Education Technology, Continuing Education
Article | August 8, 2022
The demand for data science skills and data-driven decision making has been rapidly accelerating for years. Now, organizations across industries are putting professionals to the test to understand and respond to the drastic shift in business operations and consumer behavior caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Download our free data science guide for an overview of key data science and analytics learning opportunities in today’s unusual economic landscape. Whether you want to explore data science for the first time or advance your career, gain valuable analytics skills that can be applied to a range of job functions, or earn a degree.
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Online Education
Article | July 12, 2022
There’s no question the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges to everyday life. But it has also spurred rapid growth in technologies that aim to make everyday life simpler, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Many industries have been fueling this growth, automating processes through AI (the use of computers and machines to mimic human problem-solving and decision-making abilities).
K–12 education is no exception. As schools rushed to accommodate remote learning with little notice — and maintain a secure online network for students and staff — many incorporated elements of AI and ML. Between digital assistants, endpoint security, chatbots and more, AI is gaining a foothold in U.S. classrooms.
Here are three trends to look for in 2022:
AI in Digital Assistants Helps K–12 Teachers Manage Classrooms
“Alexa, read us a story.”
That’s one way teachers are using digital assistants, such as the popular Amazon Echo device — technology that many parents of home-bound students used last year to aid in their children’s educational routines — in the classroom.
One school district in California has integrated this technology even further with the Symphony Classroom device from Merlyn Mind, described as the world’s first digital assistant for education. The device is powered by Edge AI, combining artificial intelligence with edge computing technology.
It’s a way of getting technology to kids where they’re at and when they need it, says Brian Fish, an English teacher at Rancho Verde High School in California.
“Nothing can replace a teacher. However, technology can expand teaching,” Fish says.
Elsewhere in the Val Verde Unified School District, first grade teacher Jennifer Thornton says it comes in handy in her classroom because she’s never at her desk for very long. Through voice commands, Merlyn — the name given to the AI — can navigate tabs on Thornton’s computer and play or pause a YouTube video for a lesson, for example.
“It’s helped a lot with the classroom management,” she says.
Darren Crist, an elementary special education teacher in the district, also uses it for videos in his classroom. But Merlyn’s best feature, at least for Crist’s students, is its visual timer, which helps them with time management and more.
Crist also assigns students to be in charge of Merlyn as a classroom job, which helps them develop life skills.
“As a special ed teacher I’m focused a lot on, not just the normal standards of academics, but making sure that my kids are able to get some of that executive functioning they might be lacking,” he says.
"Nothing can replace a teacher. However, technology can expand teaching.”
- Brian Fish English teacher, Rancho Verde High School
Next-Generation Cybersecurity Solutions Integrate AI Technology
The use of AI and ML is also shaping cybersecurity and the IT industry. For example, these technologies “can offer IT security professionals a way to enforce good cybersecurity practices and shrink the attack surface instead of constantly chasing after malicious activity,” BizTech reports.
So, what does that mean for schools?
Between January and May 2020, as the pandemic took root, the use of remote management and collaboration apps increased by 87 percent and 141 percent, respectively, in K–12 schools, according to an Absolute Software survey of more than 10,000 school and district representatives.
Despite the rise in online applications for teaching and learning, “educational institutions are spending more on endpoint security yet gaining less visibility and control. Forty-one percent of schools say tracking devices is one of their most significant challenges,” Forbes reported.
That’s where technology such as next-generation endpoint security comes into play. “This advanced protection leverages artificial intelligence to recognize potentially dangerous threats — both known and unknown — in real time without the need for signatures, increasing speed-to-action via a proactive, streamlined security protocol,” according to a CDW•G white paper.
Cybersecurity solutions powered by AI and ML are becoming more popular in school districts because they give time back to small IT teams and allow them to scale security with the introduction of large device fleets.
Chatbots Rely on AI to Improve Communication and Tutoring
AI-powered chatbots have been shown to improve classroom efficiency and help teachers communicate with parents.
Since the onset of the pandemic, even more uses for chatbots have started to gain steam. With tutoring seen as a solution to helping students overcome the COVID-19 learning disruption, chatbots could help bridge the equity gap between students who can’t afford private, traditional tutors and those who can.
“To me, AI is just a set of simple tools that we can use, in this case, to figure out some problems that teachers and kids are persistently having,” researcher Neil Heffernan, a computer science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, says. “The real magic is giving human tutors and teachers a little bit of information on what’s going on so they can be more efficient.”
Google released a suite of programs for higher education that include virtual assistants and, as of November, an AI tutor. The applications in this software suite, called Student Success Services, can be customized for use in K–12 classrooms.
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Online Education
Article | July 19, 2022
As device deployments grow in size and complexity, visibility is needed to track the growth of devices, users and other critical data points. Whether you’re planning for the future or tracking a serious issue now, visualizations are a popular way that IT professionals keep their eye on the health of their environments. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a well-constructed dashboard is a novel that tells the story of your fleet’s present, past and possible future. Fortunately, Jamf provides extensive data points from which to build your dashboards. And we want to make it easy for you to get started.
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Education Technology
Article | December 9, 2021
After almost two years of disruption due to the pandemic, our ongoing recovery has highlighted the value of embracing change and working much more flexibly than before, refusing to give up at the first hurdle and a willingness to work together to achieve a common goal. These transferable skills are becoming ever more important for us to thrive in our increasingly automated world, and they are skills that can be developed and embedded through the medium of mathematics.
Fluency, reasoning, and problem-solving are the three foundations of our mathematics curriculum. By valuing them all, we will ensure that our future workforce has the confidence and skills to work together much more effectively to solve problems, overcome hurdles, and sustain our recovery. Let’s begin with fluency. Although AI is becoming increasingly prevalent, benefiting both our social and working lives, we still need number skills, perhaps now more than ever. Too many high-profile technology projects have failed due to basic mathematical errors. We need our education system to nurture the types of number skills needed in industry, especially a much greater focus on using and applying number skills. We must encourage students to develop their confidence in estimating quantities and a willingness to check calculations, even when they’ve used a spreadsheet or calculator.
From NASA’s disintegrating space probes to trains that don’t fit their platforms and submarines that are just too big, the tech world is littered with avoidable, costly mistakes. Acquiring number fluency means developing a ‘feel’ for numbers so that we can easily spot when something is not quite right; the NASA probe disintegrated due to a simple error converting units, the trains would not fit because no-one checked the platform sizes, and the submarines needed refitting due to an error entering spreadsheet error. Each of those three were incredibly costly, totalling millions, if not billions of pounds, but they were all avoidable too. We must nurture a willingness to estimate and develop a ‘feel’ for numbers, known as ‘number sense,’ alongside the more traditional approach of performing more formal calculations when needed. After all, few people head to the shops armed with a pencil, squared paper, and a ruler in readiness to calculate their change at the cash register.
We need to value number sense and rethink our expectations of the primary curriculum.
Encouraging a different approach towards the teaching and learning of mathematics may also help to address the gender imbalance in the subject. If you filled a room with a hundred math professors, the chances are that less than ten would be female. However, female mathematicians have played key roles in the fight against COVID. Mathematical modellers such as Professor Julia Gog, based at the University of Cambridge, drew on her research as an adviser to the government’s SAGE committee.
Nevertheless, even though more students study A-Level mathematics than any other subject, few female students choose to apply to study mathematics at university. My own research with female A-Level candidates reveals their preference for careers which help others and contribute towards a better society.
However, they often do not appreciate how studying mathematics might help them to realise their dreams by helping thousands, if not millions, of others through research on climate change, medicine, and networks.
We know that the gender gap in mathematical performance starts at a young age, and researchers have suggested that the changing expectations in the curriculum as students progress through their schooling might dissuade girls from continuing to study mathematics at a higher level. At primary school, pupils are expected to master written calculations such as long division and long multiplication to achieve ‘age-related expectations.’ However, to progress further, they also need to be able to solve problems, and this seems to be the point where female students lose out.
It has been argued that the switch from being rewarded for learning procedures to solving problems favours boys over girls, and the persistent gender gap in results for higher-achieving primary pupils appears to add weight to that argument. Effort are being made to encourage more females to consider studying mathematics, including the Maths 4 Girls project which organises school visits from female role models and the careers arm of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications which organises poster competitions to encourage more school students to think carefully about studying mathematics, both projects which I support. Yet more needs to be done.
Our curriculum and assessment system are designed to value number sense, estimating and problem-solving skills and perhaps rethink the time schools devote to rehearsing written calculations. Otherwise, we risk overlooking the huge potential of our current female students to contribute and build on the work of their predecessors, including Florence Nightingale, Mary Boole, Ada Lovelace, and Julia Gog, among many others.
To continue our recovery from COVID and rebuild our economy, we must embrace the potential of mathematics for developing and embedding the skills and attitudes that our students will need to thrive in their increasingly automated world: a willingness to "play" with numbers, estimate and check their answers; an enthusiasm for solving problems and working together; and an understanding that it’s OK to get stuck sometimes. We can overcome the hurdles that we face by working together as a team.
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