third, tools can personalize learning to 

adapt to a variety of learner needs, such 

as providing alternative explanations, 

examples, and visualizations to help a 

student understand difficult concepts. The National Center for Learning Disabilities is a good place to find 

information about learning disabilities, and more on web accessibility can be found at the World Wide Web 

Consortium. Accessibility needs to be considered as a feature to be built in from the outset; as these W3C videos 

demonstrate, watching users with disabilities navigate learning apps and tools with assistive technologies can 

be illuminating. 

Why is this important? Schools normally won't be able 

to use your app if it's not accessible to students with 

disabilities. The Department of Education has issued 

guidance describing how two civil rights laws, Section 

504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with 

Disabilities Act, apply to technology used in schools. 

When you design with accessibility in mind, not only do 

you facilitate school district compliance with civil rights 

laws, but your apps will become much more beneficial to 

your users as well, even those who may not have specific 

learning disabilities. Consider how entrance ramps to buildings (designed to provide access for people who use 

wheelchairs) also benefit children on bicycles or parents pushing strollers. The text description added to a website to 

make sure a person who is blind can use a screen reader might also improve searchability for all users of the site. Apps 

developed to assist in communication could be a life-changing experience for learners with autism, cerebral palsy, or 

Down syndrome. With appropriate technology, English learners (ELs) have the ability to access the same content as 

Universal Design for Learning

The Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) developed 

Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework for 

making curriculum inclusive of “flexible approaches that can 

be customized and adjusted for individual needs.” The CAST 

guidelines encourage instructional practices and educational 

content that embrace the widest possible diversity of 

learners. The UDL approach encourages the development of 

tools that consider this diverse range of users in the original 

design rather than add-on features. To see the guidelines, 

refer to the CAST website.

Tip: Useful Hashtags

Consider tapping into educators’ current 

conversations about supporting diverse learners by 

searching hashtags such as #ldchat, #atchat, and 

#spedchat.
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their peers and can leverage their native language and 

academic skills to “transfer” to the work in English, as 

shown in this report produced by Cambridge University 

Press. Generally, content should be communicable in a 

variety of formats so as to increase the applicability of 

the tool. Specifically, this may be manifested as delivery 

of content in more than one of the following forms: text, 

pictures or illustrations, audio, and video (whereas any 

one format may be insufficient to meet an individual’s 

special needs).

What would help? Think about the human-machine 

interface you are building. Are there multiple ways 

for users to interact with and respond within your 

app? Could a user control your app by voice? Will 

it interoperate with a screen reader? Does it take 

advantage of accessibility settings in device operating 

systems? Does your app support varying levels of 

complexity, interaction, and support? Making your 

content accessible is good. Solving fundamental access problems in communication, organization, and social 

interaction is better. Features that customize the delivery of learning must not clutter or confuse the delivery 

itself, and so developers may place such settings or controls within a separate functional area of the tool. 

Stories From the Field: Designing Ed Tech Products 

Stephanie Castilla is the Technology Integration Specialist at the Highlander Institute 

where she works with educators on a daily basis to discover models for implementing new 

technologies that support teaching and learning. 

"Designing ed tech products for schools is an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience. Each day 

brings new insights and opportunities as I work with others to define and refine problems and solutions. 

When teachers are your target users, it is critical to empathize with their day-to-day work life. Teachers face 

increasingly changing expectations. They come to new applications with varying degrees of understanding, 

and many times they feel forced to integrate solutions into their classrooms that they themselves did not 

choose. With more deadlines, standards, and requirements placed on them, it is incredibly important that 

the tools they use not require extensive training or follow-up and, more important, that they genuinely solve 

a problem experienced by the teacher and not just by administration. This level of empathy is fundamental 

when you design anything for day-to-day use. 

Well-designed experiences have the power to make someone's day more productive while providing them with 

opportunities to find more enjoyment and inspiration in their work. Ultimately, the key role of a designer 

in the ed tech space is to work each and every day to highlight the inherent joy and satisfaction found in 

teaching and learning and to maximize the opportunities available to all who seek to experience it."

Using a 3D printer, students at CrossRoads Middle School 

in Columbia, SC, created a prosthetic hand for Alyssa, an 

11-year-old girl from Charleston, SC.
17

Opportunity 9: Closing Opportunity Gaps

An opportunity gap refers to unequal access to resources or opportunities. Rural students often have less access 

to resources found in urban settings such as museums, cultural centers and industry experts, for example. Job 

shadowing and internship opportunities may be more limited in many communities. Less wealthy communities 

often cannot afford to provide the well-equipped libraries, rich educational experiences, and classroom equipment 

and resources found in wealthier communities. 

The technology gap is one form of opportunity gap. Despite the growing sense that digital tools are common 

in educational settings, access to them is far from equal. While some schools and students have access to topnotch resources, others, such as those in highly impoverished locations, are significantly lagging behind. Without 

the tools, content, and connections to high-quality learning tools and experiences, these teachers and students 

cannot be expected to provide and experience learning in ways equal to their peers. This opportunity inequity 

is addressed in greater detail in the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ October 2014 Dear 

Colleague Letter, which focuses on gaps based on race, color, or national origin but could be useful in approaching 

any opportunity gap.

Why is this important? All students have the right to an equitable education. This right should not be affected 

by geographic location, family income, or any other demographic factor. Apps provide the opportunity for 

students to access content and expertise that may not be available within the bounds of a physical school 

building.

What would help? While recent years have seen an increase in the amount of open education resources (OER), 

many teachers lack the training or time to comb through and evaluate them. The creation of pathways for the 

curation of content verified for quality and standards alignment and the sharing of curated sets or playlists would 

alleviate unnecessary stress on teachers and increase the availability of low-cost, high-quality learning materials 

for all. Additionally, tools designed to help students and teachers access expertise in all areas from curricular 

content to improved teaching practices could help better leverage the usefulness of Internet connectivity. Finally, 

be mindful of equity of technical accessibility when designing products. Users on slower systems should be able to 

access and experience an application or service with the same ease as those using more cutting-edge technology.

Opportunity 10: Closing Achievement Gaps

Achievement gaps occur when one identifiable group of students outperforms another by a significant amount. 

For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP—the Nation’s Report Card) provides data 

that show significant gaps in mathematics and reading ability between Hispanic and white students and between 

black and white students (results are on the U.S. Department of Education’s NAEP website). Gaps can also exist 

among groups such as children who are economically disadvantaged, in foster care (as reported by the Los 

Angeles Times in Students in Foster Care Face 'Invisible Achievement Gap'), or those belonging to a historically 

low-performing group (see the Michigan Department of Education’s African American Young Men of Promise 
18

Initiative website). Nationwide standardized tests are not the only place where gaps are evident. State and 

local assessments along with results from Advanced Placement course completion and testing can also help you 

understand achievement gaps and areas of need. For example, computer science Advanced Placement courses 

lack significant participation by girls and minorities, a gap described in this 2014 Slate article, No Wyoming 

Students Took the AP Computer Science Exam Last Year. 

Why is this important? Demographic factors should not systematically limit academic achievement and thereby 

future opportunities. All students deserve the chance to pursue college and careers in areas that interest them and 

should not be disadvantaged because of gender, race, economic status, or any other factor. Achievement gaps in 

the United States have persisted for many years and need to be closed.

What would help? Everything we have discussed to this point can make a difference: helping teachers, involving 

parents, strengthening non-cognitive skills, targeting academic subjects, and improving accessibility help to 

promote equal education opportunities for all students. Illustrating how your product helps to achieve these goals 

while working to close gaps in achievement makes it more compelling to educators and more likely to succeed 

in schools.
19

2

The Design Process: 

From Idea to Implementation

Beginning

While the steps below are presented in a suggested order, development of your product may require rearranging 

the order and even repeating some of the steps multiple times to refine your vision, plan, product, or research 

base. In general, the basic process will look something like the following:

1. Surveying the field for existing products (successful and failed) and getting to know the world and 

concerns of your potential end users

2. Beginning from a research base supported by the most current available information from the 

learning sciences

3. Iterating your product based on user feedback and experiences

4. Conducting short-cycle efficacy trials to gather data that builds a case to support your product’s 

ability to solve the education problem or dilemma you’re attacking. (Given a longer time frame and 

greater resources, you may be able to conduct other trials and tests subject to specific regulations.)

Survey the Field

Before you start coding a solution to a particular problem, do your homework to understand what apps and 

tools are already attempting to address the same issue. Even if your approach is better, you will want to be able 

to contrast it with the status quo. 

One way to get a feeling for existing 

educational apps and tools is to peruse 

app review websites such as the Edtech 

Index (by EdSurge) or Graphite (by 

Common Sense Media). These provide 

a description of the tools developers 

have already built and show you, for 

example, how crowded the mathematics 

and language arts spaces are and how 

few apps and tools there are for science, 

social studies, and world languages.
20

Spend some time understanding what has 

already been tried, what succeeded or failed, 

and why (e.g., by browsing the U.S. Department 

of Education’s repository of reviewed research, 

the What Works Clearinghouse). Choose 

problems that will have the greatest positive 

impact on the intended users. 

Talk With Stakeholders

Even before designing a prototype, talk with 

teachers, parents, students, and educational 

researchers to make sure you are solving the 

right problem and that your tool or app will 

meet the needs of your intended users. Say 

you’re creating an app to help teachers assign 

tailored practice in reading. Start by visiting 

with teachers. Help them do what they do the 

way they do it now (i.e., volunteer) so you can 

observe what classrooms are like and empathize 

with teachers’ challenges. Talk to parents about 

how they support reading at home. Involve 

them in the process of developing a solution. 

With teacher and parent permission, talk to 

students about their experience and the kinds 

of features they want or need to allow your 

solution to become a seamless part of their learning.

Ed tech blogger Audrey Watters created a checklist called, What Every Techie Should Know about Education, for 

tech entrepreneurs to assess their understanding 

of a variety of topics relevant to building tools 

for schools. The checklist explains the work that 

has led to this point in the ed tech movement 

and provides some food for thought for aspiring 

entrepreneurs. 

Once you reach the prototype stage, get as much 

feedback as possible as you move through testing 

your assumptions. Along the way, it is essential 

to continue to engage your intended users as you 

refine your app or tool. One approach for this is 

to create simple mock-ups of the tool or app that 

you are planning to develop, including user-case 

scenarios that are examples of how students and 

teachers might actually use the technology in a 

Disruptive Innovation vs. 

Incremental Improvement

Many educational apps and tools offer marginal 

improvements on existing practice. This often results in a 

positive but limited impact. These can be called “sustaining 

innovations.” In contrast, some educational innovations 

fall into the category of “disruptive innovations”—they go 

beyond just improving the current way learning happens 

and radically redefine the context, goals, and/or approach 

based on the foundations of learning science or other 

leaps of insight. According to the Clayton Christensen 

Institute for Disruptive Innovation, disruptive products 

alter processes and markets, often in unexpected ways, 

whereas sustaining innovations automate or simplify 

existing processes. There is also a third category, hybrid 

innovations; these are solutions that straddle sustaining 

and disruptive innovations and are sometimes necessary in 

the transition from the status quo to disruptive innovation. 

Blended learning may be considered a hybrid innovation 

(see Is K–12 Blended Learning Disruptive?). Lest you think 

that innovation means the end of school as we know it, 

read Audrey Watters’ The Myth and the Millennialism of 

"Disruptive Innovation" for a more sober perspective. 

Tip: Games for Learning

Games can engage students while teaching important 

concepts and skills. Games for learning work best 

when they don’t feel like a homework assignment. If 

you are designing a game for learning, don’t forget 

to build tools to help teachers and parents see what 

students are learning through the gameplay. A 

general guide is to develop a game that students 

want to keep playing once they leave the classroom 

and teachers won’t ask students to put away when 

they enter the classroom. This means striking a 

careful balance between game design, learning 

sciences, analytics, and demonstrable efficacy.
21

classroom setting. With these in hand, you can conduct 

more formal user-concept testing, where users provide 

feedback in a survey or through a structured or guided 

interview. Once you have this feedback, you can write 

up the results from this research and have a brief ready 

to show future funders or stakeholders to demonstrate 

that the concept has been formally vetted by its 

potential users and is ready for the next step.

Many educators are looking for innovative ways to 

integrate useful tools into their teaching. A challenge 

is identifying, organizing, and, if appropriate, 

compensating these early evangelists. In the end, the 

insights they provide into what teachers want may 

make the difference between success and irrelevance 

for your tool or app. 

Base Your Design on Learning Principles and Evidence

In developing educational tools and apps, it is important to build on the foundation laid by decades of education 

research. Too often apps are well coded and fully functional but are based on learning theories that researchers 

debunked years ago, so they underperform in their core purpose. Consider the following key concepts and 

resources as you create your app.

Learning sciences. Learning sciences are related 

to instructional design, cognitive science, and brain 

research. Learning scientists study factors that 

enhance or impede different kinds of learning and the 

best ways to engage learners for maximum impact in 

minimal time. These researchers have made significant 

progress in understanding learning in ways that are 

highly relevant to designing educational software. 

Developers who are not aware of the foundations of 

cognitive science, instructional design, or the learning 

sciences can miss out on opportunities for high-impact 

design and ways to systematically build in features 

from the collection of effectiveness data that can 

help them improve their product. To get an idea as to 

whether your product is aligned with the core tenets 

of learning science research listed below, try using a 

checklist like Kaplan’s Educational Product Evaluation 

Checklist.

Research-based design principles. Here are some 

resources to get you started with lessons from research 

Tip: How to Find 

Teachers for Feedback 

In an article on the Edtech Handbook website, 

How to Find K-12 Teachers for Product Feedback, 

Mike Lee, co-founder of edshelf, gives specific tips 

for how to identify and engage educators to obtain 

that critical feedback you need when you’re getting 

started. In his words: 

“You may be surprised to hear that there are 

many enterprising educators out there. I don’t 

mean they are profit seeking; I mean they are 

inventive, progressive, and oftentimes tech-savvy. 

Some call them edupreneurs, some call them 

teacherpreneurs. Whatever you call them, as a 

startup, you can see them as innovators or early 

adopters.”

Tip: Talking to Teachers

Brett Kopf, cofounder of ed tech startup 

Remind101 and alumnus of the Imagine K12

accelerator, creates services built on three 

principles: talk to users, build a simple product, 

and solve a real problem. He provides tips on 

how to connect with 100+ educators and the 

questions to ask to refine your app in the article 

Confirming the Problem: Talking to Teachers

from edtechhandbook.com.
22

about designs for learning. Having a researcher on your team or collaborating with a research group can help you 

successfully apply these principles.

• The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) publishes guides for educators 

that summarize recommendations for teaching and learning based on research results. A list of these 

practice guides can be found on the IES website. In addition, the Department updated its General 

Administrative Regulations to encourage greater use of evidence in grant programs, which this EdWeek 

Words of Advice: Capturing the Attention of Influencers

Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) is a full-time teacher at Westwood Schools in Camille, Georgia. She is 

also the author of Reinventing Writing, Flattening Classrooms, Engaging Minds and the popular Cool 

Cat Teacher Blog. 

"The best companies are those that engage in conversation with teachers. Startups that have products and 

services crafted and advised by real teachers will always get an in with influencers. Remember, influencers 

will only give your product just a few minutes of time before moving on or looking deeper. 

Customer service is important. Successful startups I have had experiences with answer the emails of teachers 

who are starting to use their services and respond to classroom needs.

Genuine contributors to conversation are always rewarded in educational spaces. There is a massive 

movement of educators to connect and contribute in online spaces via Twitter chats and other places, and 

watching these conversations is a virtual focus group for you to glean knowledge to make your company more 

successful. Add your moving part to the engine of positive change rather than trying to siphon off valuable 

resources for a need that doesn’t exist."

Stories From the Field: Getting Teacher Input

Drew Minock teaches at Eastover Elementary in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He is also a leader in the 

field of augmented reality in education.

"Last year, my colleague Brad Waid and I were looking for a digital tool to document student work. After 

extensive research, we finally discovered a smartphone app that let us collect and organize student work in 

photos, videos, or audio.

After sharing the app on social media, the app creator contacted me to thank me for sharing my experiences. 

I took this opportunity to offer some suggestions for improving the tool from a teacher’s point of view. Since 

then, we have had several conversations to discuss the continued improvement of the app and have put the 

creators in contact with other educators for their feedback. It is exciting to know our voice and opinions 

as educators are valued and respected and have the potential to help students all over the world engage in 

deeper, more meaningful learning experiences."
23

article summarizes.

• Research and practical experience combine 

to produce an excellent set of best practices 

for children’s app development on the 

Sesame Workshop website.

• Two accessible and comprehensive books 

regarding learning from the National 

Research Council are How People Learn and 

Knowing What Students Know, which outline 

the science and design of educational 

assessments.

• The Pittsburgh Science Learning Center has 

created a wiki with a set of instructional 

principles as well as some hypotheses that 

are still under study. A short article from the 

center published in Science (subscription 

required) describes how to manage the 

complex search space that results from 

varying principles related to instructional 

timing, techniques used, and amount of time 

spent learning.

• The American Psychological Association 

website includes an article by cognitive 

scientist Art Graesser outlining principles 

that research has shown increase student 

gains.

• The Hewlett Foundation has supported 

efforts to promote deeper learning and 

provides this list of resources on its website. 

Learning and design frameworks. As a developer, 

you may find that teachers will refer to particular 

learning or design frameworks when describing their 

classroom and learning goals. Here is an introduction 

to some common frameworks to help you understand 

how educators think about instruction.

• Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom’s Taxonomy of 

educational objectives (revised in 2001) is 

well known for defining successively deeper 

levels of learning. The taxonomy suggests that 

students develop higher order thinking skills 

as they move from knowledge to application 

and on to evaluating and creating, using 

Tip: Design Thinking 

If you are an educator looking to build an app 

or tool, consider using Design Thinking to help 

unleash your creativity and zero in on effective 

solutions. Design Thinking is a structured process 

for generating and developing ideas that can help 

you work with others to build meaningful solutions 

to problems in the classroom, at school, and in 

the community. The design firm IDEO offers a 

free Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit on its 

website and a course on the process and methods 

of Design Thinking. Explore this toolkit and begin 

brainstorming solutions for your problem. 

Using Research to 

Inform Design

Teachley was founded in 2012 by Kara Carpenter, 

Dana Pagar, and Rachael Labrecque, former 

researchers at Teachers College at Columbia 

University, who bring educational research to 

game design. Their company won an Apple 

Design Award and was featured on NBC 

Education Nation.

"We integrate research into each design stage, 

from comprehensive literature reviews to formal 

evaluative studies. Our designs target key strategies 

from cognitive research that improve math learning. 

For example, extensive studies show that students 

with math learning difficulties tend to use less 

sophisticated strategies than typical students, 

which negatively impacts future learning. Our apps 

promote advanced strategy acquisition through the 

use of carefully designed virtual manipulatives that 

draw from this research. Developing high-quality 

educational software requires that designers consider 

the research on children’s cognitive development, 

pedagogy, the subtleties and complexities of the 

content, and technological affordances."
24

factual and conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge (strategies and 

self-knowledge). For an overview, see Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching resources on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

• Multiple Intelligences. Howard Gardner proposed eight distinct types of intelligences or mental faculties—

linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and 

naturalistic—and further proposed that every individual possesses a unique combination of them. Teaching, 

he believed, should nurture many of these intelligences. (Multiple intelligences are commonly misconceived 

to be modes of processing information for learning, leading to such claims as that a person with a particular 

intelligence should be taught primarily or exclusively through means that cater to that intelligence. This has 

not proven to be the case.)

• Understanding by Design. Understanding by Design (UbD) is a framework for curriculum design 

that starts with identifying important curriculum goals, such as developing enduring understandings, 

maps these to evidence that students can show to demonstrate skills and knowledge, and then links 

that evidence to learning experiences that develop the skills and knowledge. ASCD's website provides 

resources and publishes books and workbooks to support UbD. 

Use Data to Improve Your Design 

You have surveyed the field, gathered stakeholder input, applied lessons from the learning sciences, and you 

now have an early prototype. Next, you need to try it out, gather data systematically, and use the data to iterate 

on the design. Where feasible, you can multiply your efforts by doing this in a partnership with researchers 

and teachers (see Design Thinking as a Design Process on page 29). Whatever your approach, if you objectively 

examine the data, you will find that you can improve 

your product’s positive impact faster. 

Iterate Design to Create 

a Minimally Viable Product

User feedback is important at all stages of app and 

tool design. Iterative design is the process of using 

short feedback loops to define assumptions, create 

prototypes, and obtain early user feedback, first to 

validate the need for your app or tool (or invalidate 

it, saving time, money, and other resources) and later 

to improve its usability and impact. 

Educational apps and tools have different target 

audiences than those for the consumer market. 

Whether your app or tool is for a student, teacher, 

district, state, or national stakeholder, be aware 

that each has varying needs and operates under 

different constraints in the highly regulated and 

procedure-driven education domain. Using lean 

startup approaches, you can obtain feedback on your 

Beware of 

“Learning Styles”

Learning styles, the idea that there are specific sensory 

approaches to learning that differ among people 

(e.g., left-brain and right-brain learners, visual versus 

auditory learners) and that presentation modalities 

should be matched to those styles, is a popular but 

unproven notion. The theory of multiple intelligences is 

often confused with learning styles, but in a Washington 

Post article Multiple Intelligences are not Learning 

Styles, Howard Gardner decidedly separates the two. 

Learning styles have remained popular even though 

there is no research supporting their existence. This 

American Association of Psychological Science article, 

"Learning Styles Debunked" describes a study that 

reviewed all the research literature on learning styles 

and found no evidence that using learning styles in 

instruction aids learning. 
25

project and steer key development earlier. This reduces the risk of investing time, money, talent, and passion 

on an app or tool that may not work in an education context. You will find elements of the lean startup 

approach embraced at Education Enterpreneurs events (formerly Startup Weekend Edu, see event listings at 

EducationEntrepreneurs.co) as well as by incubators and accelerators. 

Reflections From a Developer on 

Creating Games for Learning

Dan Norton is the chief creative officer and a founder of Filament Games, a company that has been 

funded by the SBIR program at the Department of Education and Institute of Education Sciences. He has 

designed games about a broad range of topics, from marine turtle ecology to legal argumentation, that 

have won numerous industry awards and have been played millions of times in classrooms across the 

country.

"Who doesn’t like a good game? From chess to bowling to 

flapping (possibly even angry) birds, games have permeated 

our culture. With social and mobile technology infusing every 

aspect of our life, even Grandma has been known to cultivate a 

virtual farm or crush some candy from time to time.

For people who love games, this is great news. But now that 

games are accepted as a mainstream medium, how can we 

use them in educational contexts? 

Firstly, the game should be about more than just having a good 

time. When evaluating a game for the classroom, the gold 

standard to ask is: “Does mastering this game mean students will 

have mastered the learning objectives?”

Secondly, games can ask you to step into the role of a hero: 

They create identities that give purpose. Games elevate writers, 

scientists, thinkers, and problem solvers to champion status. Students want to know why learning material matters—and 

games help paint that picture! Ask yourself if the game is granting players an identity that complements or empowers the 

learning objectives.

Finally, games are, at their heart, simply a set of rules that players must follow. Think of these rules as a system/

simulation and players as “researchers” testing the boundaries of the simulation through play. This makes games 

well suited to express complicated, systems-driven concepts often found in science and math. Think about the 

rules of the game you are evaluating and see if they represent the learning space accurately.

When educators evaluate games, they think of them as an opportunity to connect, create context, and inspire 

students, not to entertain or distract. When evaluating games to use in classrooms, teachers are looking not for 

temporary diversions, but powerful new tools they can use to enhance the entire curriculum."
26

The lean startup approach follows the principles of Agile software development (see agilemethodology.org). 

It consists of a rapid-cycle efficacy trial driven by a customer development process and is used to verify that 

a need exists for the product and then to incrementally advance the product from that starting point. Short 

iterations and fast testing of assumptions drive product development more efficiently than long development 

times. A shorter development time leads to the creation of a minimum viable product (MVP), a bare-bones 

version with limited critical features to seek customer feedback. The MVP is then continually refined by testing 

assumptions against customer feedback and incorporating the results in the next version.

Stories From the Field: 

Design Thinking in Education with Design EDU 

Alex Hernandez is a partner at the Charter School Growth Fund where he leads the fund’s 

“Next Generation” Charter Management Organization investments 

"Many of us entered the field of education to change kids’ lives, and the lucky among us can name former 

students for whom we made a real difference. What’s hard about innovation in education? Changing our 

teaching practices. Changing our schools. Changing our beliefs about what is possible for children. We 

launched Design EDU because we meet so many educators who believe that “betterness” in education is 

possible and crave a community to support their ideas for innovation. We help educators use design thinking 

to bring their ideas to life.

Design thinking is a problem-solving approach—not a silver bullet—used in many industries to come up with 

creative approaches and solutions to problems. In a nutshell, spend a ton of time getting to know your end 

users (in education, students and families), identify a problem worth solving, rapidly test potential solutions, 

gather feedback, and keep doubling-down on what’s working.

Innovators who relentlessly focus on people’s needs find themselves in unexpected places. When thinking 

about people’s need to travel more efficiently and more quickly, Henry Ford didn’t try to create a faster horse. 

He built something altogether new that met the need in a way that no one had anticipated. Steve Jobs made 

the iPod because he believed there were better ways for people to listen to music.

In education, there is a growing belief that schools can be more personalized, more creative, more challenging, 

more supportive...just better. We don’t need more committees and strategic plans. We do need to support our 

most innovative educators with a community of like-minded and inspired peers, the tools to bring their ideas 

to life, and the “space” to prototype new ideas and see what kids do with them.

One way we support our educators is through community dinners, where teachers describe an innovation 

they are working on at their school and identify a challenge in that work. A group of peers uses a design 

thinking process to surface different ways to get “unstuck” and keep the innovation going. I love this activity 

because it puts teachers at the center, starts positively with an innovation already under way, and empowers 

the community to help one another. It turns out innovation, inspiration, and community make the business of 

changing lives a little easier." 
27

Rapid Feedback Through Built-in 

Measures of Effectiveness

To iterate on your design, you need to collect good 

data to make sure your app or tool is effective. 

It’s often best to measure knowledge and attitudes 

before and after your app or tool is used. The U.S. 

Department of Education’s Expanding Evidence

report details ways of documenting evidence of 

the effectiveness of digital learning tools. One 

example is built-in A/B tests (or short-cycle 

efficacy trials) in which one set of users tries one 

version of the app and another set tries another, 

and you compare the two groups to see which had better outcomes on a specific task. These built-in A/B tests 

for educational effectiveness can help optimize product impacts on behaviors internal to the product (e.g., 

number of items attempted or percentage correct on embedded assessments), but at some point developers 

need to find out whether they are also optimizing against the external measures that are valued in education 

(such as standardized tests, course completion and mastery of learning). Several platforms for education are 

testing these approaches with regional ed tech innovation hubs, as described in this EdWeek article on efficacy 

trials for personalized learning. Short feedback cycles can help you test such questions as “What are our criteria 

for going on to the next level?” or “Do we need interactive or static diagrams?”

Demonstrate the benefits of your app or tool 

by showing it has an effect on an outcome that 

matters to schools. If you are asking a school 

to use your creation for a significant amount of 

instructional time, you will need evidence that 

it works before many schools will take such a 

risk. Demonstrating that your app or tool has 

an effect on student learning, engagement, 

struggling learners, minority subgroups, or 

other variables that schools are evaluated on 

and receive funding for will make a school 

much more likely to try your tool. 

Some developers make the mistake of assuming 

that time spent using their app or tool is 

evidence that students are learning rather than 

actually measuring student learning. If finding 

and building in measures of learning outcomes 

are not prioritized early, developers can slip 

into poor design choices because the feedback 

they use to measure success isn’t about 

learning. In contrast, well-conceived, targeted 

data collection strategies make it possible to 

Design-Based Research

Design-based research is an approach that bridges 

theory and practice in educational research. Ideas 

are designed, implemented, and evaluated in 

iterative cycles, where new ideas are identified 

and evaluated with each cycle. This approach 

requires collaboration with educational researchers 

throughout the design process and can be highly 

beneficial for creating an effective solution. 

Tip: Let Students Break It 

Incorporation of student feedback is imperative to the 

design of a new tool or app. Student input helps avoid 

building with inaccurate assumptions and instead 

uses relevant knowledge and experience to drive your 

designs. The quality of the feedback you gather is also 

critical. For feedback to be truly valuable, you need 

to give students the opportunity to explore whatever 

you’ve created in depth. Avoid feedback gathered from 

a limited experience designed to be "indicative of the 

larger experience," and avoid asking questions with 

simple yes or no answers.

Dig deeper, and let students explore. Allow students 

to be brutally honest about what you’ve developed and 

allow them to analyze their experience using it. Let 

them find loopholes and shortcuts or tell you what's 

fun and what is boring. Listen to their feedback as they 

go. If they are not engaged or satisfied when you let 

them loose with what you’ve got now, they will not be 

engaged or satisfied when they must use it for class later. 
28

Stories From the Field: Getting Student Feedback 

Dr. Alice Wilder is an Educational Psychologist, Television Producer, Writer of Blue’s Clues, 

Super WHY!, and co-creator of Think It Ink It Publishing. Her innovative approach to 

research with children is cited in Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point. 

"Using technology to learn, children can become immersed in what feels like play but is in fact a powerful and 

often personalized learning experience. Consider a well-designed digital story for preschoolers. A tablet can 

take the story beyond static images and words on a page. Text highlighting, animation, and narrative prompts 

help bring stories to life in ways impossible with print books.

My philosophy for developing high-quality content for children is that the only way to know what kids like, 

what they understand, what challenges them, and what they learn from is to ask them. This has been a 

fundamental part of my research process in developing Blue’s Clues, Super WHY!, and now Speakaboos. We 

take a similar approach when considering the benefits and drawbacks of learning from technology: by asking 

students and teachers.

This process, known as “formative research,” involves testing every piece of content many times during 

development. After each content assessment, formative researchers provide the creators, producers, writers, 

and directors with direct feedback from kids. Based on that feedback, the mission and goals of the content, the 

mission of the writer, and learning theory, our team improves the content. We involve our target audience in 

the development because ultimately the product is for them, and the insights that they give us along the way 

make a huge difference in the end product.

We also engage an outside evaluator to conduct summative research on our content. In each and every 

instance in which we have had this opportunity, we have seen great success. Talking and listening to kids 

who are your target audience is the best and most joyful way to make effective learning environments. When 

learning is comprehensible, interactive, and engaging, then kids want to learn. And they will offer amazing 

ideas that will enhance your lessons, offer new additional ideas, and make teaching and learning more fun."

measure effects such as long-term retention and 

preparation for future learning.

Depending on what your app or tool does, you 

will need to determine the best way to measure 

effectiveness. If you are trying to improve learning 

in academic subjects, in addition to demonstrating 

that you are aligned with relevant college and 

career ready standards, the tests, quizzes, and 

checks for understanding you provide must be 

validated against the measures educators care 

about: their own classroom assessments as well as 

standardized tests. If you are looking to support 

non-cognitive factors such as grit, persistence, and 

Students test games at White House Education Game Jam
29

Design Thinking as a Design Process

Stanford d.school teaches Design Thinking a Design Process. Essentially, Stanford advocates that Design 

Thinking is creating a more desirable future and a process to take action when faced with a difficult 

challenge, a creative optimism well-needed in education. Classrooms and schools across the world are 

facing design challenges every single day—the challenges educators are confronted with are real, complex, 

and varied. And as such, they require new mindsets, new tools, and new approaches. Here are steps in the 

Stanford d.school Design Thinking Process:

Step 1: Empathy = Really get to know your user 

Use human-centered design process, which puts the user squarely at the center of the process. When designing, you 

start with identifying who you want to design for (your user) and really get to know them. 

3 ways to get to know our user:

• Observation (what we observe them doing, in the environment we want to design for as well as in other 

similar and different environments, so we really get to know how they live and work, what they value, etc., 

and can use that to help us design solutions to problems that matter to them in ways that work for them)

• Immersion (we walk in our users’ shoes, until we can experience firsthand the challenges they face that 

can inform our design)

• Interviews (we listen to their stories to hear how they experience the challenges and opportunities they 

face, we focus on feelings in addition to facts, and we listen beyond what we hear directly). 

Don’t make average products for average people. If your users have a name and you’ve walked in their shoes, you 

can both design for them as well as get their feedback along the way. 

Step 2: Define = Define the problem your user is having that you want to solve 

• We always define the problem from the users’ perspective. Solve the problem they actually have, not the one 

you thought they have.

• Reframe. Identify the underlying cause of a problem and solve that. If you only solve for the symptoms but 

don’t understand the true nature of the problem, you are less likely to create solutions that matter. 

• Aim for the Goldilocks Zone. Not too broad. Not too narrow. 

Step 3: Ideate = Open up the solution set

• Ignore feasibility at this stage. An awesome but infeasible idea at this stage may lead you to a breakthrough 

idea you never would have considered. 

• Go for quantity. Like taking pictures, the best way to get a good idea is to generate a lot of ideas.

• Embrace radical collaboration. A wider variety of ideas is generated from diverse minds. Find colleagues in 

different fields, different age groups, with differing perspectives.

• Go for wild ideas. Unleash your creativity.

Step 4: Prototype & Test

• The best way to get feedback on an idea is to watch someone experience your solution. So what can you 

create quickly that someone else can experience...today? 

• Identify an important aspect of your solution, find a way to let someone experience its essence, and observe 

what they do.

Step 5: Iterate

On day 1 your solution is OK at best. By the time you launch, your solution will be AMAZING because it will 

really solve their problem!
30

self-regulation, psychological measures of these traits are necessary. In measuring parental engagement, you 

will need to use before and after measures: How much were parents engaged before using your app or tool, and 

was your tool or app the cause of the increased engagement? You can see that collecting data to make claims 

about impact requires planning and persistence if the outcomes you are trying to affect are not immediate.

Evaluate Impact

Rigorous evaluation takes time and careful thought and often needs to be conducted by a third party to ensure 

credibility. 

To meet the highest standards, researchers will want to identify a comparison group that is not using your 

product but is similar in every way to help them estimate, and isolate, the effect of the use of your app or 

tool from other factors that may also influence the outcome of interest. For example, when researchers ask, 

“What was the impact of a tool on a particular outcome?” what they really mean is, “How did students do after 

participating in learning with the tool relative to how they would have done had they not participated?” Because 

researchers cannot observe how students would have done without the program, they select a set of similar 

control schools and students to use as a proxy. The idea is that if the control schools match the tool-using schools 

(aka, the treatment schools) closely, and if a difference is found in outcomes between tool-using and control 

schools, then that difference can be 

attributed to the tool and not some 

other factor such as school wealth 

or demographic disparities. In 

most cases, the more similar the 

treatment and control schools are, 

the stronger the case that the tool 

or app made the crucial difference. 

Random assignment to create the 

comparison groups is the preferred 

approach but is not always feasible, 

so other matching techniques 

are often used. It is important to 

understand and acknowledge their 

limitations when making claims 

about the impact or effectiveness of 

your app or tool. 

Gauge carefully how much and when to invest or when to partner with an organization to evaluate impact. 

For example, if you expect that students will use your app or tool on their own time, on the bus, at home, and 

it’s free, evaluation could be considered low stakes/low risk. You should still collect data on how it is used 

but will not need to make an airtight case for its educational impact. If you expect that your solution will be 

adopted in the classroom as a regular practice, however, the burden of providing evidence of positive effects is 

substantially higher, and you will need to anticipate a substantial investment in demonstrating effectiveness.

In the latter case, you are entering a complex school ecosystem with a host of conditions and practices that your 

app or tool may be disrupting. These factors can include classroom cultures that teachers have established, the 

Teacher provides feedback to an entrepreneur at an ed tech summit in Baltimore
31

teacher’s role as an information provider and assessor, and norms for technology use. If you are trying to alter 

standard education practice, you may find that your solution morphs when implemented in the current system 

because of the momentum of existing practice pushing against the changes you envision.

Developing technology innovations using effectiveness research studies is often very challenging for developers 

because the studies generally take a long time to complete. By the time a large randomized controlled trial 

(RCT) is complete and reported, the technology is likely to have been updated multiples times. To move 

to the market more quickly, short-cycle efficacy trials can provide a research feedback loop with minimal 

development delays.

It may take some give and take for teachers and school officials to figure out how to adapt your app or tool 

to their specific needs and conditions. If you’re interested in educational theories about how teachers adopt 

technology, look into this explanation of TPACK (technological pedagogical content knowledge) or SAMR

(substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition), which help teachers think about their levels of 

technology adoption. 

Once you have a successful instance of seamless adoption and demonstrated impact, convincing users becomes 

much easier. 

Ensuring Privacy and Protecting Student Data

While this guide will introduce the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and other federal 

laws, keep in mind that FERPA is a floor for privacy protection, and many states have enacted more restrictive 

student privacy rules. It is best to assume that the student information you collect in your app is statutorily 

confidential, unless it is de-identified, and to build privacy and data security features into your app. The last 

thing any developer wants is for your privacy practices to spark a controversy in school districts that use your 

product. 

Be Transparent

As a start, you should minimize the data your product collects by asking which data points are absolutely 

necessary. For those that make the cut, prepare a rationale for the inclusion of each data point so that you can 

make your case to educators and families. Rather than waiting for questions or potential criticism of your data 

collection, be transparent with schools and families about what you are doing with student data, why the data 

have educational value, and what safeguards are in place to protect the data. You can post this information 

on your website, as well as write your terms of service agreements in plain language. Your public information 

should outline how your product aligns with state and local privacy statutes, as well as the federal statutes 

outlined below. In preparing your terms of service, you might consider the Model Terms of Service guidance 

issued by the U.S. Department of Education. 

Student Data and Privacy

While not every app or tool aimed at schools is intended for student use, many learning apps do rely on the use 

of student data in one form or another. Ed tech developers must be aware of how data privacy, confidentiality, 

and security practices affect students; privacy laws and best practices exist to keep children safe while using 
32

innovative technology services. It is critical that software developers understand these laws and practices and 

implement appropriate safeguards for student data. Not considering them is irresponsible and in some cases 

illegal. 

FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) gives parents the right to access and seek to amend 

their children’s education records as well as protects personally identifiable information in education records. 

These parental rights transfer to the student when the student turns 18 years old or attends a postsecondary 

institution at any age. (Students to whom FERPA rights have transferred are termed “eligible students.”) 

FERPA generally requires that prior written consent of parents or eligible students be obtained before schools 

can share personally identifiable information from a student’s education records unless an exception applies.

If your product is being used in a school, you should review PTAC's Protecting Student Privacy While Using 

Online Educational Services: Requirements and Best Practices for guidance regarding legal requirements and 

best practices. 

It is important to note that schools and teachers that use apps with a “click wrap” terms of service agreement 

must still comply with FERPA. Schools that use apps will almost always be contracting with app developers 

using the school official exception, meaning that the developer can only use the student education records in 

accord with their arrangement with the school – and the school has to have a “legitimate educational interest” 

in entering into the arrangement. Marketing unrelated products to students and parents is not a legitimate 

educational interest.

App developers should explore whether using de-identified data for research and product development is a 

possibility, as de-identified data is not covered by FERPA. Keep in mind, however, that it can be challenging 

to truly de-identify student data, and de-identification typically will require removing the school code, as well 

as name, date of birth, and other more obvious identifiers. More details can be found at the U.S. Department 

of Education FERPA website.

COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) governs online collection of personal information 

from children under age 13. For example, before an app can collect any information from students under 

13, “verifiable parental consent” is required. The 

Federal Trade Commission, which enforces COPPA, 

has said that school officials can act in the capacity 

of a parent to provide consent to sign students up for 

online educational programs at school. The general 

guidance is that software companies are allowed 

to track students within their program, but COPPA 

prevents them from tracking those students across 

the Internet. More details can be found on the FTC’s 

COPPA compliance FAQs.

CIPA (the Children's Internet Protection Act)

imposes several requirements on schools or libraries 

that receive E-rate discounts for Internet access. 

Schools and libraries must certify that they have 

an Internet safety policy that includes technology 

protection measures. These protection measures must 

Tip: Privacy Support

The U.S. Department of Education has 

established a Privacy Technical Assistance 

Center (PTAC) website as a one-stop resource 

for education stakeholders to learn about data 

privacy, confidentiality, and security practices 

related to student-level longitudinal data 

systems and other uses of student data. PTAC 

provides information and up-to-date guidance 

on privacy, confidentiality, and security 

practices through a variety of resources. Do not 

hesitate to contact PTAC.
33

block or filter Internet access to pictures that are obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors, and schools 

must also monitor the online activities of minors. 

Because most schools receive E-rate funds, they are required to educate their students about appropriate online 

behavior, including on social networking websites and in chat rooms, and to build cyberbullying awareness. 

Particularly if your app involves networking among students, keep that in mind and consider ways that you can 

help schools comply. More details caon be found on the Federal Communications Commission’s CIPA FAQs.

PPRA (the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment) is intended to protect the rights of parents and students 

including, but not limited to, requiring that public elementary and secondary schools make instructional 

materials available for parents’ inspection if those materials will be used in connection with a survey, analysis, 

or evaluation funded by the U.S. Department of Education and in which their children will participate. The 

PPRA requires that public elementary and secondary schools obtain parental consent before minor students 

participate in certain types of Department-funded surveys, analyses, or evaluations. The PPRA also requires 

that public elementary and secondary schools provide parents, upon request, a right to review any survey 

created by a third party before the survey is administered or distributed by a school to a student and generally 

requires them to provide notice to parents along with the opportunity to opt their children out of activities 

involving the collection, disclosure, or use of personal information collected from students for the purpose of 

marketing or for selling that information (or otherwise providing that information to others for that purpose). 

More details can be found at the Department's PPRA website.

Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) also provides confidentiality protections, and will often 

additionally protect information for students with disabilities. 

Special Considerations for Research

In some cases, you may need to collect personally identifiable information (PII) in order to conduct research on 

your app or service. If your research involves human subjects (students, teachers, parents, or administrators, 

etc.), you should acquaint yourself with the rules for consent. The Department’s regulations can be found at 

34 CFR Part 97. 

For more guidance on using human subjects in research, see Protection of Human Subjects in Research from the 

U.S. Department of Education.
34

3

Networking and Funding

Even the best ideas benefit from the vetting and support of experienced people who can contribute advice, 

expertise, and early financial resources until you achieve self-sufficiency. This section describes how to find 

people who can help you shape your idea, reach your target audience, and create a sustainable model to 

support the work you want to accomplish.

Finding Like-Minded People 

Community is essential to ed tech entrepreneurs for idea sharing, funding opportunities, and scaling. Several 

organizations are creating thriving communities committed to harnessing the power of the technology to 

transform the way students and lifelong learners achieve their educational goals. You can find them via 

meetups, hackathons, startup weekends, social networks, and (un)conferences. 

Education hackathons are education-related developer events often organized by co-working spaces or 

incubators and accelerators. Sometimes universities will also sponsor hackathons through their business or 

education programs. If you can’t find an education hackathon in your region, consider hosting your own 

following the guidelines at edtechhandbook.com.

Education Entrepreneurs Startup Weekends are 54-hour events that bring together educators, entrepreneurs, 

developers, and designers to design and validate an ed tech solution over the course of a weekend. These 

events are a great way to determine if your idea has enough validity for you to continue building. If you 

can’t find a Startup Weekend Education near you, consider organizing your own using guidelines from 

EducationEntrepreneurs.co.

Ed tech meetups, like other meetups, are 

open meetings with a social impact component 

followed by speakers, panelists, etc., who are 

drawn from the local community. Held as often 

as weekly in some cities, ed tech meetups can 

be informal opportunities for educators and 

entrepreneurs to explore topics at the intersection 

of education and technology, to learn about the 

technologies supporting teachers, and to hear 

from teachers about problems in education. 

You can find ed tech meetups in your area by 

searching meetup.com for for keywords like “ed 

EdCamp co-founder Kristen Swanson joins Secretary Arne Duncan 

at an EdCamp at the U.S. Department of Education
35

tech” or “education technology.” If you’re considering organizing your own meetup, you may find the article 

“Bringing the Baltimore Charm to Your Edtech Meetup” helpful. 

EdCamps are designed and driven by educator participants. Collectively the group begins the day by determining 

what they want to discuss and learn from each other and then organizing sessions throughout the day on these topics. 

EdCamps can be great opportunities to learn from educators where they struggle, where their pain points are, and what 

tools they might need. It is important to respect the culture of EdCamps; these events are not sales opportunities but 

rather learning opportunities. The EdCamp Foundation offers suggestions for organizing your own EdCamp.

Unconferences, like EdCamps, are participant-driven professional learning events that reject the format of 

traditional conference and professional development experiences. In typical unconferences, the participants set 

the agenda and topics, and the event includes open time for discussions and collaboration.

Other ways to connect and keep up with ed tech, such as at traditional conferences and on social networks, 

are listed later in this guide.

Ed Tech Incubators and Accelerators

Incubators and accelerators help speed up the process of creating and distributing a tool or service. Both 

provide mentorship and a community workspace for participants. Some support recruiting and developing 

strategic partnerships.. Both typically offer participants reduced-cost services (e.g., cloud web services, legal, 

marketing, graphic design, etc.) through partner companies. However there are also some key differences 

between the two.

Accelerators provide seed funding and media exposure, often to more experienced entrepreneurs. Accelerators 

prepare participants to for a major milestone—usually the ability to attract a large investment round. 

Accelerators take small amounts of equity in return for funding and mentorship. The goal is to scale fast and 

rapidly increase the value of your tool or product over a course of three- to four-months,.

Incubators, on the other hand, bring in an external management team to foster an idea that was developed 

internally. The goal of incubators is to help build a company. Incubators take little or no equity in the company, 

which is an important consideration if your goal is to retain control of your business or prepare to participate 

in an accelerator program. The table that follows shows the general distinctions between incubators and 

accelerators. 

Education-focused incubators and accelerators have sprung up in recent years. EdSurge maintains a list of 

education incubators and accelerators in North America. Developers with a novel idea for solving an education 

problem are often drawn to an incubator or accelerator for quick capital, access to schools, access to investors, 

software development expertise, or experience in the complex world of school distribution. It can be difficult 

to be accepted into an incubator, and being part of one does not guarantee success. Consider your needs and 

speak with startup founders who exited an incubator about their experiences before you join. 
36

Other Funding Opportunities

Once your app or tool is beyond a minimally viable product with a small set of users, you may need additional 

funding to continue to develop it and scale it to serve more users. 

Crowdfunding is a way to raise money by asking 

for small contributions from many supporters, often 

those in your personal network. In return, project 

supporters typically receive early versions of your 

tool or other related items. A modest donation may 

result in a free T-shirt, whereas a more substantial 

donation may result in a free subscription to your 

app or service. Crowdfunding can also be an effective 

way to reach out to potential beta testers. There are a 

Tip: Crowdfunding

A few education developers have been down the 

crowdfunding path and share the good, the bad, 

and the ugly of their experiences on the Education 

Times website. Read about the experiences of 

BrightLoop and Odyssey Initiative. 

Comparison of Incubators and Accelerators 

Incubators Accelerators

Cost of participation Models vary from no cost to to paid 

services (frequently in the ~$3,000 range) 

to services in exchange for equity.

Commonly offer a suite of services in 

exchange for equity (usually 6–8%).

Program funding Likely to be not-for-profit efforts, often 

funded by government, philanthropic 

foundations, or other not-for-profit 

organizations. However, can also be 

for-profit, operated by investors or other 

businesses.

Likely to be for-profit efforts operating 

on models similar to early-stage 

venture capital firms. Most have their 

own investors. Inquire about investor 

relationships or obligations inherited by 

participating in the program.

Length of program Likely to be longer term (often a year or 

more) or offer open-ended participation 

based on milestone achievement.

Programs typically last about 3 months.

Common traits Tend to attract participants that have 

products that are further along in the 

development process. Participation on site 

may not be required. 

Generally perceived as intensive programs, 

and many participants are in the very early 

stage of product development. Participants 

are typically required to be present on site.

Seed funding Generally not offered. Typically provide $15–$25k seed funding, 

and may guarantee additional funding 

upon completion.

When should you 

participate?

If you have schedule constraints that 

prevent the commitment an accelerator 

requires, if you expect your company 

to grow organically and don’t need 

outside investment, or if your idea is not 

sufficiently developed to be accepted 

by an accelerator, you may consider 

participating in an incubator.

If you expect your company to grow 

rapidly and reach high scale in a short 

time—perhaps before you’ve generated 

significant revenue—and/or you will 

outside investor capital to launch, you may 

consider participating in an accelerator 

over an incubators.

Adapted from Heather Gilchrist of Socratic Labs. Used with permission.
37

variety of crowdfunding platforms to choose from, including CrowdTilt, IndieGoGo, and Kickstarter. Each has 

its own style of campaigns and backers, so you’ll have to do some homework to select the one that best fits you 

and your tool. Keep in mind that the models are often all or nothing, so if you don’t meet your funding goal, 

you might walk away empty-handed. You can also check out CrowdsUnite, a review site for crowdfunding 

platforms. 

Grants and innovation funds can also be resources for development or testing in the field. Although the 

application process is more involved than crowdfunding, grants can offer a chance to work more formally 

with new partners (such as research institutions or school districts). Here are a few examples of government 

innovation programs and foundations: 

• The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program is a federal initiative that “enables small 

businesses to explore their technological potential and provides the incentive to profit from its 

commercialization” (as described on the SBIR website). Through SBIR, 11 federal agencies, including 

the Department of Education, fund R&D projects that stimulate technological innovation, address 

national needs, and strengthen small businesses. The Department's SBIR program provides $7.5 million 

a year to develop and evaluate commercially viable education technology products to improve student 

learning and teacher instruction. Examples of companies funded by SBIR include Filament Games, 

Sokikom, Teachley, Triad Interactive Media, Fluidity Software, and Zaption, to name a few. See this 

Education Week article and the ED SBIR website for a deeper look. You can also explore some of the 

many games SBIR has funded in this playlist.

• Challenge.gov is a government portal that shows opportunities from across government agencies where 

new solutions for education are needed. Challenge.gov links innovators with funding opportunities to 

promote innovation as well as increased capital formation in the field. 

• The U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) program has funded 92 projects 

seeking to provide innovative solutions to common education challenges. Funding for innovative uses 

of technology can also come from the federal Race to the Top District Competitions. 

• The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences research grants provide awards 

for $1.5 million or more for technology development, and up to $3 million in efficacy evaluations 

of education technology across many content areas. Awardees are typically academic researchers, 

but startup developers are eligible to apply and have won awards in recent years. You may consider 

partnering with an academic researcher to strengthen your application. 

• The Foundation Center’s Foundation Directory can be a source for connecting your product and team 

to organizations with a similar interest in solving the education problems you’re solving.

• Local foundations may invest in underserved schools in their area with ed tech solutions that target 

critical needs that align with the foundations’ mission. This can provide more mature products with 

important exposure in schools.

Angel investors are good to connect with when you want to raise private capital to build your startup (angel 

investors can include friends and family). AngelList offers the most comprehensive platform for researching 

and connecting with angel investors. There are also angel networks that focus on social impact investing, such 

as Investors’ Circle. In general, early angels will come from your personal network. 
38

Venture capitalists and institutional investors have been eager to join the ed tech trend in the past few years. 

NewSchools Venture Fund compiled information on “Who's Funding K-12 EdTech?” and posted the article “A 

Closer Look at K12 Ed Tech Venture Funding in 2013” detailing recent ed tech funding. In addition, EdSurge 

maintains a list of investors interested in ed tech.

While you should raise as much money as your company needs to achieve major proof-points/milestones, 

overfunding a company too soon can also have its own risks. More investment money leads to more investment 

terms and complexities for founders, issues in receiving future funding, and a risk of misappropriating funding 

early on. The rules around a venture captial (VC) investment are usually a little more complex, and large 

portions of equity and control can be taken by the firm. Consider lower risk sources of funding such as angel 

investments, crowdfunding, and the lowest possible, private and public sector seed grants.

Moving a product to scale once it has shown traction in the marketplace requires significant capital to keep the 

business growing, to strengthen marketing and outreach plans, and to further strengthen the technology so that it 

is sufficiently robust to be used by the masses. During this phase, many developers seek venture capital or angel 

investments in exchange for a portion of the rights to their technology to cover the costs associated with further 

developing it to fit the needs of individual schools and to handle larger volumes of users and data.

While there are many resources for learning how to move your idea from inception to distribution, two places 

to start are the set of insider tips on the edtechhandbook.com website by experienced entrepreneurs Michael 

Staton and Mick Hewitt and this EdSurge article from the founders of Wikispaces giving their perspective on 

the fundamental principles that are needed to succeed in educational technology.

Words of Advice 

Matt Greenfield is a managing partner at Rethink Education, which seeks to invest in progressive growthstage companies that are at the forefront of the education technology industry and have the ability to 

make positive impacts in communities. 

"Your goal should not be to start a company: Your goal should be to solve a problem.

Find a problem about which you are passionate. Ask yourself: Does the world need your company? Does the 

world need your software? Do I really believe deeply in meeting this need? What feels urgent? Who am I really 

selling this to?

Do your research: Is someone else already in that space? What do I really understand about education—how 

do teachers work, how do schools spend money, and what is really effective? Can I imagine—clearly see—a 

transformation or a fundamental shift in this space? 

Question your assumptions. Do you need to start a company, or should you work for one that’s already out there? 

Or maybe join, or start, a nonprofit. 

If you choose the startup route, be prepared for the long haul and possible disappointment. Be a zealot on a 

crusade. That is the only way to survive the journey."
39

4Inside a Typical School District 

School districts (also known as local education agencies, or LEAs, which oversee schools within a defined region), 

state departments of education (state education agencies, SEAs), and the U.S. Department of Education also 

have distinct roles and responsibilities in K–12 education. This section lays out a few basics on their respective 

roles, school funding, staff, and infrastructure elements as they concern ed tech. For a more comprehensive 

look at the public school ecosystem, see A Public Education Primer: Basic (and Sometimes Surprising) Facts 

about the U.S. Education System by the Center for Education Policy.

Federal, State, and District Responsibilities 

The federal government plays a role in K–12 education through the enforcement of civil rights protections in the 

Constitution and federal laws prohibiting discrimination against and ensuring equal educational opportunities 

for all students regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability. In terms of influence on a school, 

outside of civil rights enforcement, the federal level has the most indirect role, primarily leveraging a series of 

grant programs to encourage states and districts to raise academic standards and provide equitable opportunities 

for all students. For example, states and districts that receive specific federal funding must provide additional 

educational services to low-achieving children in low-income schools. States receiving federal funding must 

ensure that teachers are highly qualified, set academic content and student achievement standards for what 

students should know and be able to do at each grade, and must test nearly all students in grades 3–8 and once 

in high school. 

States and school districts determine how to implement federal requirements through decisions at state 

departments of education or school districts. Generally, states set requirements for compulsory schooling, 

attendance, and graduation policies, and these vary by state. Whether decisions are made at the state or district 

level also varies by state. So-called “local control states”—defined by EdGlossary.org—delegate most decision 

making to LEAs. The states set standards for what students must know and be able to do; some states also 

create a curriculum corresponding to the standards, whereas others leave that task to districts. Some states 

approve textbooks; in others, districts make their own textbook decisions. States have the authority to hold 

schools and districts accountable for students’ academic progress. Generally, states have the responsibility to 

set teacher preparation and certification requirements, and districts handle staff hiring and compensation. 

District Funding Sources and Budgets

District funding also varies by state. To understand how a school could purchase an app or tool—for example, as 

part of a technology upgrade or a program to serve a special student population—it’s important to understand 

how districts operate and how they are funded. 
40

K–12 education funding, on average, comes from state funds (47%), local community funds (43%), federal funds 

(9%), and private funds (less than 1%, competitive grants and donations). State and local funding for education 

is usually raised through taxes and bonds. However, some districts have taxing authority, some have bonding 

authority, and some have neither. LEAs administer these funds for local public schools within their boundaries. 

School budgets are influenced by the source of funds (federal, state, or local), and the exact details of school 

funding and budgets vary across the approximately 14,000 school districts in the United States (the most current 

statistics on district numbers can be found on the National Center for Education Statistics website). Charter 

schools, an alternative type of public school that is often subject to fewer state and local requirements, are often 

funded via the same mechanisms as other public schools, receiving funding based on the number and/or type 

of students they serve. Just the basics are sketched here; for more information on school budgets and funding, 

see this 2012 PDF report, School Budgets 101, from the American Association of School Administrators as well 

as Money Matters: A Primer on K–12 School Funding from the Center for Public Education. For state-by-state 

public school financing, you’ll have to search for information for each state. For example, in 2013 California 

enacted sweeping changes to K–12 funding called the Local Control Funding Formula, which necessitated 

changes in the way schools think about budgets based on student needs. The website for the California-based 

organization EdSource describes the changes in their article, “A New K-12 Funding System Demands New 

Thinking in Building Local Budgets,”

Facts About School Budgets

• Where does the money go? The Center for Public Education (in Money Matters: A Primer on 

K–12 School Funding) states that, in general, money goes to instruction (66%), operations (17.8%), 

administration (11%), and student support services (5.2%). Most of instruction funding goes to staffing, 

leaving 9% for supplies and services.

• How are long-term purchases handled? Public school districts face pressure to use all their funding in a 

given fiscal year and generally cannot save funds over time as a way to afford larger one-time expenses. 

Funds left over can make a school’s budget seem excessive when each year’s budget is supposed to pay 

expenses for only one year.

• What is the budget timeline? Many LEAs operate on a budget period of July 1–June 30, so a typical 

budget process would begin in the fall to evaluate existing programs and set program priorities for the 

next year. By midwinter, LEAs would integrate the estimated costs of new initiatives, anticipated savings, 

and any cost adjustments into a preliminary budget. Meanwhile, the state budget is submitted, and 

districts can make their projections. In the spring, district budgets are adopted only after final review 

and public hearings, while concurrently the state budget is signed into law and funds become available 

to districts for the upcoming school year. District budget decisions are typically proposed by district 

administrators and approved by the school boards. Many larger districts must first present to a school 

board committee before presenting to the full board. Some district decisions must be approved by an 

additional level of government, such as city councils, which can extend timelines.
41

Federal Funding - Elementary and 

Secondary Education Act

The primary source of federal K–12 support began 

in 1965 with the enactment of the Elementary and 

Secondary Education Act (ESEA). (In 2002, ESEA 

was reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act, 

NCLB). ESEA provides funding, primarily to state and 

local educational agencies, through a wide variety 

of programs to support services for disadvantaged 

students, e.g., low- income students, English 

learners, or migrant students, with the general goal 

of improving academic achievement for all students. 

Although federal funding is a small overall percentage, 

it represents important monies for LEAs, and federal 

funding—for special purposes and populations—

cannot be repurposed to cover other expenses. 

Competitive Funding: Innovation Funds

Multiple initiatives at the federal, state, and private foundation levels seek to support innovative education 

reform. These programs typically award short-term funding (12–60 months) to organizations that qualify for it.

EXAMPLES OF FEDERAL INNOVATION FUNDS 

• Race to the Top is a U.S. Department of Education competitive grant program designed to encourage 

and reward states and districts creating the conditions for education innovation and reform.

• The Investing in Innovation (i3) Program at the U.S. Department of Education has funded 92 projects 

seeking to provide innovative solutions to common education challenges.

EXAMPLES OF STATE INNOVATION FUNDS

• The New York School Innovation Fund awards grants to partnerships committed to the rigorous work 

required to redesign and turn schools around into high-performing, high-quality organizations.

• Wyoming Trust Fund For Innovative Education Grants supports innovative educational ideas leading 

to the improvement of public education. 

• The Rhode Island Model School Grant (supported by Race to the Top, 2012) was a competitive grant 

process that awarded $470,000 to an elementary school in Rhode Island with a powerful blended 

learning vision and strong implementation partnerships.

• The Maryland Digital Learning Innovation Fund is designed to help local school systems maximize 

new and emerging technologies to improve the teaching and learning, as well as to better prepare all 

students for the careers of the future. These grants have awarded a total of $3 to $5 million each year.

Tip

For detailed information on No Child Left Behind 

and title grants, download the 2009 PDF report 

NCLB: Targeting and Uses of Federal Education 

Funds from the U.S. Department of Education 

on guidance for state and local implementation 

of NCLB. For clarification on how federal funds 

can be used to support technology, such as 

professional development for teachers, collecting 

and analyzing educational data, and using 

technology to communicate with parents, see the 

2013 Use of Federal Funds Dear Colleague Letter

(PDF) from the U.S. Department of Education’s 

Office of Educational Technology. This letter 

clarifies acceptable uses for federal education 

funds in transitioning to digital learning.
42

Key People

Schools are complex organizations with longstanding practices. Understanding how people are 

organized will help you make sure you are engaging 

the right decision makers. Generally, districts (and 

larger schools) will have several departments 

focused on special areas, such as curriculum and 

instruction, English learners, special education, and 

IT/technology. The director of curriculum, working 

under the direction of and in collaboration with the 

superintendent and the school board, determines the 

academic strategy and implements the goals for the 

district, including digital learning approaches. Each 

department can have a say in how technology is used 

to meet its goals and can influence how funding is 

allocated to apps and tools. If the school receives 

federal Title I funding for disadvantaged students, 

it may have a Title I director who oversees the 

turnaround approach for the school, and most schools also have a director of special education who manages 

the federal funds for students with disabilities.

Schools rarely make funding decisions; districts allocate resources across schools to ensure uniformity of 

curriculum and instruction. Other times, schools are granted greater fiscal autonomy as they meet various 

performance thresholds. However, movements are under way to give principals greater authority to spend 

resources to meet specific needs, particularly for schools identified as persistently low performing. 

Because of smaller size, greater flexibility, and site-based management, charter schools represent a more 

local staff-based approach to fiscal decision making than district schools. Generally, charter teachers have 

more input in allocating instructional resources. In some cases, individual teachers also have small budgets to 

purchase materials to meet the needs of specific students.

Regardless of whether a school is a traditional public or a charter school, the general theme for all schoolbased educators—from principal to kindergarten teacher—is busy! Educators have many demands placed on 

them and limited time to juggle a host of responsibilities. Most likely, the teacher you’re talking to or the 

principal you’re calling is forgoing lunch or a trip to the bathroom to have a conversation with you. Keep your 

interactions short and focused, and recognize how valuable their time is. 

School leaders. Traditionally, the term “school leaders” refers to the principal and assistant principals. The 

principal has the primary responsibility for shaping a vision for academic success and managing the school. 

(For research on the role of principals, see the Wallace Foundation report: The School Principal as Leader.) 

Assistant principals may have a variety of roles from handling discipline to managing relationships with 

parents, to overseeing teacher performance. However, there are many school leaders in addition to principals 

and their assistants. College and career counselors, reading specialists, lead teachers, instructional coaches, 

etc., are also school leaders. In addition, many times technology coaches and teachers most comfortable using 

technology are involved in making decisions about what tools and apps will be used in a school. When working 

Teachers as 

Purchasers 

Grassroots efforts are under way to empower 

teachers as fiscal decision makers. This 

movement is in its infancy, but as innovative and 

relatively inexpensive apps and tools become 

available, many educators hope the tension 

between bureaucratic procurement policies and 

teacher demands will be addressed. Some notable 

teacher purchasing projects are the experimental 

Teacher Wallets project and a platform called 

Donors Choose on which teachers can post 

technology and other requests for funding 

through crowdsourced donations.
43

with schools, it is helpful to identify which school leader is responsible for the problem your app or tool is 

intended to solve. 

School leaders often spend much of their day in classrooms observing teachers and providing instructional 

coaching. If your app or tool is intended for use by school leaders, remember that their jobs are becoming 

increasingly mobile and require access to data and information in any location in the building.

Teachers and instructional specialists. Educators who work directly with students have advanced degrees 

or certifications in their specialty area and teach multiple subjects for elementary and possibly fewer subjects 

in middle and high school. In elementary school, teachers often collaborate at a grade level, whereas in 

later grades, the collaboration may be more department based. Increasingly, school librarians and media 

specialists are serving as points of contact for technology acquisition, evaluation, and implementation. Even 

in schools where this is not their formal role, new technologies can eventually fall under their purview. When 

approaching schools and districts, make sure your messaging speaks to and acknowledges all parties. For more 

information about the daily lives of teachers, check out these websites from the Carnegie Foundation, Inside 

Teaching and the Gallery of Teaching and Learning.)

Not all teachers are early adopters of new technology, but those who are can be helpful to someone developing 

a new app or tool for classroom use. Sometimes early adopters can be found on teaching- or technologyoriented committees, and they are also often the experts other teachers go to for technology-related questions. 

If you can get an early adopter excited about your app or tool, that educator has the potential to get other 

teachers in his or her larger network as well as the 

school administration excited about it as well. 

Home and family. Although some apps may be 

intended for use only in a formal school environment, 

many are targeted to parents for their children to 

use outside school. Traditional uses like test prep, 

tutoring, and homework help remain attractive to 

families, and more families are also using apps for 

mobile devices like math apps, e-books, and learning 

games, especially those apps that are engaging 

and demonstrate that they can help children learn. 

Many companies that provide schools with learning 

technologies also include capabilities for use at 

home or Internet-enabled locations such as libraries 

(keeping in mind that not all families have access to 

high-speed Internet at home). There are also good 

side-by-side apps designed for family members to 

use with their children. Even if your app is designed 

for use at school, it is important to consider ways 

to share student progress with adults in the home. 

For an example, see the case study School Districts 

Use Mobile Apps to Engage Parents that describes 

how a district built a mobile app to push student 

information to families’ phones. 

Maker Movement 

Some parents are eager to involve their children 

in hands-on media or maker projects. Making 

has become the umbrella term for the events, 

local community spaces, and online communities 

dedicated to the design and manufacturing of 

objects and installations using such tools as 3-D 

printing and metal- and woodworking. Parents 

may have been to a regional MakerFaire where 

makers gather to showcase their creations. An 

example of an organization leading this charge is 

the Maker Education Initiative. 

The maker movement is supported by technology 

in many ways including engineering, robotics, 

and fab labs. Sites like DIY.org and Makezine.

com are promoting coding, making, design, and 

media creation. Simple kits and applications are 

becoming more accessible for students of all ages, 

and developers should be aware that a growing 

number of parents are excited about doing these 

activities at home and supporting them in school.
44

Students. While students are in a group of their own 

and may not typically purchase ed tech apps and tools 

with their own money, their influence on the ed tech 

market should not be discounted as they are the users 

most developers have in mind. Many students take 

personal devices to and from school (for example, 

THE Journal reports high use of smartphone use in 

Advanced Placement and writing courses), and some 

districts are adopting BYOD (bring your own device) 

policies, as reported in this 2013 Wired article, The 

Future of Education: BYOD in the Classroom. Some 

students, particularly guided by a family member 

and/or teacher, are also looking for mobile apps to 

learn with on their personal devices or websites to 

help with formal coursework or informal learning. 

Remember that, while a teacher or family member 

may judge an app solely on its academic credibility, 

students must have a seamless, effective, and 

engaging experience if they are actually going to use 

the app to its full potential. 

Technology 

Infrastructure

Many schools are now gaining access to and building 

good technology infrastructures and the technical 

support to keep them running smoothly. Still, you 

may encounter schools that have a patchwork 

solution run by part-time personnel who wear 

multiple hats. It is a challenging environment for introducing new ideas and approaches; developers who are 

used to targeting the latest smartphones and who assume continuous, ubiquitous connectivity sometimes are 

surprised to see some schools’ technology limitations. Conducting research up front can help you design a 

solution that is robust enough to work in multiple environments and save effort you might put into a solution 

that requires infrastructure that not all schools have. Build toward access by users with all sorts of capabilities 

and away from the assumption that they will have fast connectivity and devices.

Schools use a variety of devices (such as tablets and laptops) to connect to the Internet, and some also have 

a BYOD policy. This means that apps and tools must run on many platforms, including older operating 

system versions. When introducing your product to potential users, include documentation of all the possible 

interoperability (sending and receiving data) you bring to the table, system requirements, external sites and 

platforms schools will need to whitelist, and your ability to personalize a product to meet specific needs. 

President Obama set the goal for 99% of students to have access to broadband Internet and devices by 2018 

through the ConnectED Initiative. This presents a great opportunity for ed tech developers to help schools gain 

Digital Citizenship

Our lives have transitioned into an immensely 

digital world of learning where one-to-one (1:1) 

initiatives and bring your own device (BYOD) 

policies are growing rapidly. Consequently, there is 

an increasing need to spread the conversation about 

the responsibility that students, teachers, parents 

and technology leaders have in the digital space. So 

what exactly is digital citizenship? Digital citizenship 

establishes a set of norms and practices regarding 

appropriate and responsible technology use. Digital 

citizenship requires a whole-community approach to 

thinking critically, behaving safely, and participating 

responsibly online. Bringing national attention to this 

topic, organizations such as Common Sense Media, 

a media and technology awareness organization, in 

conjunction with Connected Educators hosts "Digital 

Citizenship Week" to empower students, engage 

families, and connect teachers. Leading the charge 

in the classroom, Common Sense Media is quickly 

spreading its K-12 Digital Literacy & Citizenship 

Curriculum, which addresses digital literacy and 

citizenship topics in an age-appropriate way. 

Common Sense Media simplifies the user experience 

by allowing students, teachers, and parents to 

browse by grade band or click a specific category to 

highlight the lessons that address a specific topic.
45

access to the same kinds of web-based apps and tools that businesses and consumers have come to expect. Still, 

at present a school’s Internet access may not be the same as your office’s, so it’s important to make apps and tools 

that are robust despite less than ideal bandwidth or slowdowns at peak times throughout the day when usage 

overloads capacity. The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) recommends that schools 

and districts meet minimum bandwidth goals (see below). Several public, private, and nonprofit organizations 

are working to help schools reach and exceed these goals. The Federal Communications Commission is in 

the process of modernizing its long-standing E-rate program as part of this effort, providing billions more 

dollars to schools and libraries throughout the country to support their implementation of broadband and 

wireless technology. While only an estimated 20–30% of U.S. schools now have reliable broadband service to 

the classroom, these efforts should begin to have a noticeable impact in the near future. To learn more about 

what schools and district leaders can do to meet ConnectED technology infrastructure goals, see Future Ready 

Schools: Building Technology Infrastructure for Learning. 

Testing Your Product in Schools

Developers aim to build apps that work for the greatest number of users, and schools are especially diverse 

in their infrastructure, organization, staffing, and purchasing. For example, some schools run throughout the 

summer and others take a break. Some school districts classify sixth grade as an elementary grade and some 

roll it into middle school. Some school filters block video streaming and social media sites and others don’t. 

The list goes on. This variability is a major challenge, and you may need to limit your initial implementation 

to specific schools so you can concentrate your resources on core features before adapting to the variations you 

are sure to encounter. Once you prove that your solution works in one context, however, you won’t be able to 

scale effectively without addressing additional settings and constraints. 

Testing an educational app or tool in a school requires coordination with the school administrator and teachers, 

and it can take some convincing to let teachers take valuable class time for a new app. It can be easier to ask 

teachers or administrators to test an app that is intended for their own use because then they don’t feel they are 

spending precious student learning time on something unproven. Working with an early adopter educator or codesigning with teachers from the school where you want to test the app or tool can help.

Recommended Bandwidth for U.S. Schools

Broadband Access for Teaching, 

Learning, and School Operations

2014–15 School Year Target 2017–18 School Year Target

External Internet connection from district 

to Internet service provider (ISP)

At least 100 Mbps/1,000 

students and staff

At least 1 Gbps/1,000 students and 

staff

Internal wide-area network (WAN) from 

district to each school within the district

At least 1 Gbps/1,000 

students and staff

At least 10 Gbps/1,000 students 

and staff

Source: SETDA, The Broadband Imperative, 2012
46

Some organizations are devoted to making product testing in schools easier. Jennie Dougherty’s Beta Classroom

was an early nonprofit organization with an organized and systematic approach to teacher beta testing. EdSurge 

recently started to bring more educator voices to the table through its EdSurge Tech for Schools Summits, but 

note that these events involve bringing teachers to a centralized location to share apps and tools rather than 

putting products in the classroom. In Rhode Island, the Highlander Institute has made inroads with public, 

private, and charter districts, and it leverages these connections to get ed tech products into more schools 

and classrooms. Chicago’s LEAP Innovations program is similarly working on connecting schools and ed tech 

companies through its LEAP Pilot Network, as is the Learning Innovation Hub (iHub) in Silicon Valley. EdTech 

Maryland is laying the groundwork for short-cycle efficacy trials as well.

When working in schools or building apps to use on school networks, developers should understand the 

implications of acceptable use policies (AUPs) that districts are developing to address concerns about accessing 

inappropriate materials. These could affect your app or tool because districts may be relaxing policies on 

filtering or blocking of websites at the school or district level. AUPs are important for protecting school systems 

from liability as students and teachers consume and create digital media. CoSN (the Consortium for School 

Networking) created a short guide, Rethinking Acceptable Use Policies to Enable Digital Learning, to help 

schools develop these guidelines, which can involve parents acknowledging that their child agrees to basic care 

and responsibility guidelines and student assent that they agree to follow the rules governing their use of the 

Internet and online conduct. As school device infrastructure has evolved over time, AUPs have also to address 

one or more of typical usage models: (1) shared digital devices that stay in school (for example, laptops on 

carts shared by classrooms), (2) student-owned devices under BYOD programs, and (3) one-to-one devices that 

belong to the school but that students are allowed to take home.

Teacher Support and Training 

Teachers find apps and tools valuable 

only when they know how to leverage 

them effectively. Therefore, your app or 

tool should be designed and user tested 

thoroughly so that teachers can be up and 

running shortly after downloading it. If data 

imports are needed (e.g., to set student levels 

in adaptive software based on benchmark 

tests), don’t assume that a teacher will wait 

for the IT department to do it—make the 

instructions clear and simple to follow.

Not every teacher will be an early adopter, 

and not every teacher will pick up your 

product with a curious willingness to play 

and see what it can do. No matter what you 

build, plan an accompanying professional 

learning component that outlines the basic 

structures, functions, and abilities of your tool. An online training module, space for a community of users 

to collaborate, or co-created collection of suggestions will help more reticent users start to feel at home with 

District leaders learn from each other at the Future Ready Summit in 

Raleigh, NC
47

whatever is new about it. As with all things, remember time for training is time educators aren’t using to do 

something else, so make sure to apply user testing of your training elements as well to make sure they actually 

answer real questions rather than the ones you think teachers will have. As you design training, consider how it 

will be delivered—on site, remotely, blended on site and online, synchronously, asynchronously? Decide who 

will develop the materials and who will conduct the training. Will the trainers be employees, paid consultants, 

or early adopter volunteers? Also, how will you make sure that teachers not only understand your app or tool’s 

features, but also understand and respect the privacy requirement that might be associated with the data your 

product uses and/or generates?

Ideally, your tool will eventually need minimal training on how to get started because the tool’s design will be 

largely self-explanatory.

Beyond training, how will you communicate with teachers and districts and parents who use your app or tool? 

For instance, will a support team be available to answer emails and phone calls? Your ability to communicate 

and work with early adopters may improve the chance for broader adoption from teachers and school districts.
48

5

Getting Apps and Tools to Users 

So you have a great app, but how do you get it in the hands of those who can benefit from it? This section 

provides insight into selection and procurement process.

District/School Procurement

School district procurement practices tend to be lengthy, which can be challenging for new app developers. 

The Smart Series Guide to EdTech Procurement from Digital Learning Now! elaborates on the “12 Rules 

of Smart Ed Tech Procurement.” Aimed at state and district leaders, it offers many key questions for them 

to consider before authorizing a purchase, along with advice on ways to simplify the purchasing process, 

and gives developers insight into what districts care about. “Improving Ed Tech Purchasing Guide” from 

Digital Promise, illuminates the thought process of potential users and highlights the challenges in the often 

complicated process. 

Purchasing Examples

Procurement practices vary by district and state, and they can be cumbersome, especially for larger districts 

(some procurement documents are more than 200 pages). The objectives are to provide fair opportunity 

for companies to compete for public funds, prevent unapproved purchases, and save costs. The following 

hypothetical examples (based on actual districts) are representative of the practices that may be in place in 

districts across the country. When working with a particular district or state, you will need to become familiar 

with its procurement policies and procedures, including requirements that apply to Federal grants.

Large District (> 40,000 students, > 40 schools). Requests to purchase an app are made to the district to the 

purchasing department, which issues purchase orders for approved requests. To ensure fair and competitive 

bidding, district requirements are generally as follows:

• Purchases under $500 require a written quote confirming the price.

• Purchases between $500 and $2,000 require three written quotes from different vendors.

• Purchases between $2,000 and $15,000 require specifications to be sent to the purchasing 

department, which then obtains written quotes. Purchasing departments may not be familiar with 

technology purchases, which can introduce delays. Purchase is submitted to the superintendent for 

approval.

• Purchases over $20,000 go through a formal bid handled by the purchasing department based on 
49

specifications created by the district. Public notice is given (which may not be in the channels where 

an ed tech company would notice), and comprehensive files are created for each bid received. The 

purchasing department coordinates the announcement, review, and award of all bids. The board of 

education approves the final purchase. 

From start to finish, a $10,000 request might take 7 to 12 weeks to process, and a $30,000 request might take 

four to seven months. Some significnat purchases can take over a year.

Small District (~5,000 students, ~10 schools). A smaller district may have somewhat less formality, but it 

still must comply with federal procurement policies to ensure fair and competitive bidding. Smaller districts 

may also be more risk averse and have stricter requirements for smaller dollar amounts. Requirements are 

generally as follows. 

• Purchases under $500 require a verbal quote confirming the price.

• Purchases under $2,500 require three verbal quotes confirming the price.

• Purchases in excess of $2,500 require the superintendent’s approval of written quotes.

• Purchases over $2,500 but under $8,000 require three written quotes and must be submitted on a 

formal purchase requisition.

• Purchases over $8,000 require a formal bidding process that entails a legal notice, sending bid 

invitations to interested bidders, and formally opening bids at a designated time and place.

From start to finish, a $2,400 request might take between two and four weeks to process, and a $10,000 

request might take between eight and 12 weeks.

Charter School (<500 students, one school). According to this 2014 Forbes article, “Illuminating The Edtech 

Market For Small- To Medium-Sized School Systems,” many charter management organizations are developing 

in-house solutions for administration and academic software. For external procurements, the school board must 

approve any construction-related project expense over $10,000 and any general expense over $5,000, although 

this policy can be waived under certain circumstances. The head of school has latitude to seek quotes or bids as 

deemed reasonable. Federal procurement policies apply to all federal funding streams at the school. From start to 

finish, both a $10,000 and a $30,000 request might take between one and four weeks to process. 

Implications and Alternatives in the Procurement Process

Traditional procurement processes have drawbacks for schools and for ed tech innovators alike. If a district 

determines at the end of a lengthy procurement process that it selected the wrong vendor or approach, 

it most likely requires starting over and losing precious time, possibly postponing implementation to the 

following school year. Difficulty changing contracts once they are approved can also stall innovation. Forced 

to define work six or more months before it starts, districts often cannot nimbly adjust initiatives based on new 

technology or innovative services. 

At the same time, the procurement process can be a time when districts have an opportunity to think through 

their priorities and requirements (for example, the need for the product to interoperate with a single signon solution and to provide data sharing and interoperability). If a district or school is unsure of product 

capabilities, it can issue an RFI (request for information) to help it assess what products can do. Furthermore, 
50

proposals that come in during the bidding process can provide valuable information, such as price comparison, 

licensing options, and results from other districts.

On top of developing new products, small ed tech startups often lack the capacity to build large sales and marketing 

teams. To more efficiently distribute their apps to schools, many developers pursue licensing agreements with larger 

partners that already have relationships with schools. For example, SBIR awardee Children’s Progress developed 

a math and reading assessment that was distributed by many leading textbook publishers, and Fluidity Software’s 

mathematics software program is distributed by original equipment manufacturers.

Ways to Improve Decision Making 

There are things that app developers can do to support schools in making decisions about which digital tools 

and apps to consider. Here are some possible strategies.

Find an internal champion. If internal champions believe in the importance of the app or tool, they can help 

make it a priority to get the purchase approved. To do this, introduce the app or tool to district leadership sooner 

rather than later and leverage teachers’ enthusiasm to arrange meetings with key decision makers. Provide these 

champions with easily sharable information (one-page flyer, short video, etc.) to help them advocate for your 

tool.

Gain union support. For apps that address a specific teacher need or help make better use of teacher time, 

teachers unions may have influence on procurement. Make sure the union (through the representing teachers) 

supports the purchase. Consider meeting with union leaders early in the process. 

Secure a place in the budget. Districts often have categorical and general funds that must be spent before 

the end of the fiscal year. If the purchase of your app or tool is not budgeted in the current fiscal year (often 

set by March of the prior year), consider providing professional development services, creating a pilot project, 

or otherwise engaging in groundwork with any available funds to improve your chances of being included in 

the next year’s budget.

Ensure you and your team have met requirements to be on site. District requirements for employment 

and/or volunteering will most likely apply if you or someone from your team needs to be inside a school for 

implementation support. Check district requirements early to have time to make sure, for example, that 

each individual who will be on site has undergone a background check (including fingerprinting). Check for 

insurance provisions and requirements to comply with labor laws, such as prevailing wage.

Do as much contract prework as possible. Contract terms and approvals can cause delays, so be prepared 

to negotiate early and be ready once a contract is negotiated. Learn the district’s procurement policy and 

recognize the steps and timelines involved. Prequalify as a vendor for the district. Review standard contract 

terms and negotiate modifications early. Understand the nuances in both professional service agreements and 

software licensing agreements (per user, per device, site license, per teacher per classroom, per student, group 

license, and volume purchase). If a contract must be approved by the board of education, determine when the 

board meets and the lead time required for getting on the agenda. 

Price your app or tool strategically. Different threshold amounts require purchases to be competitively bid 

and approved by the board of education. Be aware of the cutoffs for competitive bids and approval and be 

strategic about pricing and selling within district policy.
51

Distribution Through Third-Party 

Storefront

Many educational tools and apps can be 

distributed to schools directly through a digital 

storefront (such the Apple iTunes Store or 

Google Play). This typically requires students 

or teachers to have an account set up on each 

device but can be streamlined through the use 

of device management software. If multiple 

students are using a single device, tracking 

student progress or app access can be tricky. 

Some software solutions (such as eSpark) 

help manage multiple students using a single 

device.

“Consumer” Education 

Market 

If you want the VC perspective on the potential of 

the consumer business model applied to ed tech, Fred 

Wilson of New York-based Union Square Ventures 

shares his thoughts in this article, Fred Wilson on Ed 

Tech: 4 Takeaways for Educators and Entrepreneurs. 

Another perspective comes from Umang Gupta, a 

Silicon Valley investor and CEO, in his article, Education 

Technology: Could it Be Different This Time? 

Stories From the Field: 

Out-of-the-Box Approaches to Procurement 

Steve Hodas is an education and online-communities entrepreneur with twenty years of 

experience ranging from startups to NASA, IPOs to the NYCDOE. 

At its root, “procurement” is a system for defining problems, identifying and acquiring potential solutions, and 

putting them in place. There are many conceivable variations for each of these steps and for how they can be 

coupled together, but most commonly they take the uninspired form of a conventional Request for Proposal 

(RFP). The limitations of the RFP process are well known to anyone who has attempted to participate in one. 

From the vendors’ perspective, RFPs can be opaque, tortuous, inauthentic exercises in compliance that seem 

designed to ensure you do not deliver your most inspired work. From educators’ perspective, they often result 

in products that are at best uninspiring and at worse useless.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Principles of user-centered design (UCD) and crowdsourcing are beginning to 

make their way into the mainstream of how school districts (and other municipal agencies) solve their problems. 

The NYC DOE's Office of Innovation has embraced these principles to help improve processes defined at all levels 

of the system, from the classroom to the school to the central office. Over the past year, they have run several 

iterations of UCD-based challenges and hackathons to create more authentic solutions to pressing problems. One 

of the goals is to create exemplars that can be picked up and localized by districts elsewhere.

The GapApp Challenge focused on middle school math classrooms, a Spotify Hackathon on music education, 

and the most recent School Choice Design Challenge on building apps to help families choose high schools. As 

different as their end products were, each of these “procurements” was based on the belief that when it comes 

to looking for answers to hard questions, bottom-up beats top-down and all of us are smarter than any of us. 
52

Sustaining and Growing an App or Tool 

It takes effort for schools and teachers to adopt new apps and tools into their technology infrastructure or their 

classroom practices, so it’s important for startups to think about sustainability from the beginning. A panel of 

seasoned entrepreneurs discussed lessons learned with various sustainability models at an ed tech meetup in 

2013, and EdSurge reported the results in the article EdTech Business Models that Work:

Of the companies represented [Pathbrite, Big Universe, Edmodo, and Global English], only Edmodo is 

following the Facebook-LinkedIn model of building a huge audience with support from hefty venture capital. 

Even so, Andreas Quandt, head of product and analytics at Edmodo (and formerly with Facebook), noted that 

entrepreneurs should realize that ed tech isn't like the consumer web: “You should not go into this space for 

financial reasons," he cautioned. "You need to have the vision and conviction that you can build the right product 

and do everything right. And you will need a lot of patience and perseverance and grit.”

With that caution in mind, the following are some common approaches to building sustainability for your tools 

and apps in the education space.

• Freemium for teachers, students, or 

parents. Offer a basic version of your app 

for free and encourage teachers or parents 

to purchase the premium version with 

added features. The advantage is you can 

build a large customer base through the 

free version, with the downside being the 

need to convert enough users to purchasing 

the premium version to make ongoing 

development sustainable. Also, if teachers 

or parents are downloading an app or tool 

to try it out, the freemium version should 

give them enough information about how it works to be able to make a confident purchasing decision.

• Freemium for schools. Offer your app or tool for free to teachers or students and then charge schools/

districts for the premium version, which could come with additional reporting or integration to enterprise 

data systems that could be useful at the school or district level. 

• Direct to parents. With the proliferation of mobile devices and the ease and familiarity of purchasing 

and downloading apps from education app storefronts, making your business sustainable through parent 

purchasing is a possibility. 

• License to other companies. Consider making an arrangement with a platform provider or content aggregator 

to offer your app to students, teachers, and/or schools through an existing distribution channel.

• Enterprise or institution. Enterprise sales are familiar in the education marketplace but can be difficult for 

startups with a small sales force and can take a long time. Focusing on the region in which you are based and 

generating referrals from early implementations can help you connect with decision makers in other regions. 

• Value-added services. Offering your tool or app for free and offering services such as technical support, 

professional development, or analytics in connection with your app or tool can make it more appealing to 

the education sector. This can be a way to provide sustainability for the development of your tool without 

charging for the app itself.

Watch out for Advertising!

While many of the approaches presented here will be familiar 

to app developers who have worked in other spaces, there is 

an important difference. Producers of consumer-focused apps 

often fund the development of their app through advertising 

in the app. In education, this may not be appropriate because 

it can be distracting to learning and can repel parents and 

teachers. District policies may even prohibit the practice.
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6

Software Interoperability 

and Open Data

Schools have a lot of data—everything from student grades to library management to bus schedules or transcript 

generators. Often these data are stored in a variety of stand-alone systems that don’t share their data in a 

standardized way. This means that the same data, such as teacher names or student schedules, must be entered 

manually into each system that needs the data to function properly. New tools and apps may find it challenging 

to exchange data with existing school data systems. The situation worsens with the increased use of online 

learning systems that depend on student data to personalize instruction and provide reporting to teachers. As 

teachers and students go online for more of their teaching and learning needs, the number of systems they 

rely on increases. This makes it very difficult for teachers and students to see a comprehensive picture of their 

learning progress or know where students are struggling and for teachers to give them effective support. 

There are some approaches in place to address these challenges. For example, the Guide to EdTech 

Procurement from Digital Learning Now! recommends leveraging industry standards for single sign-on and 

data interoperability.

Single sign-on. Apps and tools can be built to enable single sign-on—allowing teachers and students to log 

in to all their applications with a single password. This is similar to how general Internet users may log in to 

a variety of sites using their Facebook or Google account, only in the case of students the accounts would be 

provided by the school. 

A teacher teaching six classes of students a day with multiple apps and tools needs a way to manage learning 

content, attendance, student progress, and grades. Students and teachers having to keep track of a different 

user name and password to log in to each system wastes time and creates frustration. In addition, if all the 

different learning systems don’t know who a student is, they can’t help schools create a complete picture of 

that student’s learning. For all these reasons, solutions involving single sign-on are needed for teachers and 

students to access all their technology solutions though a single log-in credential. Many districts are even 

moving from preferring single sign-on to requiring it.

Interoperable systems. No one app or tool can provide all the functionality that every teacher, student, or 

parent may need. Enabling teachers and students to seamlessly use more than one app goes beyond just having 

a common log-in. Basic information, like student schedules or courses completed, may need to be shared from 

one system to another to provide the best learning experience. For example, if a student demonstrates the 

mastery of a new concept in Khan Academy, that might be reflected in an app that the teacher or parents use 

to track student progress. 
54

One common format for web services in education is the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard. The 

IMS Global Learning Consortium develops the LTI standard, and information about the specification can 

be found on its website. This standard allows learning management systems to exchange data with other 

learning tools and applications approved for use by the school, so students can have a seamless learning 

experience even if they are using apps created by different developers. 

App developers should also consider offering users the ability to export information in case they need to use it 

in another tool or app. Google Takeout is an example of this, allowing users to export any of their data from 

a Google tool for use on other tools if they choose. 

If app and tool developers can come together to create and use open standards so that teachers can use any 

platform in tandem with any additional applications that they find useful, this would greatly reduce barriers 

to empowering teachers to select the best tools for their needs. 

Data interoperability and standards. Regardless of whether you enable data sharing through an existing or 

custom API (application program interface) or through a data export option, in order to be useful the data need 

to be in a common format. For example, when transferring student data between systems, should a system 

indicate gender as “M” and “F” or “male” and “female”? Should the name of the field be “student_name” 

or “first_name”? These are essential items to define if we are going to allow students to seamlessly move 

between learning apps. Fortunately, data interoperability frameworks have been established to ensure data 

are presented in usable formats. The following are examples of some existing standards and frameworks that 

address the issue of data interoperability:

• The Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) are a good anchor to help center the debate, but they 

do not specify how the data are actually transferred.

• The Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF) is an open data sharing specification that does this. 

SIF has an XML specification for modeling educational data and service-oriented architecture (SOA) 

specifications for sharing the data between institutions.

• Organizations such as the nonprofit umbrella organization PESC are busy working with many kinds of 

organizations to unify educational data. 

• Ed-Fi Alliance is working to create common data standards for communication between educational 

tools. Ed-Fi is different from SIF because it is focused on providing educators with dashboard starter 

kits showing real-time data displays.

Ed-Fi and SIF both align with existing local systems as well as federal standards such as CEDS, and they can both 

help lower the time and money spent on state- and federal-level reporting, if implemented effectively. There are also 

some new alternative approaches to sharing data, discussed below, such as Experience API (xAPI).
55

Early-Stage Interoperability Initiatives

The Experience API (xAPI)

When students are learning across multiple technology applications, that information is scattered among many 

different systems. xAPI is an approach to describe learning data between systems in a uniform way. 

Source: Overview of xAPI by Liz Burow

xAPI helps collect experiences from online learning activities (such as watching a video or completing a quiz). 

These data can then be used to help other learning systems give students a more personalized experience, as 

well as help a teacher understand a student’s unique needs based on his or her activity across multiple learning 

tools. Because xAPI is simply a protocol to describe learning actions (John watched a video, Kelly completed 

a quiz, etc.), any type of learning experience can be placed into this format. This means that it could be used 

to account for more social and emotional skill sets (resilience, perseverance, etc.), which is a potentially big 

improvement over a reliance on hard outcome data in most digital systems. xAPI is available under an open 

license from the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative.

Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Searching for digital content is much easier when resources are tagged: Recipes, travel directions, and airplane 

ticket information all have common fields (e.g., who, date, location, subject, publisher) that can improve 

search results for users. The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) is designed to make it easier to 

publish and discover digital learning resources through the use of common tags. Because learning resources 

have fields (such as curricular standards alignment) that are not found in other web searches, LRMI was 

created to describe those unique educational elements. 

LRMI was built as an extension to Schema.org, a metadata vocabulary developed as a collaboration among Bing, 

Google, Yahoo!, and other organizations to encourage the use of metadata to make it easier to find web resources. The 

LRMI metadata vocabulary is based on contributions from experts and organizations that have worked with metadata 

and metatagging since the early 1990s and thus comprises the best of existing systems rather than a reinvention. This 

metadata framework enables creators of learning resources to tag them consistently and effectively. 
56

The Learning Registry 

The Learning Registry is a tool for collecting and sharing information about digital learning resources. Its 

goal is to help educators and students access the right learning content for their specific needs. It does this by 

providing a common location to post information about which learning resources are relevant to which users. 

Similar to how a library card catalog provides information about all of the books in the library in one place, 

the Learning Registry provides information about digital learning resources across the internet in one place. 

Posts to the Registry may include the author and date created, as well as the curricular standards to which the 

content is aligned. The Learning Registry also records usage data for each object (e.g. 543 eighth-grade science 

teachers used the attached video last month). Like the card catalog, the Learning Registry does not store the 

actual learning resources, just information about them with links to the location of the resource itself.

App developers can use the data from the Learning Registry to recommend digital learning materials to users 

without having to collect all of the content themselves. Sites like My Digital Chalkboard and Illinois Shared 

Learning Resources use data from the Learning Registry to helps users find relevant resources. 

My Data Initiative

The MyData Initiative seeks for every student (or parents of a younger students, as appropriate) to have access 

to his or her own academic data, wherever the data are stored, in both machine-readable and human-readable

format. As the MyData website explains,

This is possible through the participation of schools and software developers who enable students to 

download their own data to create a personal learning profile that they can keep with them throughout 

their learning career. In addition, developers are encouraged to create customized services and tools 
57

Stories From the Field: 

A Case Study from Data Jam/Datapalooza

Mike Hruska is the CEO of Problem Solutions, which specializes in software, mobile and 

learning technologies for government, nonprofit and commercial partners. Hruska’s firm 

has worked on mobile strategy for the U.S. Army and developed mobile technology to 

distribute movies for Paramount and Disney. 

"The U.S. Department of Education hosted a Datapalooza in January 2014 to bring together private sector 

technology innovators and educators to build tools to support learning. One of the projects was edX Connector, 

built jointly by the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, Aptima, Carney Labs, edX, Parchment, 

Problem Solutions, Syracuse University, and the World Bank. The group realized that as more platforms for 

learning emerge, learners will have more places to access personalized learning experiences. Its goal was 

to enable platforms like edX to share availability of courses through the Learning Registry, to collect userlearning paths using the Experience API (xAPI), and to share learner profile data between learning platforms 

using a profile API. 

With only 30 days to build the demo, the group used existing technologies as much as possible. 

• Existing platforms and technologies: Learning Registry, edX

• Specifications and standards: Common Core Standards, PESC Standards, xAPI

• Collaborative and open-source tools for codevelopment (e.g., GitHub, Google Docs).

The group fleshed out three use cases and showcased the possibilities of its work at the January 2014 Datapalooza:

1. Publishing the existence of an edX MOOC (massive open online course) to the Learning Registry to 

make others aware of it

2. Capturing and sharing granular learning path data within a MOOC (in the form of a student profile) to 

share an experience with a learning resource

3. Sharing (exporting) a profile for a user.

By enabling universities to share course content and students the ability to transfer prior achievements, edX 

Connect builds a stronger ecosystem to expand personalized learning offerings. Questions like the following 

can be considered: What did you learn, how did you learn it, and what is your record of achievement? The 

edX Connector offers a first step toward this functionality."

for students based on the information available in their personal learning profile.

This data may range from classes taken to their federal financial aid (FAFSA) details. Students can 

simply retain this information for their own records or benefit by sharing select pieces of it with the 

ever-growing network of applications being built by the private sector to help students make better 

choices about which classes to take, which colleges to attend, and how to pay for tuition.
58

As one example described in this article, “Personalizing Analytics through the Education and Career Positioning 

System,” the MyData Button was used as part of an Iowa college and career guidance system that enables 

individuals to design, simulate, and create their education-to-career choices and pathways and, when they 

desire, to download all their personal data records.

Open Badges

The Open Badge Initiative is an example of an innovative infrastructure for colleges and industry organizations 

to award microcredentials to students who demonstrate proficiency in specific competencies. A student may 

earn a particular competency badge by demonstrating prior experience or by participating in courses or 

informal learning experiences. When badges are delivered using the Open Badge specification, a learner can 

collect badges from any number of different organizations and showcase them in one single place. Eventually, 

employers may use Open Badges to search for new employees who have specific competencies, leveling the 

playing field for job seekers while better matching skill sets with positions. 

Sources of Education Data and Resources

The open education movement has made data about education and learning materials freely available to be 

used to improve learning experiences for students everywhere. 

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public 

domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. Open 

educational resources include full courses and textbooks, down to individual images, videos, or assessments. 

The OER movement became popular when Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched MIT Open 

Courseware in October 2002, making all of the materials used in the teaching of MIT courses available for free 

on the Web. Washington, Utah, Illinois, and California have all set up programs to help their educators access 

and share OER.

Open Educational Data

The open data movement provides datasets that can be freely used in the development of tools and apps for 

education. Data.gov is a repository of nearly 300 open educational datasets from the federal governement, 

ranging from names and addresses of all schools in the country, to dropout rates by college, to areas of teacher 

shortages. These datasets can be used to create apps that help students make informed choices about college, 

visualize educational trends, improve career planning, and compare educational institutions. The following 

summarizes some particularly useful education datasets on data.gov. 

• The Integrated Postsecondary Data System (IPEDS) gathers information from more than 7,000 U.S. 

colleges and universities. Institutions report data on enrollment, program completions, graduation 

rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and financial aid. IPEDS offers information about 

college access, comparative pricing, graduation rates, degree types, instructional costs, finances, and 

on-campus crime. 
59

• Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) collects education access and equity data by race/ethnicity, sex, 

English proficiency, and disability. The collection captures elementary and secondary school data on 

education access and opportunities, including access to college- and career-readiness courses, teacher 

equity, school expenditures, retention, access to pre-K programs, athletics, restraint and seclusion, 

bullying and harassment, and discipline. The CRDC also provides information on athletics and teacher 

salaries. 

• Common Core of Data (CCD) provides an official listing of all public elementary and secondary schools 

and school districts in the nation. The CCD provides information on student population characteristics 

by gender, race, and grade; the number of schools that opened and closed each school year in every state 

and school district; the percentage of students attending charter schools; the teacher-to-student ratio; 

high school completion rates; employee salary and benefit information; and per-pupil expenditures. 

• EDFacts is a U.S. Department of Education initiative to put performance data at the center of policy, 

management, and budget decisions for all K–12 education programs. It is the central collection system 

and national repository for federal program information on state, district, and school performance 

measures. EDFacts provides data on the percentage of students reaching grade-level proficiency in 

reading or math, the percentage of a ninth-grade cohort that graduated in four years, and the proportion 

of a district’s Title I schools that have been identified as needing focused attention or improvement. 

• The Federal Student Aid Data Center is a repository for information on the more than 9 million Pell 

Grants and over 23 million student loans disbursed annually. This data center provides institutionallevel data on how much each postsecondary institution receives in the student aid programs each year, 

along with performance information like the student loan default rate. It also contains information 

on earnings and loan repayment for 

vocationally oriented programs. 

• The National Student Loan Data 

System (NSLDS) is the U.S. 

Department of Education's central 

database for student aid. NSLDS 

receives data from schools, guaranty 

agencies, the Direct Loan program, 

and other Department of Education 

programs. NSLDS Student Access 

provides a centralized view of 

Federal Student Aid so that aid 

recipients can access their federal 

student loan and/or grant data. 

It also offers an implementation 

of the MyData service to enable 

download of personal data. NSLDS 

contains extensive data on federal 

grants and loans provided to 

individual students along with their 

background information. There are 

Education Secretary Arne Duncan visits with app developers at an Education Datapalooza 
60

a variety of potential applications for these data, such as student financial and educational advisement, 

personal management of financial aid, search assistance for supplementary financial aid, or services 

targeted to financial aid recipients.

The U.S. Department of Education encourages the use of open government data to develop tools and apps to 

help students and their families. From time to time the Department hosts events that bring diverse stakeholders 

together to brainstorm ideas for app development based on open data. Over a course of 90 days the participants 

are encouraged to design new apps or integrate data sets into existing apps in new ways. Products are then 

displayed at a Datapalooza event to highlight the apps and tools that use open data in helpful ways. Visit 

tech.ed.gov/datapalooza to see examples of apps, or visit tech.ed.gov/open-education to learn more about the 

Department's open education initiatives.
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7

Important Trends in the 

Education Landscape

Whatever topic or skill you decide to focus on, you are sure to encounter some of the major educational trends 

highlighted here. Some of the most interesting innovations in K–12 are happening around them and because of 

them. In addition to the specific practices outlined below, the District Reform Support Network has published 

case studies of lessons learned in four of the Department’s Race to the Top – District grantees. The case studies 

can provide in-depth understanding of what innovative practices look like within districts as well as initial 

lessons learned in how those practices have been adopted.

Stories From the Field: From Academic Research to 

Tools for Classroom Practice

Dr. Bill Cope is a professor at the College of Education at the University of Illinois and the 

director of Common Ground Publishing.

"Mary Kalantzis and I have always tried to translate our research into practice. In the past, this was by producing 

curriculum resources. However, over the past few years we have translated our research into software—the 

Scholar writing and assessment environment. This would not have been possible without the support of IES—both 

through the SBIR program and technology transfer in the case of IES grants to the university. Scholar realizes 

everything we have been arguing for in our research work for the past several decades. In Scholar, students can 

produce multimodal pieces of writing, including images, videos, audio, and datasets (in fact any digital media), 

inline, within the writing. These are published into personal and class web portfolios. Scholar is an environment 

for creating informational texts or write-ups of experiments in science or digital storytelling. Our research has also 

focused on writing assessment, so Scholar includes multiple forms of assessment (rubric-based review by peers, self, 

and/or teacher; in-text annotations; item-based surveys; and a dashboard that brings together overall results). Now 

we’re on the path to commercialization and creating a self-sustaining enterprise. Our spin-off, Common Ground 

Publishing, is located in the University of Illinois Research Park, and we have licensed the IP from the university. 

Already, we have schools that have licensed Scholar from us directly and publishers who have provided content, 

and we are currently in discussions with potential distributors."
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Blended Learning

Blended learning is an important support for transforming teaching and learning to increase individual student 

performance. It goes beyond adding technology to an existing learning flow. In a blended learning environment, 

part of the learning occurs online and part occurs face to face. Both the online and face-to-face experiences 

are parts of a whole. They are blended into a seamless, integrated learning experience where learning in each 

environment informs and supports the other. The Christensen Institute categorizes blended learning variations

and gives examples. A key element of most definitions of blended learning is the ability for a student to have 

some control over time, place, path and/or pace.

Usually, the online time is personalized, so students can go at their own pace, get extra practice and remediation 

if they need it, and follow their interests to the degree that the software supports that kind of personalization. 

In many blended models, the students spend some of their face-to-face time with the teacher in a large group, 

some face-to-face time with a teacher or tutor in a small group, and some time learning with and from peers. 

Technology may also support these face-to-face interactions. 

Blended learning makes classrooms look and feel fundamentally different. The following video resources 

demonstrate the practice:

• What is Blended Learning? From The Learning Accelerator; an overview of blended learning (5 minutes) 

• Phaedrus Initiative: Blended Learning. From Seton Education Partners; shows data-driven instruction, 

assessment, and differentiation in the first year of a blended learning program in San Francisco (9 minutes)

• Blended Learning Energizes High School Math Students. From Edutopia; educator Peter McIntosh 

helps his students take ownership of their learning by using interactive subject-mastery tools like 

Khan Academy (5 minutes)

• Blended Learning at the RI Model School. From The Highlander Institute; shows blended learning 

using a classroom-rotation model in an elementary school (3 minutes)

• KIPP Detailed Blended Learning. From KIPP Empower Academy; an example of blended learning 

across grade levels (9 minutes)

Standards for Learning

Each state maintains a set of learning standards—skills that students must master at each grade level. These 

learning standards serve as a map for the lessons and activities that teachers create. They are also the foundation 

on which state assessments are designed. The Achievement Standards Network provides a machine-readable 

list of all state standards. 

Developers providing content solutions will need to know how their tools and apps align with the learning 

standards for a specific state. One of the first questions a teacher or district leader will ask about a tool or app 

is how well it supports improving student outcomes on state learning standards. 

There are several learning standards initiatives that are important to know about if you are developing tools 

and apps for the U.S. K–12 audience.
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Common Core State Standards. Until recently, each state had its own learning standards in all subjects. This 

can make it difficult for tool and app developers who may need to create 50 different versions of their app to 

meet the various state standards. Several years ago, a number of states led an initiative to develop consistent, 

real-world learning goals in math and English language arts. This effort, known as the Common Core, helps 

ensure that all students, regardless of where they live, graduate from high school prepared for college and 

career. Apps and tools that align with the Common Core can be used across multiple states without needing to 

be redesigned. You can view the standards as well as the states that have adopted the Common Core at www.

CoreStandards.org.

College and career ready standards. A number of states have not adopted the Common Core State Standards 

but have instead adopted separate college and career ready standards. In these cases, a network of institutions 

of higher education in each state has certified that students who meet the curricular standards will be prepared 

to enter college without remediation upon graduation from high school. To be successful in these states, you 

will need to align your tools to individual state standards.

Next Generation Science Standards. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a research-based set 

of interdisciplinary science standards across all grade levels, are similar in aim to the Common Core State 

Standards. They are not yet as widely adopted, but the number of states embracing them is growing.

C3 Framework for Social Studies Standards. The College, Career and Civic Life C3 Framework was created 

by state agencies and leading organizations in social studies and its individual disciplines to help districts 

and states create standards for effective participation in college, career and civic life. They are also not yet as 

widely adopted, but the number of states embracing them is also growing.

Testing/Assessment

When selecting a problem to solve or when talking to educators about what concerns them, you will find that 

standardized testing often comes up because schools are held accountable for student performance. Test scores 

affect teachers, administrators, and even local housing prices because many parents equate high test scores 

with school quality when considering making a move to a new neighborhood. Test scores even affect the 

school year calendar because any ancillary activities stop just before and during test weeks. Some of the major 

standardized tests are described below.

To receive federal funds, each state must adopt statewide assessments in mathematics, English language arts, and 

science that are aligned with their content standards. To help states meet this requirement, the U.S. Department 

of Education funded two assessment consortia to develop assessments in mathematics and English language arts:

PARCC. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a consortium of states 

developing a common set of K–12 assessments in English and mathematics. PARCC assessments are aligned 

with the Common Core State Standards and replace annual assessments in states that transition to these online 

exams. As a result, these assessments provide data on student proficiency across state lines. 

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is a state-led 

consortium developing next-generation assessments that accurately measure student progress toward college and 

career readiness. The Smarter Balanced assessment system is aligned with the Common Core State Standards. 
64

No state is required to adopt either PARCC or Smarter Balanced in order to receive federal funds. Alternatively, 

a state may adopt its own assessments aligned with its content standards.

NAEP. Commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress

(NAEP) is a national test administered periodically to gauge, through a sample of districts across the nation, 

students’ knowledge and skills in various subject areas. The NAEP helps determine how states and urban 

districts compare on student growth and achievement over time. It assesses math, reading, science, writing, 

the arts, civics, economics, geography, and U.S. history. The newest test to be released in 2014 will be on 

technology and engineering literacy. 

TIMSS. A global assessment is the Trends in 

International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). 

This assesses fourth- and eighth-grade students’ math 

and science achievement. Administered every four 

years, the next TIMSS assessment will be in 2015. 

In 2011, a total of 500,000 students from more than 

60 nations took it. Given the growing emphasis on 

measuring students’ competencies based on both 

statewide and international benchmarks, the value and 

importance of the TIMSS assessments will most likely 

increase in coming years. 

Personalized Learning

Personalized learning is a core part of the vision 

sketched by the National Education Technology Plan. 

Personalization puts students at the center, empowers 

them to take control of their learning, and offers 

engaging learning experiences for all learners. 

Personalization can be a great asset to a teacher in 

the classroom because it expands his or her ability 

to provide tailored support for individual students’ 

needs. One-on-one instruction, particularly for 

struggling students, can be much more beneficial 

than instruction with the whole class. Technology to 

support personalized instruction can serve as an extra 

pair of hands for struggling students, or it can provide 

enriching opportunities for students performing 

above grade level. 

Instead of having all students participate in the same 

activity at the same time, teachers have more flexibility. Some students can be engaged in personalized learning 

on computers or tablets, some can gather in small-group instruction with the teacher, and some can participate 

in small-group centers. 

Individualized, 

Personalized, and 

Differentiated Instruction

Individualization, differentiation, and personalization 

have become buzzwords in education. The 

following are the definitions used by the U.S. 

Department of Education:

Individualization refers to instruction where the 

pace is adjusted to meet the needs of individual 

learners, allowing them to progress through the 

material at different speeds.

Differentiation refers to changing the 

instructional approach based on the needs of 

individual learners. Learning goals are the same 

for all students, but the method or approach of 

instruction varies according to the preferences of 

each student or what research has found works 

best for particular students.

Personalization refers to instruction that is 

paced to learning needs and tailored to both 

learning preferences and specific interests of 

different learners. In an environment that is fully 

personalized, the learning objectives and content 

as well as the method and pace may all vary.
65

Finally, most personalization programs give teachers the ability to obtain an overview of how their students 

are doing in a class. The ability to quickly assess which students have grasped a concept and which haven’t—

without wasting class time giving and checking quizzes—is invaluable for teachers.

For more on personalized learning, consider the series of reports from Education Week as well as the Race to the 

Top & Personalized ED report which provides a summary of ED's peronalized learning grant program.

Project-Based Learning

Project-based learning makes learning meaningful and teaches skills that cut across many content areas: 

creativity, collaboration, leadership, and the like. Learning takes place in the context of authentic problems, 

continues over time, and brings in knowledge from many subjects. In this way, students can be assessed on 

their ability to apply knowledge to real-world problems. The New Tech Network helps schools implement 

project-based learning, and they offer a rubric to evaluate project ideas. 

Another good set of resources on project-based learning can be found at the Buck Institute for Education (BIE). The 

BIE website provides a set of answers to the question of why project-based learning as well as collected research on 

the utility of project-based learning. Examples of project-based learning in action can also be found on Edutopia's 

site. Project-based learning, if properly implemented and supported, helps students develop 21st century skills and 

engage in complex, real-world challenges that help them meet new standards for critical thinking.

Mastery-Based Learning

Also known as mastery learning, competency-based learning is a growing focus of education conversations. The 

premise is that students learn best by mastering a particular learning goal before moving on to new material that 

builds on that goal. Instead of a group of students all moving from one topic to the next with varying degrees of 

understanding, each student continues to work on a topic until he or she has mastered the content. Because students 

of the same age advance through the curriculum at significantly different paces, schools that use this approach can no 

longer use a traditional model. In the mastery-learning model, educators design progressions of sequential learning 

goals that progress from simple knowledge and skills to complex tasks. For this to work well, the goals must be 

personalized so that they are challenging to students but not too frustrating to achieve.

Mastery learning has an assessment counterpart: standards-based grading (not to be confused with standardized 

testing). Instead of averaging a student’s general achievement over a period of time and representing this as a 

grade, teachers in mastery systems evaluate student performance in specific topics and skills and categorize their 

performance in levels of mastery, such as “advanced,” “proficient,” “basic,” or “below basic.” In a true standardsbased grading system, students do not progress until they demonstrate proficiency. See Robert Marzano’s “Formative 

Assessments and Standards Based Grading” for an in-depth look at mastery learning.

Teacher Certification

Teachers are certified to teacher either through traditional teacher education programs or through alternative 

certification programs. Certification is generally the responsibility of the state. Traditional teachers are certified by 

completing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in education, after which they typically receive a preliminary probationary 

certification. Then they must fulfill other requirements—additional tests (usually a Praxis test), participating in 
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a certain number of hours of professional development, student teaching, completing an induction program, or 

getting a master’s degree, depending on the state—in order to receive permanent certification. Advanced teachers 

can receive credentials from National Board Certification, a “rigorous, peer-reviewed process that ensures that Boardcertified teachers have proven skills to advance student achievement.”

Alternative certification programs, designed to expedite nontraditional pathways into the classroom, began 

in the 1980s and have proliferated in the past decade. Some programs labeled alternative are more rigorous 

and take even longer than traditional programs, whereas others are fast tracked and have little or no practical 

training. Some of the large alternative programs are Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, and the 

American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence; many smaller residency or online programs are also 

available. Alternatively certified teachers accounted for approximately one fifth of the teaching force in 2006, 

and that number has only grown since. Teachers with alternative certifications come from a wider array of 

backgrounds, many having worked in other professions for years before transitioning to teaching. 

Keeping Up with Ed Tech

As the ed tech space continues to grow, so does the number of media web sites and individual bloggers. Below 

are several sites useful for keeping up with ed tech news.

• EdSurge. The EdSurge weekly online newsletter is widely read in the ed tech community. EdSurge 

also produces ES-Instruct for educators and the EdTech Index, a database that categorizes and reviews 

hundreds of ed tech startups, products, and services. 

• Education Gadfly: Weekly ed tech updates produced by the Thomas Fordham Institute.

• EdTech Times: Boston-based group whose site features daily news updates and features. 

• Edutopia focuses on practices and programs that help students acquire and effectively apply the 

knowledge, attitudes, skills and beliefs to achieve their full potential.

• EdWeek Digital Directions. Part of EdWeek, Digital Directions covers news, trends, and best practices 

for the K–12 tech audience. 

• EdTech Handbook is a series of contributed articles hosted at edtechhandbook.com.

• eSchool News provides the latest educational technology news K-12 and higher education.

• Getting Smart: Created by Tom Vander Ark, the Getting Smart site covers formal and informal topics 

that cover K-12, higher education and lifelong learning. The organization has a particular focus on 

innovation and personalized learning. 

• Graphite. Created by Common Sense Media, Graphite provides reviews of ed tech products where 

educators can filter results by type (app or website), subject, grade level, and price. Product information 

provided includes setup time, skills addressed, intended student audience, and tech notes. Designed 

for educators, the products are reviewed by volunteer teachers who use a review system that examines 

pros, cons, engagement, pedagogy, support, and the bottom line. 

• KQED MindShift. If you’re looking for a deeper dive into topics related to learning, check out MindShift. 

Launched in 2010 by KQED and NPR, MindShift explores the future of learning in all its dimensions, 

including cultural and technology trends, innovations in education, groundbreaking research, and 

education policy.
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• New Learning Times is produced at the Ed Lab at the Teachers College at Columbia University and 

provides daily coverage of learning opportunites to transformation education. 

• Startup Digest EDU shares the latest news and information about startups and innovations in education.

• Tech and Learning: Published by New Bay Media, Tech and Learning includes a website, newsletter 

and monthly magazine. Both a website and monthly paper publication, Tech and Learning focuses on 

ed tech professionals responsible for implementing and purchasing for K-12 schools.

• THE Journal is dedicated to informing and educating K-12 senior-level district and school administrators, 

technologists and tech-savvy educators on educational technology issues. . 

Twitter chats and hashtags can also be great resources for identifying important trends and issues in educational 

technology. Here is schedule information and hashtags for education Twitter chats. 

Final Words of Advice 

Joseph South is the Deputy Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department 

of Education. Prior to joining the Department he led the development of educational products for 

Middlebury Interactive Languages and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

"To an outside observer, it may appear that public education in America is changing very slowly or not at 

all. Nothing could be further from the truth. Like the calm surface of a deep and powerful river, there are 

massive, irresistible forces moving swiftly below the surface that will fundamentally reshape our schools. Not 

all of the forces are positive. Poverty among public school students is increasing, not decreasing. Some forces 

are neutral. The diversity of our schools is growing rapidly and permanently, providing both opportunities 

and challenges. Some forces can change our schools completely or not much at all. Technology falls in this 

category. 

Tens of thousands of schools and millions of students will have access to broadband in their classrooms for the 

first time over the next twelve to twenty four months. But access doesn’t lead directly to change. Technology 

is an accelerator; it allows us to scale the reach of what we have chosen to do with astonishing speed. But 

it doesn’t make our choices transformational. It can just as easily scale the bad as the good, the minimally 

effective as much as the incredibly impactful. This is why the conversation must begin with a well-grounded, 

transformational vision of learning itself. With that goal firmly in mind, we can then bring to bear the power 

of technology to enable, measure, iterate, and refine our methods of achieving that vision. 

And this is why we need you. Help us articulate that vision and find that path." 
The mission of the Department of Education is to promote student 

achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering 

educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

http://tech.ed.gov