The six-criteria rubric to judge any catalogue before bringing it into your classrooms.
To evaluate digital educational content, score six criteria: alignment with your official curriculum, coverage by grade and subject, pedagogical quality of the activities, offline operation, ease of search for teachers and the update mechanism. The definitive test is not the provider's demo: it is one of your teachers finding material for tomorrow's lesson.
Two schools with identical equipment can live opposite experiences because of content: in one, the teacher finds the fractions activity in a minute; in the other she wanders through disordered folders until she gives up. Hardware is compared on a spec sheet; content can only be evaluated by using it through the teacher's eyes.
Request trial access and hand it to three teachers from different grades and subjects with one concrete task: prepare next week's lesson with that catalogue. If they find what they need in minutes and the activities work in their classroom, the content passes; if they come back with screenshots of confusing folders, you have your answer.
Curricula change, guidelines get revised and content ages. Ask how often the catalogue is updated, whether improvements arrive at no extra cost and how they install in schools without a permanent connection. A frozen catalogue is a postponed problem, not a solved one.
More than it usually gets: teachers interact with the content every day and with the hardware brand almost never. In the decision matrix it deserves a weight comparable to the equipment's.
It depends on your educational project: if bilingualism is part of it, evaluate content quality in each language separately. A machine translation of English material is not bilingual content.
That is a good sign and it must be possible: check that the platform lets teachers create, adapt and share their own activities alongside the base catalogue. The healthy balance is curated catalogue plus teacher creation, not one without the other.
If AVACOM educational technology interests you, write to us.