Is Amazon a sleeping giant of edtech? Or one of its biggest, underreported failures?
Those are questions to which my answers have varied, especially this year. But now I can definitively answer yes. To both.
As someone who lives in Seattle and has both worked in education technology as an executive and analyst, and observed the tech sector as a columnist, Amazon is inescapable. Its indirect impact on education is huge: as a source for parents and teachers to buy classroom supplies, as a distributor of ebooks and e-readers, as a fundraising tool for school-related nonprofits through the AmazonSmile program, and even as an Amazon Web Services backend for edtech startups and established education companies delivering software through the cloud. It is, at least figuratively, everywhere.
