The ed-tech buying process in K-12 districts is more decentralized than it once was. In some ways, the division of power is changing and this has very real implications for how technology companies create and market their products.
While CIOs and technology managers continue to make decisions about core technology like infrastructure broadband and hardware, teachers and school level employees are more involved than ever in choosing student-facing technology—and those are the tools that tend to have the biggest potential to create positive learning outcomes.
“Teachers, school level folks, principals and department chairs are making purchasing decisions on apps, curriculum and software to support students,” says Sarah Glover, Outreach director for Panorama Education, a Boston-based data analytics company focused on the K-12 market. “A lot of schools have been moving towards decentralizing budgets so schools have more discretionary dollars to make these purchases.”
Traditionally, all purchasing decisions have been made by top level school leaders and while titles like CIO and superintendent or purchasing director may sign the district check, often it’s lower level employees who are doing the influencing now.
“From our perspective, the teacher is really the key to success for technology. What we see increasingly is that administrators would not even deploy technologies without having support from the teachers,” says Gregor Freund, CEO, Versal, a platform that allows educators to make engaging online courses.
The New Influencers
According to Freund, this trend plays out in two different ways. He says more companies are marketing products directly to teachers. Often these products are free for instructors to use or at least feature a price point low enough that teachers will reach into their own pockets to fund it. For example, take a look at the popular LMS Schoology. A teacher can sign up for free, track student grades, post assignments, etc. Once one teacher has success with the product, other teachers in the building follow suit. Eventually, administrators see how valuable this tool has become and how easily it facilitates collaboration. The district then invests in the paid enterprise version of the software to make additional features like custom branding, extra storage space and advanced analytics available district-wide. The district ultimately makes the purchase, but the teachers are the driving force behind it.
