Navigate EdTech – Choosing Wisely for Learners
EmpowerED
Welcome to the self-paced MOOC Navigate EdTech – Choosing Wisely for Learners
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"Navigate EdTech – Choosing Wisely for Learners" is a self-paced course designed for school leaders, teachers, and education decision-makers guiding technology purchases and integration. If you're responsible for selecting the tools that will shape the digital future of your school or district, this course is for you. You'll explore essential strategies to align technology investments with educational goals, ensuring each decision supports improved learning outcomes. With modules focused on key skills—such as assessing institutional needs, setting measurable learning objectives, and evaluating EdTech usability—participants gain a practical, strategic approach to technology selection.
By the end of this course, you'll have gained foundational knowledge and practical skills to begin shaping your school's digital future. You will be introduced to key concepts for developing a tailored digital strategy, evaluating EdTech tools, and ensuring a thoughtful and impactful integration of technology into your learning environment.
This course is self-paced, you can progress at your own speed.
Learning objectives:
- Identify key gaps and opportunities in your institution's current digital strategy and explore how EdTech tools can support long-term educational goals.
- Formulate measurable learning outcomes that align with your school's curriculum and outline a plan for evaluating the impact of EdTech on student learning.
- Assess the current digital infrastructure of your school and prioritise key areas for improvement, creating a basic plan for upgrading tools and resources within budget constraints.
- Evaluate the usability of select EdTech tools by conducting basic usability tests and providing recommendations based on initial feedback from teachers and students.
Prerequisites
The course is designed for professionals involved in educational technology purchasing decisions, including:
- School administrators (e.g., principals, IT managers, procurement officers) responsible for selecting and acquiring educational technology tools.
- Teachers who influence purchasing decisions and have a role in the integration of technology in classrooms.
- Decision-makers at district or state education levels tasked with overseeing the implementation of technology at multiple institutions.
Certification
After completing a course, you will receive a digital course certificate. To receive a course certificate, participants are required to pass the final quiz. The overall passing grade is 80%
Behind the course
This course series was drafted by OAMK (Oulu University of Applied Science), with the support of European Schoolnet (EUN)
Johanna Pihlajamaa, M.A. Ed., works as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Oulu, Finland. With an extensive background in education innovation projects, she brings several years of valuable experience to her role. Additionally, Ms. Pihlajamaa is actively engaged in lecturing within OAMK's Master's in Education Entrepreneurship program, where she also serves as the program coordinator. For further details, please see www.OAMK.fi/mee.
EmpowerED, running from 2023 to 2025, aims to establish a pan-European network and platform for exchanges between European EdTech initiatives, support organisations, practitioners, and policymakers. The project will map the EdTech landscape in Europe to reflect the current state of play in the sector. This will provide insight into trends linked to new schooling models and innovative education solutions. EmpowerED will provide policymakers with a clearer understanding of how they can better support, and work with, start-ups and SMEs in the fast-expanding EdTech ecosystem. The project will help consolidate and amplify the work of current EdTech organisations and will directly provide support to start-ups and SMEs, for example by offering training and capacity-building opportunities. EmpowerED will create a thriving EdTech ecosystem for better learning across the EU.
Disclaimer
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.
All content on this course unless specified otherwise is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License