In my role as Head of Education at NetSupport, I recently had the opportunity to meet with and interview Olli Vallo, CEO of Education Alliance Finland as part of our NetSupport Radio podcast and vlog series. As a follow up to that conversation, I wrote a short post to highlight the comments and thought it worthy of sharing here too.
Here at NetSupport, we welcome the improvements across the sector in responding positively to evidence when it comes to developing technology in education. We’ve done it for years and work closely with our schools to develop our solutions.
We were recently thrilled to receive very positive feedback from Education Alliance Finland (EAF) for our classroom.cloud product. EAF (formerly known as ‘Kokoa Standard’) uses a pedagogical review framework that tests educational technology solutions against stringent standards to check their pedagogical efficacy.
Pedagogical excellence for edtech is something that is of huge importance to us and so, following our fantastic feedback on classroom.cloud, we thought it would be great if EAF could check out one of our other flagship teaching and learning products, NetSupport School.
The report it has written makes for great reading and we are very proud of it. You can find it here.
The process from EAF is thorough, as you’ll see in the report. It explores every product across several stringent criteria. Achieving a good ranking isn’t easy as, to do so, you need to score well right across all of the criteria, namely:
- Subject Area – Remote learning and study skills
- Life & Career – Social Skills / Cross-Cultural Skills and Global Awareness / Wellbeing and Sustainable Development / Work-life skills and Entrepreneurship
- Learning & Innovation – Creativity and Innovation / Critical Thinking & Problem Solving / Cognitive and thinking skills / Learning to Learn
- Information & Technology – Media and Information Literacy / Multimodal Literacy / ICT Literacy
- Learning Engagement – Autonomy / Competence / Relatedness / Respect / Stimulation / Safety
These all then feed into its examination of the pedagogical approaches found in the product it is assessing. EAF rates its pedagogical approach thus:
Further to this, I had the opportunity to interview Olli about all things #edtech and pedagogical efficacy. In the conversation we discussed:
- What makes for a good edtech product
- How they review edtech products against standards such as learning science
- The depth into which products are evaluated
Watch our discussion and conversation back here:
Learn more about Education Alliance Finland by visiting:
https://educationalliancefinland.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/education-alliance-finland/
https://twitter.com/EduAllianceFi
Of course, if you’re interested in learning more about NetSupport’s multi-award-winning products, please take a moment to visit NetSupportSoftware.com.
