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An interesting piece of ed tech to think about is lesson planning software. Most teachers put a tremendous amount of time planning their lessons, but still wri
by japhyr 15y ago
An interesting piece of ed tech to think about is lesson planning software. Most teachers put a tremendous amount of time planning their lessons, but still write their lesson plans using word processors. There are all kinds of problems in effective lesson design that stem from relying on word processors. Good lesson planning software would lead a teacher through a strong design process, letting them choose which pieces to include, and in what order. Lessons would be easy to revise. A teacher could change the format of their lessons, and instantly have all their previous lessons available in the new format. The use of word processors for lesson planning is like an architect using ms paint to design a building.
Yet every example of lesson planning software I've seen has a serious flaw. It might have a bad ui, it might not be based on sound pedagogical principles, it might promote vendor lock-in. It's hard to do it right; to do it well and for profit you would probably have to charge too much to get a significant percentage of teachers using your product.
You can sell a niche product in the ed tech market. You can build a piece of software and convince a bunch of districts to buy in, and rake in some cash. But making a piece of software that truly makes education better, and doing so in a way that does not contribute to the already huge education gap between those with resources and those without, is tremendously difficult.
- 2arrs2ells 15y agoI don't think "Lesson Planning Software" offers anything useful beyond Word, until it has a useful, curated bank of starters/activities/homeworks/etc attached to it. There are a few of those kinds of "marketplaces" (some with money involved - i.e. teacherspayteachers, and some that are free - i.e. TFANet, BetterLesson) - and I think a better version of one of those needs to be the backbone to any truly successful lesson planning tool.
- japhyr 15y agoI agree that good planning software would offer the ability to tie into a curated bank of resources. The ones I have seen are spotty, and understandably so. Wikipedia works, in part, because there can only be one article about any given topic. But in a bank of lessons, you'd have to allow multiple lessons about the same topic, if they approach the teaching in a different way. Curating such a bank is an interesting problem, and I have not seen it done well yet. I would argue it has to be free to be done well - any such bank that sits behind a paywall would not build enough lessons to be complete, and it would not reach enough people to make education better overall. Tying in to a bank of resources is not a requirement, though. You have to think in terms of unit planning, rather than just lesson planning. A unit might consist of three investigations. So on the first page or screen, a teacher gives a title, unit description, and one-sentence description of the three investigations. In a word processor, the teacher has to copy those descriptions onto separate pages to describe each investigation in more detail. Planning software would do that automatically for you, so changing the description of the investigation in one place would change it everywhere in the unit plans. I am still trying to decide how I feel about the role of non-profit and for-profit organizations in education. People should definitely be paid for their work. So a team should be able to propose a solid solution to this issue, gather funding from public resources, and make the final product available to everyone while paying themselves a fair market rate.