At a time when school districts are spending money on edtech like never before, it’s perhaps natural that some educators would be skeptical about both the pace and enthusiasm behind it.
As we’ve reported in the past, some teachers have clearly expressed that tech tools should support and not replace their expertise.
Meanwhile, changing demographics of students in U.S. public schools raise questions about whether curricula and edtech are staying culturally relevant. Between 2010 and 2021, the share of white non-Hispanic children fell to 45 percent of public school students, while the share of Hispanic children grew to comprise 28 percent.
EdSurge recently posed a question to a panel of Latino educators and an edtech leader: Is educational technology serving the Latino community, particularly its students?
Who Is Edtech Made for?
As the mother of two bilingual children who are growing up speaking Spanish at home, Rocío Raña has spent a lot of time pondering this question. She co-founded edtech company LangInnov to address what she saw as a gap in the market for assessing Latino children’s reading abilities.
There has been some progress in the human-centered design movement, Raña says, where companies involve the end-users in a product’s design — but she argues that the edtech landscape needs to do much more when it comes to designing for Latino and Black children.
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