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Edtech is big business. Investors staked around $8.15 billion in educational technology in 2017, and Forbes predicts this will expand to $9.5 billion in 2018, with particular growth predicted in China which has the world’s biggest market of school-age children. The industry is estimated to be worth around $130 billion globally, and is growing at a rate of roughly 18 per cent year on year.

Fed up with Google’s dominance in classrooms, Apple has just launched a lower-cost iPad with hopes of muscling its way into more schools. Announcing a new 9.7-inch iPad which will support its Pencil stylus, the iPad comes with its iWork suite and a number of new apps. Apple is also offering 200GB of free iCloud storage for those in the education system. These can be bought by students and teachers for $299 (around £212) or for $329 for the rest.


Chromebooks, meanwhile, can be bought for $150, and Google has been beating Apple in schools: the company currently enjoys a market share of about 60 per cent. As these giants rough it out over hardware dominance, we want to know what technologies are actually helping kids learn, where tech companies are approaching education wrong, and what are the problems tech cannot be expected to solve?

How tech is already helping

“Tech is great,” says Layla Yarjani, COO of company Little Bridge, which uses immersive, games-based technology to help children aged six to twelve around the world learn English: technology can help kids to learn at their own pace, she says, and not feel embarrassed if they are at a different point from their peers; it can provide heightened play and interactivity, appealing to innate curiosity, and of course it potentially connects them with “all the world’s information” so long as they can understand it (Yarjani points out the prevalence of English on the internet).

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Likewise, Hannah Smith, an English teacher in Cambridge, teaching children aged 11-16, says that tablets and smartphones are already incredibly useful for getting students to conduct research, and she says kids feel comfortable using their phones, and can be empowered. Technology can bring a lot of fun to learning: in Smith’s school, virtual reality – touted as the next great edtech frontier – is used to journey through human organ systems or visit Shakespearean England.

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There are also specific problems technology can alleviate. Basic things like projectors and interactive whiteboards have already made a huge difference to classroom environments, says former teacher and education expert Laura McInerney. “They sound really dull... but they’re all just ways of doing classrooms better,” she says.

Apps such as ‘No More Marking’ mean overstretched teachers can perform less of the grunt-work: the app enables teachers to train algorithms to grade work on their behalf. “It’s that post-rationalisation that’s actually taking a lot of the time,” McInerney explains, conceding that there is an inherent subjectivity involved in marking students’ work – at least this tool can speed that work up, and potentially make those judgments more consistent.

A programme called 'Accelerated Reader' is now present in most schools, which “gamifies reading,” quizzing kids on particular plot or vocabulary points, Smith says, and allotting prizes according to different ranks. This may sound like another unnecessary arena for competition, but she says that “if well-used, it’s really useful” and can serve students in different ways. She's observed it in particular helping boys who may be less keen to read, and where students in a class have different reading ages. “Reading can be quite humiliating,” but using the reading package provides “ways you can measure it so that reading can be measured and rewarded,” even when standards vary, Smith says.

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Where we're going wrong

The picture isn’t entirely rosy, however. The salient concern among those WIRED spoke to was that there is a lack of sound educational research to back up and direct the money being poured into educational technology. “So many companies are very focused on the tech side and less focused on the education side,” Yarjani says. “Actually there is a psychology to learning."


At present, 83 per cent of the market is dominated by Google, Microsoft and Apple, but as the edtech industry begins to boom, smaller companies are increasingly making their way in, as innovation shifts away from tablet-style bits of kit and towards augmented and virtual reality tools, AI software, and learning analytics.

An initiative called EDUCATE, run by UCL’s Institute of Education and part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, “aims to bring edtech closer to education research and education stakeholders,” by helping companies to validate their claims and base product innovation in evidence and education research, says its director Carla Aerts.

EDUCATE works with startups to help them refine their business case and “logic model.” They also partner with UCL Engineering, especially for machine learning products, to help with building tools. The industry, Aerts says, “is really ready for it,” and startups have been clamouring to get involved.

Little Bridge has been involved with EDUCATE since it launched in June last year; the programme is currently nurturing 246 edtech startups in the UK, which has the biggest edtech market in Europe. Yarjani says EDUCATE’s work is “putting integrity into the sector,” and Little Bridge are working with them to evaluate a question at the centre of their work: “does social and collaborative learning drive learner outcomes?”

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“Are you merely replicating an existing practice but using a computer?” asks Peter Hyman, head of School21, an innovative free school that believes “academics are not enough”. “The transformational piece comes in – which is harder – when you’re doing something you couldn’t do without the technology that really enhances learning”.

“Too often, I think we’ve seen: ‘here is a shiny machine,’ rather than ‘here’s a new thinking way of thinking about a very specific problem,’” McInerney agrees. “I think where the real innovation starts to come in is where we think about actual problems that people have – so innovations in timetabling would really help,” for instance. A lot of the software used for this – and the mentalities underpinning it – are out of date, but McInerney says.

This view was voiced by all those WIRED spoke to, and is supported by research commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which found that “technology is solely a catalyst for change,” rather than the source of it.

The EFF research, conducted by academics at Durham University, also found that "there is a recurrent and specific challenge in understanding and applying research evidence as it takes time for robust evidence to emerge in education, and the rapid pace of change of technology makes this difficult to achieve.” Big tech companies are beginning to sidestep this challenge by conducting the research themselves: there are an increasing number of Apple-, Google- and Sony-funded schools looking to capture markets through early adoption, gathering data about the education sector, and how children learn.

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Besides concerns about companies “flooding” schools with bits of kit, teachers also identified an opposite problem with uneven access, finding themselves unable to base lessons around something not all children can use. With VR headsets, for instance, Smith says “the problem is they’re very, very expensive, so we don’t have many of them”.

On the other end of the scale, in the context of an increasingly underfunded education system, teachers say money is often wasted on technology without thinking through more pressing needs. “We waste money sometimes,” says McInerney. Schools give every kid an iPad “without thinking through how easily they’re smashed, how hard they are to replace,” or the extra burden created by having to charge them overnight. “There is a lot that goes with the optimism of tech that needs to be mentioned.”

The problems tech can't solve

The possibilities laid open by tech need to be met with old-fashioned hands-on teaching. "Often if you ask students to do research," for instance, "they come up with rubbish because they get things from unreliable sources, and I think increasingly the curriculum needs to speed up with technology in terms of helping students to navigate the internet,” Smith says.

Targeting tech towards children who are struggling has proved effective: even more basic software like Google Translate can mean that children with limited English are able to understand the instructions they are given, can remain connected to the discussion in classes that may go a bit beyond their ability, and can begin mastering simpler phrases – in Smith’s school, every newly-arrived child is given an iPad to help them adjust.

But “technology doesn’t replace teaching… you can’t learn a new language by translating everything on Google translate, and actually what these mobile phones and tablets do is give schools an excuse not to provide adequate language support for students with English as a second language,” Smith says, “whereas in the past I think they would have ensured every student had some sort of one-to-one language support.”

Children with limited English are not the only kids who lose out in these circumstances: “for students who are excluded from mainstream schooling for whatever reason, really regularly their ‘[alternative] provision’ is an online package that they do from home,” meaning schools can fulfill the statutory requirement of giving that child an education, “but realistically the child is at home, isolated from other students, and often not completing the package,” she says.


Providing technological 'solutions' can act as a smokescreen for growing deficiencies, imagining that apps can stop up funding shortages that have led to rising class sizes in 62 per cent of schools across England during just the last year. Yet “educational cuts hit staff the hardest,” says computer science teacher Louis Reid. “Less staff in schools mean more work for those that remain,” and technologies should be directed towards attempting to lessen that burden, he says.

While technology can address the problems created by cuts to education funding in meaningful ways, “there are things it can’t offer,” Smith says. They come from – for instance – “building an environment where children are supported... and work with a trained teacher. I think it’s important to remember that those things are valuable alongside technology.”

And the iPad?

As for Apple’s new education-oriented iPad, Yarjani reflects, “all this hardware is fantastic, but ultimately the hardware is not going to be what engages the kids.” That will be a balance between the health of education more widely, the quality of the teaching they receive, and the use of carefully-deployed technologies which make teaching easier, more effective and more efficient.