Giving Compass' Take:

• The author discusses where Amazon has failed to gain traction in the education technology space, and where there is room for the company to respond to needs in the education sector. 

• What are the next steps forward if Amazon wants to be an influential player in edtech? 

• Read about how to make edtech the most effective in classrooms. 

Is Amazon a sleeping giant of edtech? Or one of its biggest, underreported failures?

Those are questions to which my answers have varied, especially this year. But now I can definitively answer yes. To both.

As someone who lives in Seattle and has both worked in education technology as an executive and analyst, and observed the tech sector as a columnist, Amazon is inescapable. Its indirect impact on education is huge: as a source for parents and teachers to buy classroom supplies, as a distributor of ebooks and e-readers, as a fundraising tool for school-related nonprofits through the AmazonSmile program, and even as an Amazon Web Services backend for edtech startups and established education companies delivering software through the cloud. It is, at least figuratively, everywhere.

But what’s surprising to me is how inconsistent and inept Amazon has been when it comes to directly addressing teachers and students with technology for learning. It’s almost as if the company doesn’t realize that educators’ memories, just as students’ educational careers, are long.

Amazon’s latest misstep is the abrupt, and still unexplained, shuttering of TenMarks, a math and writing software startup it purchased in 2013 and announced in 2018 it would close in the following year, leading to a lot of frustrated, Twittering teachers.

And yet, there is so much—as a school counselor might say—potential.

There are signs that as Amazon gets a better handle on what it does really well—outside of retailing packaged and digital goods—2019 may be the year it finally solidifies its role in K-12 education and takes a relatively stable place alongside other tech titans such as Microsoft, Google and Apple.

Read the full article about Amazon and education technology by Frank Catalano at EdSurge