About
The Awards of Excellence: Best of 2021 will celebrate educational technology that exceptionally supported teachers and students in Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education in 2021. The contest will recognize outstanding products that supported teaching and learning this past year no matter the learning environment, whether face-to-face, remote, or anything in between.
Why Enter?
Winning an AOE for The Best Tools for Back to School is more than just a pat on the back from Tech & Learning's editors.
Get the national exposure your brand deserves with a Tech&Learning Award of Excellence: Best of 2021 nomination – and put your product in front of a guaranteed audience of 70,000 avid T&L readers.
Additional benefits of entering the awards:
Winner logos will be distributed for use on product marketing and collateral.
Winning products will be showcased in a special edition of Tech & Learning distributed to 70,000 district leaders and school administrators.
An Award of Excellence represents the highest approval rating - based on evaluation by actual educators using education technology every day.
New for the Best of 2021 Awards! Along with our panel of educators, the T&L editors will be keeping an eye on the nominations to select a few stand out products to receive the T&L Recommends seal of approval.
These products will receive additional coverage on techlearning.com and have to opportunity to work with our endorsements team to license the badge for product marketings.*
* T&L Recommends badges will be awarded separately from the Awards of Excellence Winner logos. The AoE Winner logo usage rights are included in the entry fee for all winning products.
How Nominees Are Evaluated
Tech & Learning is looking for the rightest new products in the educational space – the tech that’s been turning heads and helping teachers and students to learn faster, easier, and more successfully than ever before.
Each nominee will have to answer the following questions:
- What specific problem does this product solve?
- How did your product exceptionally support teaching and learning in 2021?
- How does your product address the challenges facing education today?
So what does that mean in practice? It means our judges will be thinking about questions like:
- Can this product be used for remote teaching, as well as in-person?
- What features have been adjusted to help with hybrid and remote learning?
- How does your product support Social-emotional Learning (SEL) in schools?
- How have you adjusted your product to address inequities in learning
Tech&Learning's panel of educators and judges will evaluate each of these answers, along with the product descriptions, images and case studies. The panel will score each product on Ease of use, Value, Versatility, and Utility. Those products which score highly across the criteria will be named a winner in this year's Awards of Excellence: The Best of 2021.
NOMINATIONS CLOSED
Frequently Asked Questions
Any company that has a product that supports innovative, effective teaching and learning which launched, or relaunched, in 2021.
Winning an Award of Excellence tells the industry that your product has been approved by the most important audience - the educators themselves. The top products will be selected and featured in a special edition of Tech & Learning magazine reaching over 70,000 edtech professionals
All entries are due by 11:59pm EST, December 30 2021
Single Entry: $595
The categories are broken down into Primary (Tools for K-6 grade education), Secondary (7-12) and Higher Ed. You can enter the same product into multiple categories.
Yes. There is no limit to the number of products you may nominate. Each requires a nomination form and entry fee(s).
Entering the Awards of Excellence is easier than ever:
- Register your product
Fill out our new online form to get started. If you can’t do it all at once, we’ll automatically save your progress for later. - Fill out the nomination form
Answer the nomination questions and upload any supporting images, case studies and testimonials - Submit your application
Simply save and submit your application, and pay the entry fee by credit card.
Winners will be announced in February 2022 and featured in a special issue of Tech&Learning.