Giving Compass' Take:

• Tony Wan interviews longtime educators and industry entrepreneurs, analysts and stakeholders about the highs and lows, wins and woes of the past decade in edtech. 

• How can funders help to advance edtech in years to come? What essential learnings should everyone working in edtech take from these interviews? 

• Read about a group looking for new ways to peer over the edtech horizon.


Technology can collect and harness more data than ever before. But with that comes greater risks to personal privacy and potential for misuse. Those building, funding and using edtech tools must similarly wrestle with these concerns.

In education, does technology create just as many problems as it solves? If so, what new challenges have emerged? As we bid farewell to the teenage years of the 21st century, we posed these questions and others to longtime industry entrepreneurs, analysts and stakeholders about the highs and lows, wins and woes of the past decade.

What problems have we solved—and what new ones have we created?

Jessie Woolley-Wilson (CEO, DreamBox Learning): In the past, educators were focused on how to get more devices in the classroom. We’ve largely succeeded—according to a recent Common Sense Media survey, eight out of 10 K-12 teachers have computing devices in their classrooms.

But we’ve learned technology alone does not drive higher achievement. Technology must support and empower better teaching and learning. Now, educators are focused on linking edtech tools directly to student learning outcomes. As an industry, we must embrace this opportunity, rigorously testing solutions to understand what’s working—and in what context—in order to continue unlocking learning potential for all students.

Larry Berger (CEO, Amplify): I think we’ve solved the problem of “teachers don’t know/don’t like technology.” Teachers now use technology in their personal lives and they find it useful in their professional lives. That doesn’t mean they like all of it. They have serious, well-informed concerns about what are the right ways and wrong ways to use tech in the classroom. But today, if you hear someone in our field saying that teachers aren’t good at technology, it probably means they have built a technology that isn’t good for teachers.

Read the full article about the highs and lows of education technology by Tony Wan at EdSurge.