Giving Compass' Take:

• Start-ups have now come up with 'Edtech Innovator' which is an incubator that is located inside schools and allows teachers to develop their own edtech tools for their classrooms. 

• Could the incubators potentially expand to incorporate student perspective during the building process? How are incubators beneficial for the edtech community?

• Teachers have been asking for more educator participation in making edtech tools due to the challenges trying to engage students.  

Today’s teachers are expert innovators. They create classrooms designed to maximize student learning, and do everything from fine-tuning lesson plans and homework assignments to organizing the physical layout of their learning spaces. It’s an occupation that requires flexibility, as they accommodate different student needs, and a certain level of ingenuity and responsiveness for when things don’t go according to plan. Not incidentally, these are many of the same skills valued in the founders of startups creating the tools used in edtech.

Innovation in the classroom can (and sometimes does) lead to innovation in educational technology as well, but it is the private sector—usually the startup community—which often leads the way here.

Startups have their advantages, but they face unique challenges, such as the catch-22 of product testing, in which schools won’t buy untested products, but the startups can’t test their products if no schools will buy them. Startups are also working against what is known as the “Empathy Gap,” where companies must quickly close sales to stay alive, while educators need more time to properly integrate tools into their teaching.

There is a way of meeting this challenge, however: the school-based “Edtech Innovator,” which functions as a kind of startup incubator where schools themselves foster a culture of innovation and enable faculty to develop their own tools.

Schools have several key advantages that make them perfect for innovation. First, schools are full of teachers, the true “doers” in education, who are best positioned to identify their own needs.

Finally, an EdTech Innovator can skip the process of finding pilot schools for edtech tools—a school with an EdTech Innovator is the pilot school.

Read the full article about educators are the best innovators by Brendan Laughlin at EdSurge