This month marks one year since EdTech Hub began generating and sharing evidence to support the global response to Covid-19 school closures. Thanks for following our journey so far.

In this month's issue:

• Apply for our at-scale research call - deadline is 11th April
• Read some of our recently published systematic reviews on EdTech 
• Highlights from our EdTech and Covid-19 event: Lessons learned, future plans
• Mapping of the EdTech Research landscape in Sierra Leone
• Check out what EdTech Hub has achieved and learned in the last year

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See the high resolution version of this image with links included on our website here. 

Over the past few months, we have analysed and mapped the EdTech research landscape in Sierra Leone. In doing so, we met a number of organisations that are exploring if and how technology can support the country’s education sector. In this blog series, we interviewed individuals from these organisations to shed light on EdTech’s role in high-potential but low-evidence areas in low- and middle-income countries.

In the first week, we spoke with Abdulai Swaray and Bai Kamara from the Pikin-to-Pikin Movement. In this discussion, we heard more about how radio-based education can be used to keep girls and students in remote areas learning during emergencies.

In the second week, we visited Dr Samuel Moriba and Prince Brainard at Freetown Teachers College. In this conversation, we learned about the opportunities and challenges associated with WhatsApp-based communities of practice for in-service teacher professional development.
 
In the third week, we met with the team from Plan International who led the implementation of the Girls’ Access to Education programme with funding from UK Aid through the Girls’ Education Challenge. In this interview, we found out more about their work to deliver a distance teacher professional development programme to women in rural areas of Sierra Leone.

1. Using messaging help parents support their children 
   Parents and caregivers are particularly important in supporting younger learners. Messaging can help not only to sensitize parents to information on education, but also to get parents and caregivers actively involved in using materials with children (⇡Jordan & Mitchell, 2020).
   
   In a remote learning situation, we found that parents’ confidence to support their children is just as important a factor as their access to information about education. Messaging can be used to build parent and caregiver confidence in their abilities (see #Keep Kenya Learning campaign sandbox). 
    
2. Positive responses from caregivers to messaging do not always translate into learning gains 
   Evidence from the early childhood development sector highlights some potential limits of low-cost messaging to parents and caregivers compared with more intensive interventions. A recent World Bank working paper found that while a daily text messaging programme improved caregivers’ self-reported parenting practices, it did not improve children’s cognitive or socio-emotional outcomes (⇡Barrera, et al., 2020).
   
   In our recent work with Jusoor in Lebanon, which used WhatsApp to provide Syrian refugee communities access to remote learning, we found that families are often saturated with messaging. Only when messages provide practical, actionable information are they likely to be read, let alone taken up. And, while 67% of parents said they found the information helpful, the information did not translate into an increase in engagement with the remote learning programme (see Jusoor sandbox in Lebanon).
   
   Future work will build on these lessons to probe how mobile phone-based nudges to caregivers can improve their engagement in education, specifically girls’ education, through work with Innovations for Poverty Action in Ghana under our Covid-19 research effort.