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May 14, 2021 - No Comments!

Two Ways to Support User Journeys in edTech Products

As we begin to apply lessons from remote learning to new product roll-outs, edTech product owners have a unique opportunity to evaluate how user journeys have changed. With a more nuanced understanding of users' new learning environments, you'll be able to design products that support your users' day-to-day experiences in post-pandemic classrooms. 

User feedback throughout remote learning has also clarified the technological needs of teachers and learners. The increased use of digital learning tools has made all of our users more sophisticated, discerning, and engaged edTech consumers. Redesigns for existing tools must meet this new set of demands and expectations.

Buckle up! Everything in edTech is about to change.

Why the Pandemic Changed edTech User Journeys

The pandemic changed the trajectory of edTech user journeys in ways big and small. 

School schedules are more flexible than ever, and students have far more choice about how they complete projects. Educators are also more sophisticated about how they approach classroom tasks and digital learning, including how they combine technologies to facilitate that learning. 

This means that the universe surrounding your product has fundamentally changed, too. Educators are no longer using individual edTech products in isolated ways. Your edTech product is, in all likelihood, being used in concert with many other products, making integration a key need. If your product is a platform built for school use, user relationships to your product look more like a B2C model than they ever have in the past.

The relevance of future edTech products depends on how well product owners navigate these major shifts in the user journey, from learning environments to individual user needs. In light of these changes, Fall 2021 is the perfect time to refresh your approach to conducting user research and challenge the typical assumptions you start with in edTech product development. 

Here are two areas where we think product owners should revisit user research ahead of Fall 2021 product roll-outs:

Embedding Project-Based Learning Features into Your Learning Tools

We know that student collaboration and project-based learning have an outsized impact on learning outcomes. But the rise of remote learning demonstrated why educators need product owners to embed these approaches directly into their digital learning tools.

Re-thinking the UX design of your collaboration tools in this way requires digging back into your learning content. This could mean re-examining tried-and-true content or lessons already vetted by subject-matter experts. It could also mean re-evaluating user flow and changing how your content is delivered, from teacher-student facilitation to peer learning models. 

When you've already built and tested content designed for one method, it's no small feat to re-imagine it within a different context and for different users. Good UX design teams can look at teacher-student content and help product owners translate it into content that works more effectively for flipped classrooms or peer-to-peer learning environments. 

Although this might seem like an expensive investment, developing better UX for peer learning drives both student and teacher engagement. And as the edTech market becomes more crowded, it's even more important to build meaningful digital learning experiences that extend beyond digital workbooks, virtual lectures, and online quizzes.

Your new approach to peer learning environments can also be quickly validated with lightweight user research and rapid prototyping. Whether you're building project-based learning features, asynchronous online grouping and collaboration tools, or embedding SEL tools into existing content, rapidly building and testing features is an inexpensive way to test new approaches to delivering tried-and-true content. 

With a targeted, lean UXR strategy, you'll ensure that your peer-peer content not only works in a digital format but also meets the needs of future classrooms.

Addressing New edTech User Expectations with Short-Form Content 

It's no coincidence that educational TikTok posts and YouTube channels became ever more popular during the pandemic. Short-form learning content engages users in their curiosity, shapes their expectations about content, and broadens the concept of who a learner is, how they learn, and when they engage with content.

YouTube Channel "The Sci Show" offers easy-to-digest science  content for teens.

Product owners can apply these lessons to digital tools by producing high-quality, short-form learning content of their own. Short-form digital learning content addresses new user expectations while providing multiple engaging pathways to learning. From a production standpoint, short-form learning content is also easier to produce and repurpose for other channels, including just-in-time support for both teachers and students.

If you know that short-form content will drive future products, you should be prepared for how this decision will affect your UX and design strategy. From solutions for search to more personalized dashboards, your learning content should be highly personalized to the user’s journey and easy to browse. 

The more targeted each piece of content is, the more you'll be able to surprise and delight your user with UX and design decisions that support their needs and interests. As industry leaders like Khan Academy have demonstrated, short-form content is ideal for supporting students who need additional support. Videos and other learning aids are capable of breaking down complex concepts into foundational steps. Teachers can supplement their existing instruction plans with high-quality, short-form content and create targeted interventions more quickly. 

In student-facing products, learners think creatively, stay engaged, and exercise additional agency by choosing the types of content that appeal to them. Because digital learning tools are also able to gather data about learner interactions, students can receive content suggestions that personalize their user flow.

Additionally, educators themselves are likely to consume video content on their phones or in between other tasks, a finding supported by our existing user research. These viewing habits make short-form learning content an ideal component of teacher-facing products that offer professional learning, too.

We're at a unique turning point in the edTech industry, and we're never going back to old ways of thinking about digital content or designing digital tools. As you reimagine your user journeys, consider how these shifts are likely to affect your approach to learning content in new and existing products. 

Whether you create new, short-form content or shift teacher-student content toward a peer learning model, your UX team can help you find and test the best solutions for your users.

Are you thinking about making a change for Fall 2021? Contact us today to discuss how new user journeys have shifted your product and feature priorities.

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April 30, 2021 - No Comments!

How Competitive Audits and Analysis Ensure User-Centered edTech Products

You're ready to develop a new digital learning tool, and you've pulled inspiration for your product vision from consumer platforms and edTech alike. But will your feature ideas really support the needs of edTech users?

User surveys can help you uncover some answers, but competitive audits, or competitor analysis, provide an even fuller picture of the edTech marketplace. A competitive audit offers feature-by-feature comparisons of related products, as well as strategic suggestions for improving your own features throughout the design process. 

By identifying specific user challenges with competitors' products, you can refine your strategic priorities, avoid common pain points, and ensure that your new product will be better than what's already on the market. 

Done well, competitive analysis also puts edTech users back at the center of product design. After all, when you hire a UX firm that specializes in edTech, you work with designers who can translate good UX practices into good UI design for teachers and learners. 

Here's how Backpack Interactive uses competitive audits to give clients unique insight into edTech personas and help them develop must-have product features.

Analyze Your edTech Personas and User Groups

From a strategic standpoint, competitive audits provide complimentary support for persona development. With targeted analysis, this deliverable has the power to inform strategic design decisions from start to finish. Armed with stronger information about your competitors and users, you'll build a product that meets the needs of the teachers and learners you support.

During Backpack's competitive audit process, we focus on products that address the needs of users similar to your product's target audience. We dive deep on your user groups to guide the audit process, including secondary or tertiary users that are often forgotten. 

Consider your most recent product with a teacher-facing dashboard. It likely has many options for reporting to school administrators or parents. That feature alone has directly shaped your product personas and user groups—even if these users emerged late in the design process. That's right—even if admins and parents don't use your product, they're still an important user group to consider from the get-go. 

When we identify these user groups during a competitive audit, you and your stakeholders develop an even more nuanced understanding of user needs. This analytical process directly supports product design by making it easier to strategically align your stakeholders on the best user-centered design decisions for your product.

Examine Common UX Patterns through an edTech Lens

edTech products are inherently different from digital tools designed for consumers because schools and learning materials produce unique user dynamics. Common features are dictated by the way teachers interact with students, or how learners master new concepts. For these reasons, relying solely on visual design or appeal to guide strategic decision making in edTech is often a fatal mistake. 

Even if an idea looks good on paper, it won't necessarily address the needs or use cases of students, teachers, and administrators. It's important for every stakeholder involved in your project to understand why a UX pattern in consumer tech—like a Spotify library, for example—might not work in the context of a learning environment. Even if there's initial excitement around a common UX pattern in the consumer world, competitive audits are a great tool for ensuring alignment on the best UX patterns for your edTech product.

During Backpack's competitive audit process, we only consider how digital products are used in the context of learning environments. Even if we analyze products that support learners outside of traditional classroom settings, we prioritize the UX of teaching and learning above other interactions. After all, your products must work for edTech users within learning environments in order to be adopted and widely used. 

So don't just conduct a competitive audit and put it back on the shelf. Refer to your competitor analysis and recommendations throughout the design process. This will help your stakeholders align on user needs and feature priorities, so you can make a real impact on the teachers and learners who use your tools. 

How to Evaluate the UX of Common edTech Features

By examining UX patterns common to edTech products, a competitive audit highlights specific user needs, provides more context about users' learning environments, and helps you avoid costly design decisions.

From dashboards to rostering features, here are the three edTech-specific features we analyze again and again. Finding the right UX solutions for these features will inform everything from your user journey to design direction. Let's dive in.

Student- and Teacher-Facing Dashboards

One of the biggest decisions you make as a product owner is how you'll differentiate the UX and visual design of your student- and teacher-facing dashboards. Is student content accessible to students who can't yet read? Is teacher content easy to export into a professional report, so they can share findings with parents and administrators?

In order to gain a competitive edge, examine how comparable brands and products address the needs of their student and teacher users. Which UX choices help their users navigate and understand relevant data? How do their visual design choices reflect an understanding of a student's grade level or a teacher's day-to-day environment?

The more you distinguish the user experience of student- and teacher-facing dashboards with both UX and visual design decisions, the easier it will be for users to engage with your learning content and advocate for adoption.

Login Patterns

No matter what kind of edTech product you're building, examining login patterns during the competitive audit accelerates critical decision-making. Should students have a unique login or use a QR code for more accessibility? What about SSO integration? How will teachers manage or administer this process?

It's important to get these decisions right. As remote learning has shown us, a frictionless login experience is crucial to the adoption and engagement of your product. Especially in edTech, users interact with your product long before they ever reach a login screen. 

Consider a student-facing product administered by a teacher, like Class Dojo. Teachers send QR codes for student logins to family members, so students can log in on their own. With other products, family members might facilitate the login for their child. 

If the login process becomes too complicated at any of these touch points, you'll lose users along the way—and make it almost impossible for teachers to truly integrate your product into their toolkit.

Rostering Features

User management is a challenge in any industry. In the education sector, however, concerns about privacy, data sharing, and permissions are especially high. 

A competitive audit that examines rostering and other user management features will help you stay ahead of the curve. This area of product design changes quickly, and without a thorough competitive audit, you might roll out a time-consuming, expensive build that fails to meet the up-to-date user expectations. 

Product integration with tools like Google Classroom should also stay top of mind during your research. Can teachers automatically add students to their class? Must they do so manually, or can they upload students in large batches? Who manages the process and how flexible are these permissions?

Every school system has a different approach to user management and permissions, and competitive audits provide strategic pathways for working through these issues. By making your products more customizable, you'll anticipate shifting user needs and "future-proof" user management features. 

From individual user permissions to product integrations, customization and flexibility makes your product easier for teachers and administrators to both use and adopt. 

How Competitive Analysis Identified a Crucial Market Gap for Heinemann Publishing's Listening to Learn Platform

Listening to Learn Labs provides interactive video support for teachers wishing to practice assessment interview techniques.

When Heinemann Publishing decided to launch a new platform dedicated to helping math teachers improve their assessment techniques, they hired Backpack Interactive to help them better understand the competitive market. The publisher's vision for its new platform, Listening to Learn, was to introduce an entirely new way for teachers to learn more about math instruction. 

We immediately wanted to know more. How had competitors provided professional development within assessment tools in the past? Was there currently an existing product that tied professional development and student assessment software into a single, teacher-facing product? How would such a product be received? And what types of support and training would teachers need to use such a product effectively?

Before diving into competitive market analysis, Backpack Interactive went back to basics. We conducted an extensive user survey with existing Heinneman customers. Our goal was to understand the challenges these customers experienced while conducting math assessments. We also identified other major players in the field, established more detailed use cases for the assessment tool, and measured customer satisfaction with a related legacy product from the same author.

After watching a video of a student, instructors determine how the student reasoned out a math problem. Every response is supported with subject matter expertise.

But something exciting and unexpected stuck out in user survey responses. Many educators indicated that they hadn't received regular professional development on assessment best practices. At most, they attended an annual training. Even if teachers received training in assessment data analysis, they indicated a need for more regular support. Ideally, they would be able to access this support as challenges arose with conducting an assessment or analyzing the results.

Identifying this critical market gap directly impacted the design strategy for product updates in Listening to Learn. Armed with a competitive analysis, we considered how best to support teachers in their professional learning around assessments.

 

In addition to interview support, Listening to Learn provides annotated guidance on student reasoning and problem-solving strategies. These annotations help instructors identify the strategies students use to solve math problems.

We knew that professional development content had to be easy to locate within the product. It would be even better if we were able to integrate subject matter expertise into the structure of the product itself. By making professional learning content more accessible, we were also able to design a product that supported teachers of all ages and technical abilities.

In early ideation conversations, we referred to this analysis regularly to ensure stakeholder buy-in and guide strategic decision-making. We worked with the Heinemann team to develop rich, self-paced, interactive product features that helped teachers engage deeply with professional learning and support. Ultimately, competitive analysis and the resulting recommendations helped Heinemann's stakeholders align around feature priorities, user interactions, and product navigation to create a digital tool that innovatively addresses a real user need.

Whether you're rolling out product updates or designing a digital tool from scratch, competitive audits conducted by an edTech UX specialist give you an edge. Together with your UX team, you can use audit findings to refine your personas, examine features specific to edTech, and align your stakeholders. After all, the better you understand which features teachers and students need to succeed in the classroom, the faster your product will be adopted by teachers and administrators alike.

Are you ready to see what your competition is up to? Contact us about our research services, or to begin the discovery process today.

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March 10, 2021 - No Comments!

Discover Innovative Solutions for Your edTech Product With Rapid Prototyping

If you've embraced agile product development, your product team likely builds products with the design skills and tool sets they already know will be successful. Even if you're planning sprints and embracing iterative design, you'll always be headed toward your product team's MVP solution.

While this can be an efficient way to design and produce products, it leaves little room for innovation. In fact, agile product development often lacks the elements of discovery, search, or trial and error that lead to breakthroughs.

Product teams that rely heavily on agile processes are likely missing out on better or more innovative solutions to their creative problems—simply because they're not given the time or resources to go looking for them.

By developing prototypes and producing demonstrations quickly, your team will think more strategically about product requirements, push your product in exciting directions, and bring internal stakeholders along for the ride.

Balance Agile Development with Rapid Prototyping for Better edTech Tools

Even when used within agile development frameworks, rapid prototyping provides teams with more creative leeway to find unexpected solutions to complex problems.

Both your UX and development teams may need to use unfamiliar technology or learn new skills quickly to develop a prototype on a tight turnaround. We know this isn't always possible when your project has a strict deadline or budget ceiling. But the trade-offs are almost always positive.

Not only will your team stay more up-to-date on current design trends, but they'll also learn new skills destined to keep your next edTech product ahead of the curve.

Ultimately, when you're able to build in more time for learning and problem-solving, you're guaranteed to head into product development with the most innovative and creative solutions your team can muster.

You might even create a future-proof edTech product—and leapfrog over your competition.

Rapid Prototyping Allows for Strategic and Creative Risks

Because the stakes for a prototype are so much lower than the stakes for your finished product, prototypes give your team the opportunity to break free of traditional design solutions.

Whether you're creating a rostering tool or an assessment feature, your design team's sense of the "traditional" solution begins as early as the discovery phase. Your team looks for competitors that represent the most popular brands in your product space. Who's up-and-coming? Who's doing something new?

But keeping up with the competition can sometimes mean treading the same ground as brands that are already successful in your market. Get out of your design rut by actively pulling apart user pain points and considering how to create the best user experience.

When you consider the best way to solve problems independent of user expectations and competitor data, you broaden your pool of solutions—and often hit on something innovative. Rapid prototypes allow your team to test out these innovative design solutions and ensure your new ideas are viable.

You may even be inspired to look to other industries, mediums, and digital product spaces in order to pull new ideas into your toolkit, identify new technology opportunities, and seek out inspiring tone and voice examples. Which brands are being enviably playful, innovative, or disruptive?

It's important to understand where your competitors are coming from, but you should always look for opportunities to flip the conversation on its head. Rapid prototyping will help you identify and test these innovative solutions even faster and with more strategic clarity, so you can stand out from the crowd—and build a product that stands up to the test of time.

Prototype Demonstrations Align Stakeholders Quickly

Unlike design presentations, prototype demonstrations are tactical. They show how the product works in real time, which means your stakeholders no longer have to imagine how your product works in an abstract way.

Clickable wireframes, rapid prototypes, and rough animation are all helpful tools for gathering constructive feedback from your CEO, sales team, and other internal stakeholders with little-to-no context. There's no need to review specific use cases or persona documentation or be brought up to speed by the product owner. Instead, your stakeholders can simply react to a design or technology idea as it's executed in real time.

Because rapidly built prototypes are real, stakeholders stay engaged in the product's success throughout the design and development process. When your company is energized around a product, everything moves faster and falls into place more easily, including budgets and internal support.

Getting the right input from the right stakeholders at the right time makes all the difference to your product team, too. If nothing else, your own team will be excited and creatively challenged as you charge ahead.

Catch the Holes in Your edTech Design Strategy

Even if your product owner, development team, and UX team have all looked at product wireframes a million times over, creating clickable prototypes will help you discover the holes in your own planning and edTech design strategy.

A clickable prototype reflects the complexity of your product. Using prototypes to fuel design, strategy, and feedback sessions will help you identify where team members have different assumptions. With a working prototype in front of you, you'll identify important edge cases or find the gaps between technology and design thinking that you may have missed.

A word of caution. Focusing too intently on your prototype's functionality can actually backfire. Prototypes exist somewhere between a quick, lightweight build and full product design. If the prototype process takes too long or becomes too involved, you could wind up uncovering problems that would never exist in the real product.

Stay on track by keeping your prototype build light and fast. Anything that takes longer than a week to finish probably isn't as "rapid" as it should be!

The Resources You Need to Embrace Rapid Prototyping

Quick turn-around user research and testing abilities
If you start the product design process with a developed testing plan, you can use it to propel your team through UX and technology plans, too. Set up parameters for testing, research, and feedback generation to get the most out of rapid prototyping to solve real user problems.

A devoted front-end developer
With a skilled front-end developer on your team, you can quickly create proofs of concept that help move both UX and UI forward with technology solutions.

Time
While rapid prototyping should take less than a week, building enough time into your entire project to allow for creative thinking is crucial. Where can you extend your timeline to allow for more creative solutions?

Design thinking 
Use design thinking to break down problems and foster the most creative solutions from both visual designers and developers.

Software
Many programs offer prototyping tools to help your designs come to life. Here are a few we recommend:

Rapid Prototyping Builds a Design-Forward Company Culture

Successful design cultures are built by teams that think innovatively about design and user research outside of client and product deliverables. While rapid prototyping is most often used to move specific projects forward, the skills your designers and developers need to be good at prototyping start within your company's culture.

Help your team develop an innovative mindset as they explore real problems in learning and education. Which new technologies and design methods can solve for the most pressing problems faced by educators and students?

When your entire team is immersed in the vertical, they'll be able to imagine how to apply design and technology solutions in edTech, test solutions through prototypes, and take your product design into the future.

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February 22, 2021 - No Comments!

What’s the Future of edTech in the Classroom? Two Teachers Weigh In

From tech to teaching strategies, educators are doing their best to reach students in remote, hybrid, and in-person classroom environments. They still face unique challenges, including flagging student engagement online and accommodating special needs in remote environments.

We talked to two teachers who are members of Backpack Interactive's Teacher Council, Dannielle Rivera and Daniel Nero, to find out which digital tools are helping them effectively reach students, how their teaching plans continue to evolve, and the future of education technology in their classrooms.

Dannielle Rivera teaches 2nd grade in a public school in suburban Southern California. Daniel Nero is a fourth-year English teacher at a Title I high school in Las Vegas, Nevada. These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Integrating edTech into Remote Learning

How are you currently teaching? Hybrid? Remote only? How's it going?

Dannielle Rivera: I'm completely remote. I'm the grade level chair for my department. I created a Google website and told my teachers we were going to create tech tutorial videos so [students and parents] can access them on their own. The biggest feat [is] tech knowledge for parents and students. Now when parents watch [our tutorials], they're not messaging me like, "Oh, my gosh, I can't do this."

Daniel Nero: It's hybrid. Some of my students are in person, whereas I'm, as you can see, at home. But I could always jump into the building if I wanted to teach.

What was your remote teaching plan like last September? Which digital tools did you start out using?

DR: The first two weeks was just teaching the kids how to log on. I tried to premeditate those things. I made their Clever badges and attached them to pre-made folders. They're 7 and 8. As resilient as they are, I have to remind myself what is age-appropriate. To what extent can I push them?

At first, we were converting everything to digital worksheets. We would screenshot the page and make it a background on Google Slides. Then we switched over to Jamboard because on Google Slides, they couldn't annotate. We just had to learn over time.

DN: When I teach in person, there's a lot of paper, there's a lot of hands-on activities. And all of that disappeared when we switched over to remote learning. I had to digitize all of the texts that we're [reading].

A lot of the skills that we did on paper—like annotation, highlighting, taking notes, answering questions—all of that also became digitized, and I had a lot of trouble transferring those necessary skills to remote instruction because I had a hard time finding the tools to be able to do that.

I was using Google Docs, collaborative Google Slides, and Pear Deck, but I decided to cut back on a lot of these apps and try to make it as simple, consistent, and doable for the kids.

How has your remote teaching plan evolved?

DN: One thing that I brought into remote learning is socio-emotional learning. Because a lot of our kids right now are struggling, not only academically, but emotionally. A lot of things that happen at home are aggravated because they're stuck at home. I just wanted to check in on them and tie social-emotional learning to what we've read, or what has happened in the news.

Pairing Instructional Strategies for Remote Learning with Digital Tools

Which specific modes of teaching have you gravitated toward?

DR: For math, we use whole group instruction and independent instruction. Students are also given the opportunity to work collaboratively in small groups in Google Meet rooms. I've evolved to [using] Jamboard and the HoverCam. Jamboard is great, but there is just something about pencil and paper. They can either solve the problems and show their work digitally through Jamboard, or they can solve it on pencil and paper or whiteboard and a marker and take a picture of their work. After taking a picture, students then insert the image into their Jamboard assignment, which is linked to our Google Classroom.

Language arts is an orchestrated set of tasks and lessons, and we have a lot of moving pieces. It entails 1:1 assessments, whole group instruction, small group instruction, and group work through Google Meet rooms. Because we have kids that go to reading intervention groups or speech, we also have independent work.

DN: We mostly do synchronous instruction through Zoom. Regardless of whether the students are in person or not, they're on Zoom. On Fridays, we have one-on-one office hours, and students jump into the Zoom call based on [their needs]. Within the Zoom call we sometimes go into breakout rooms where we have small group instruction. So we're trying to mimic what we had in person, but in an online setting.

What activity, subject, practice have you found the most difficult to translate to remote learning?

DN: Discussions. I love to talk to students, especially if we're talking about the text that we're tackling. But because of remote learning, I feel like a lot of the students are very quiet, shy, or just not willing to participate. I truly miss discussions because I get to see the students' faces. I get to hear their voices. I get to hear their opinions. But in online settings, all I see are black screens sometimes.

Using edTech and SEL to Reach Struggling Students and Promote Self-Efficacy

What strategies or tools have you tried to reach students who are struggling with remote learning?

DR: Our special needs students are truly struggling. This is not the proper way of learning for them. My heart breaks for them. Because many of their parents have to work, the kids that are thriving are the kids who have a grandparent sitting with them.

While students are working on independent work, I open up another Google Meets room for students that are stuck or need help with a problem. This alleviates them from reaching their frustration level.

I've also adapted the lessons. When I try to meet with the parents of my struggling students, I really adjust their work. For example, if it takes four problems to complete an exit ticket or complete an assessment, I tell the parents, "You pick two."

I also like to focus on the social-emotional aspect. What should be the forefront of our concern is the social-emotional states of our students. That has to be a priority because if that is not in tune, then they can't do the academics.

DN: For the students who are struggling, or just about grade level, I put a lot of scaffolds in my lessons. Everything is scaffolded up to the assessment. I tell them that at the beginning of each class. "We're going to have this as the assessment today, and everything that you're going to do for the next hour, you're going to need to show me for your exit ticket."

How has remote learning fostered positive outcomes in your students?

DR: They're becoming more tech savvy. They've become more responsible in some ways, like taking ownership of their work. These are the kids that are succeeding. Obviously, a lot of things can become frustrating, so we've had our share of breakdowns. They've really had to learn how to self-regulate their emotions. I feel like their coping mechanisms have gotten better in times of struggle.

DN: Student accountability. On Pear Deck, I can see who is writing and who is not writing, and I would narrate on Zoom, "Awesome! Thanks, Ashley, for giving me your answer. I'm waiting on four more people to respond to this prompt." A lot of the students are also starting to become critics of their own writing. It's related to the students finding a way to sustain themselves in their writing and their reading. That makes me feel good. At least for me, that's my responsibility as a teacher. I'm there to guide them, but once they're ready to fly free, they can.

How edTech Product Designers Can Address Real Classroom Needs

As you consider returning to the classroom for full-time instruction, which elements from remote or hybrid learning would you continue to use?

DR: One of the things that I've learned is grace and being more gracious towards parents. I've always considered myself to communicate well with parents, but I feel like I've just learned how to talk to parents a little bit differently.

I would also take a lot of the tutorials that we do. Let's say a student is struggling, and a parent can't meet with me. I can record a screencast of a demo. I feel like you waste so much more time trying to coordinate or schedule meetings. You can definitely hold parent teacher conferences virtually. There are these families that bend over backwards to try to make it in the middle of the day when they can just pop on their phones and not have to deal with driving and stuff.

We are living in Google Classroom right now. And I'd definitely love to take that with me into the normal classroom. I was already using Google Classroom quite a bit, but now we have this archive of videos, so independent work in a classroom will look so different now. I feel like it will free me up to meet with small groups more.

DN: Consistency and the simplicity of my lessons. It's working right now, so it should work in the classroom with a printer and paper and all that stuff. I think it should be fun.

The strategy that I would hold on to even more is to just make sure that I put the students first. Sometimes I'll be doing my lesson, and the students are not responding or I'm having low participation, and I get frustrated as a teacher. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is our new normal right now, and we have no idea what's happening to our students on the inside or behind the screen, at home. So I just have to bring myself back down to reality. You don't know what's happening. And you have to give them that.

What's something that you wish one of your current learning products did that it doesn't currently do?

DR: I wish more of the products had SEL components ingrained into them. For example, when they're taking an assessment, iReady has them take a "brain break," like breathing exercises or stopping to do something active.

I wish more products had video tutorials for students and parents. I wish some of the programs had a live chat with customer service so I could solve problems faster.

I wish there was a way to set up my break out rooms in Google Meet, name them, and save the grouping settings. That way I wouldn't have to make new break out groups every single time.

DN: I would like to be able to link to a text in Pear Deck, so students could annotate that whole passage. Right now, I have to chunk the texts out into different slides. I also wish it had a student comment function. Only teachers can comment.

Using Teacher Feedback to Shape the Future of Education Technology

From onboarding parents to anticipating student needs, teachers are working overtime to ensure that their students are mastering content and staying safe, healthy, and balanced.

When edTech products don't rise to meet teachers' demands for flexibility or SEL content, they find work-arounds and tailor solutions to the needs of their own classrooms.

Product owners can still do more to understand how teachers use and adapt their digital tools. By conducting additional UXR, testing products in real or remote classrooms, and drawing on the insights of the Backpack Interactive Teacher Council, your next edTech product can help teachers meet even more students where they are.

Want more insights on how our Teacher Council can help with your next edTech product? Let's talk!