Much edtech reaches children through schools, indicating that what goes on in schools, is likely to greatly influence edtechs impact on outcomes. If we want to know how effective edtech is at improving outcomes it is arguably necessary to study their effectiveness including the influence of schools. However, schools are not the easiest places to arrange impact studies because their bandwidth is often consumed with their primary objectives of safety, administration of activities, behaviour and teaching. This talk suggests edtech should not be put off from attempting to do studies with schools because the difficulties are only skin deep. Overcoming initial barriers shows schools are almost ideally organised/structured to carry out high quality education research with hardly any inconvenience to themselves. This is because schools are organised into groups of comparable children, classes, that are selected on a scale of ability in a subject (setting). Meaning, the subject departments have ready made groups of similar children, so if edtech is given to one class and not the other any difference in outcome is likely to only be the edtech. The talk sketches out other ways schools are set up to be nearly ideal for measuring the impact of edtech, advocating for school studies to be approached more enthusiastically.
