Education Technology
Article | August 4, 2022
What role will artificial intelligence play in the future of education? For educators, AI can feel like an exciting development — or a terrifying unknown.
AI technology is advancing quickly and creating solutions once thought impossible. It’s widely available in various technologies and, in many places, already being integrated into the classroom. The pandemic spurred the development of educational technology out of necessity, including the development of AI. Suddenly, educators needed ways to obtain more information virtually.
“We were starting to work on AI during the pandemic, but it sped up because there was a huge demand for it. All these things were happening online, and teachers were saying. I don’t know what’s happening in my classroom anymore."
- Mike Tholfsen, principal group product manager at Microsoft Education
With educators busier than ever, Tholfsen says, the greatest benefit AI can offer them is time. AI programs can gather data teachers would traditionally have to gather themselves manually.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Trying to define artificial intelligence is a bit like asking about the meaning of life: You will get a slightly different answer from everyone. At its core, AI is an area of computer science addressing the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers.
Michelle Zimmerman, a classroom teacher, researcher and school leader at Renton Prep Christian School in Washington state and author of the book Teaching AI: Exploring New Frontiers for Learning, notes that psychologists and neurologists in the field don’t even agree on what counts as human intelligence.
The definition also changes over time. Not too long ago, simple calculators were considered AI, while the term now is associated with a variety of innovative technologies, such as those that power content filtering and endpoint security.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning: What’s the Difference?
Though not all AI involves machine learning, it is a popular subcategory of the technology. Machine learning refers to machines that process vast amounts of data and also have the capacity to get better at it the more they “learn,” Zimmerman says.
“You can train models with machine learning to improve things. An example is speech-to-text technology,” Tholfsen says.
“Machine learning needs a lot of data to train it to look for patterns and understand what it is looking for. The more data, the more refined or accurate the results. The results, though, are only as good as the data included,” Zimmerman says.
How Can AI Be Used in K–12 Education?
AI is already playing a role in many classrooms and has promising benefits that can be integrated now and in the future.
Intelligent tutors
What if an AI program could play the role of a teacher or coach, leading students through lessons and even motivating them? Nancye Black, founder of the Block Uncarved and project lead for ISTE’s AI Explorations program, says AI can support learners in a variety of ways. As a Columbia University researcher, she’s exploring how avatar interactions impact students. “There is some really promising research around the use of AI agents supporting girls and students of color, who are able to — in a lower-risk situation — ask for help and have social learning, even when they are learning independently,” Black says.
Reading workshops
If educators could host reading workshops around the classroom with each individual student, they would. Instead, AI-powered products such as Microsoft’s Immersive Reader can help educators focus on improving education for the 1 in 7 learners who have a disability, Tholfsen says. The product uses text decoding solutions to individualize instruction.
"Machine learning needs a lot of data to train it to look for patterns and understand what it is looking for. The more data, the more refined or accurate the results.”
- Michelle Zimmerman Classroom Teacher, Researcher and School Leader, Renton Prep Christian School
Translation capabilities
Translation technology is improving quickly, and these tools include more dialects and language nuances every day. A teacher in New York, for example, used AI technology to host a virtual parent night for families who speak multiple different languages, Tholfsen says. Microsoft Translate allows the teacher to generate a code, which broadcasts to everyone connecting to the stream. It translates the speaker’s language into listeners’ languages without the necessity of a human interpreter. “Listeners can type or speak back in their languages, and it cross-translates, so when you type back in Spanish, it goes to me in English, translates to Mike in Italian, and to the person speaking Arabic or Chinese,” Tholfsen says. “It’s like the Star Trek universal translator.”
Low-vision accessibility
Accessibility checkers are helping educators increase access for low-vision students. “We use AI and computer vision to identify what is in an image and generate a caption,” Tholfsen says. “It’s a massive timesaver to do auto-captioning on images, so people are much more likely to make their content accessible.”
The implementation of AI tools won’t replace educators but will instead help them save time. The tech can be customized to fit any classroom, putting educators in control of the AI tools — not the other way around.
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Education Technology, Continuing Education
Article | August 8, 2022
Table of Content
What is the School Management System?
Benefits of Having School Management System
Why is the School Management System Required in Educational Institutions?
Conclusion
Managing the day-to-day tasks of the educational institute is not at all easy. There are thousands of things that need to be tracked regularly. Therefore, software development companies have come up with a technological solution that can help the institutes seamlessly perform their daily activities. The solution is a school management system or we can say an ERP system for schools and colleges. In this blog, we will learn more about it and see how its implementation can be beneficial.
What is the School Management System?
The school management system is software that manages the complex tasks of educational institutions like schools, colleges, and coaching centers. It is a tool specially designed to automate the education institutions’ management and operations. The school management system is a paperless administration that helps in avoiding costly errors and also saves a lot of time.
Benefits of Having School Management System
The main advantage of school management software enables the students, teachers, and parents to connect with each other. Besides this, there are some other benefits of implementing the management system in educational institutions and they are -
1. Increases Productivity
With the use of the school management system, educational institutions can boost their productivity. The reason behind the increase in productivity is that the system decreases the time to maintain the track records and organize the data. This makes the work progress of the institution very accurate. Besides, the lesser time the institute takes to manage the data, the more productive it becomes.
2. Anywhere Access
The school management software can be accessed from anywhere and at any time. It keeps the record of everything and those things are easily accessible. Basically, the software is the way to provide information at the immediate measures.
3. Student-Teacher Collaboration
With the use of cloud-based management software, the collaboration between teacher and student becomes beyond the classrooms. It helps to increase the interactions between the students and the institute’s staff members. This interaction happens through the application.
4. Reduces Workload
The digital platform reduces the workload of the staff members. They don't have to manually note down the data of the students or create studying materials manually. So be it the administration department or teachers, all can be relaxed and do their tasks digitally with fewer efforts.
Why is the School Management System Required in Educational Institutions?
School Management System is a digital platform that enables educational institutions to regularly manage administrative and academic activities like admission, online fee payment, attendance, online classes, and more. Besides this, there are some more important reasons that make school educational software an essential element in schools and colleges. They are -
1. Easy & Smooth Communication
With the school management platform, the communication between the school authorities and students becomes easy and fast. It makes the communication channel between the teachers, parents, and students very convenient. The school can send fee reminders and student’s report cards to the parents through this school software.
2. Creates School Branding
In this technologically advanced world, not having a school management system can make the education institute look underrated. The schools that use this type of software have a positive impact on the parents, students, and teachers. And this positive impact can help in building a good brand value for the school.
3. Transparency
The school management platform makes all the information transparent for every user. For instance, if the student is absent for one day then it gets visible on his curriculum. Besides, if parents are busy and cannot attend the PTA meeting, then they can check the meeting details on the application.
4. Student Management
The education software allows the institution to save the data related to the student’s promotion, performance, homework, attendance, projects, admissions, and more. This makes it easy for the school to check a particular student’s details as per their grades in one place.
5. Managing Employee & Their Payroll
With the help of the school software, the administration can easily manage and keep track of the salary of the teachers and other staff members. Besides, they can also keep a record of the other salary-related works like leaves, deduction, bonus, and more. The software helps in calculating all these things without any error.
6. GPS Tracking
The school management system can help the education institute and parents to keep track of student’s safety and security. The software provides GPS tracking of the school bus which can be accessed by the parents and the school administration. They can track the transportation route of the bus and if for any reason the bus is not on time, they can check its location and see to it when the students will reach the school or home.
Conclusion
As seen in this blog, there are many advantages of implementing a school management system in educational institutes. It facilitates the schools and colleges to manage their operations with ease. And it also covers the loopholes of the traditional education management methods.
To sum it up, having a school management platform can lessen the workload and increase the productivity of students, teachers, and administration.
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Education Technology
Article | July 5, 2022
Education technology has the opportunity to improve learning outcomes for hundreds of millions of children and adults worldwide.
But what are the biggest trends in edtech for 2021? And what’s coming around the corner?
Read on to find out.
Tech-Enabled Immersive Learning
Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term for augmented reality, virtual reality, or the combination of related technology with the real environment. And it’s one of the biggest edtech trends happening right now. One big reason is cost.
The price of a standalone VR headset is already lower than ever, and expected to drop further to $200 by 2023 (and even lower for mobile-based VR units). Cheaper units means that more schools can use them as a standard part of their curriculum. Separately, the total value of AR in education is expected to reach $5.3 billion by 2023.
But how can these technologies be used to teach?
One way is by enhancing the visual learning process.
Using AR, students can see 3D depictions of dinosaurs, chemical elements, the human body and more. Products like Adobe Aero are making it easy for anyone to build AR objects. While a real expense for many schools, VR can actually be used to save money on physical equipment.
For example, Danish startup Labster provides interactive VR laboratories that STEM students can run experiments with. No million-dollar lab needed. While Google Expeditions lets classes take virtual field trips to places like Mount Everest and the Louvre. And for adults, Interplay Learning lets tradespeople learn skills like HVAC repair and solar panel installation.
VR is also assisting special needs students.
Students with disabilities can use VR to see things they can't physically access. And autistic kids can rehearse scenarios they're likely to encounter in the outside world.
Another type of immersive learning is "makerspaces".
Unrelated to AR and VR, makerspaces are physical areas of a classroom, school, library, or community center that allow students to build things by hand. They can be used for any creative endeavor, like creating books or art. But makerspaces are often used for tech projects.
For example, students are using littleBits kits to learn programming.
Innovative K-12 Homeschooling Startups
Interest in homeschooling in the US has been increasing for years. In fact, homeschoolers currently make up 3.4% of American school-aged children.
And because of the coronavirus pandemic, homeschooling has been an even hotter topic over the past couple of years.
But a lot of homeschooling is still conducted with old-school pen and paper, using workbooks that can be expensive or outdated. So it's no surprise that several edtech startups are stepping in to offer new, tech-enabled homeschooling solutions.
One of these is Prisma.
Offering a blend of in-person and live online learning experiences, Prisma separates the roles of instructor and facilitator/coach.
And promises to unlock learners' potential in the process. Outschool is another interesting edtech startup in the homeschooling space. Outschool works by matching students with teachers for online learning in small groups, conducted live.
A third example is Primer.
This startup wants to build the "full-stack infrastructure" to help parents homeschool their kids, with the hope of bringing homeschooling into the mainstream. The platform includes a tool to help parents navigate local regulations, a learning management system, and a library of curated educational resources.
ELearning
In 2021, there’s probably no bigger education trend than eLearning.
According to the Research Institute of America, eLearning increases retention rates by 25 to 60 percent. It's also extremely scalable, allowing the best educators to reach many students at the same time (or at different times, in the case of on-demand pre-recorded courses.)
And at a much lower cost than traditional in-person classes. No wonder this industry is expected to exceed $1 trillion by 2027. The homeschooling startups we just covered are following the eLearning trend for K-12.
But tools that aren't built for online learning are also being used en masse to teach courses live. An example of this is via Zoom. Additionally, a whole host of service providers have stepped in to serve different segments of this growing sub-industry.
Some colleges have started offering 100% online bachelor’s degrees in recent years. And many others have offered online courses during the pandemic.
So it's safe to assume a good portion of them will continue to offer online learning post-pandemic as well. While Coursera has partnered with scores of universities (including Stanford and Yale) to provide higher education courses and degrees online.
And beyond college, Udemy offers online courses for professionals seeking to improve their skills.
Other major players in the eLearning space include:
MasterClass, a subscription service for on-demand courses taught by celebrities.
Teachable and Thinkific, course-creation platforms for entrepreneurs.
Lessonly, B2B training software.
Italki, 1-on-1 language tutoring.
DailyBurn, an app for exercise courses.
In K-12 education, the eLearning trend is unlikely to slow down. But it's not without its challenges. According to a survey of IT leaders in the U.S. educational system, only 7% expect their school districts to return to pre-pandemic onsite teaching this fall. However, 87 percent named off-campus internet availability as an urgent issue to resolve to maximize distance learning possibilities.
Accessible Education
As of 2018, there were 258 million children worldwide not getting an education. Things are improving: that number is down from 378 million in 2000.
But there's still a long way to go when it comes to accessibility. Even in Europe and North America, there are millions of out-of-school children. eLearning promises to help solve this problem. However, there are still barriers.
For example, many schools have doled out Chromebooks to each student. But some of these homes lack internet access. In the US, 86.6% of households have broadband. But in rural areas, the number is much lower.
Device availability is another challenge. Mobile-first learning may be able to help with both of the above. After all, mobile devices are cheaper than laptops. And rather than requiring wifi access, they can rely on mobile data service.
But not everyone can afford a dedicated additional mobile device, or a data plan for it either. So in some cities, local PBS networks are broadcasting lessons on TV for pre-K to 8th graders. While some libraries have offered curbside book deliveries. At the same time, many edtech leaders are calling for the FCC to use its E-Rate program to help bring reliable internet access to homes.
For homeschoolers and underserved communities, free educational resources are also helpful. Open Educational Resources (OER) and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) offer no-cost use of materials and software for educational purposes, enabling students and educators access that would not otherwise be possible.
AI-Enabled Adaptive Learning (And Admin)
Adaptive learning is a high-tech form of personalized education. Thanks to AI, digital learning interfaces can adapt to students' needs in real time, providing the lessons and exercises that are needed to fill in knowledge gaps and reinforce concepts.
All at the level of the individual student. Automated, intelligent tutoring systems have been on the rise for years. In fact, the first "teaching machine" was created in 1924.
But it's only more recently that processing power (both in the cloud and on local devices) has become powerful enough to employ AI for this purpose. Unlocking near-unlimited possibilities for personalized learning.
One example is the AI-powered math tutoring service Thinkster, which promises up to a 90% improvement in math scores for K-8th graders. And in April 2020, Thinkster acquired another AI-based adaptive learning service called SelectQ.
SelectQ applies the technology for SAT test prep tutoring. Adaptive learning is also present in the ROYBI Robot, named one of Time Magazine's best inventions of 2019. The ROYBI Robot uses machine learning to tailor its educational content to the child who's interacting with it, taking the child's learning style and emotions into account. Artificial intelligence is also being used to grade essays in at least 21 U.S. states - though the results aren't always flawless.
AI-enabled chatbots are becoming increasingly common as well.
For example, the chatbot-like Duolingo uses adaptive learning to teach foreign languages. And chatbots like Ivy.ai and AdmitHub are being used as higher-ed administrative assistants, helping with anything from the college admissions process to student housing and financial aid. These automated tools can drastically reduce costs for colleges, as the average cost of a call center call is about $5.
Gamification
Gamification in education is nothing new. For ages, teachers have been offering students prizes for reading books, achieving good grades or otherwise being a good pupil.
But in the digital era, game mechanics can be used in even more ways. In fact, many educational tools are simply games.
Minecraft is probably the most common example.
This "sandbox" style game has been used to create stage performances, write stories, and even teach students about DNA. And with over 100 million monthly players, gaming platform Roblox is now even bigger than Minecraft. It's being used around the world to teach programming and game design. On the other hand, game mechanics are being added to non-games as well.
Socrative offers a "space race" feature that turns quizzes into a competitive game. Knowre brings gaming mechanics (and adaptive learning) to math lessons. And ClassDojo can add points-based gamification to almost any subject.
Google Everything
Google has planted roots in the education system. Thanks to their low cost and ease of use (and maintenance), Chromebooks have become the standard student-learning device.
And there's no more natural pair to Chromebooks than G Suite for Education. This suite of tools includes favorites like Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail and Forms - each of which can be used by faculty or students. (And a free version is available.)
Also included in G Suite for Education are Google Classroom and Google Assignments. Google Classroom offers a digital space for students and teachers to interact, assign and turn in homework, and more.
While Google Assignments is a tool to help teachers create and grade coursework more quickly. Finally, Google also offers their Google Cloud Platform to schools and universities, offering cloud storage and computing power for research and other uses.
Accelerating Investments In EdTech
Global edtech venture capital investments totaled more than $10 billion in 2020, up from $500 million in 2010. Some estimate an additional $87 billion in investment over the next decade. According to EdSurge, from 2014 to 2018 the most well-funded education technology product category in the U.S. was post-secondary education products.
With curriculum products fighting "other" products for second place. Among the well-funded post-secondary edtech companies are CommonBond (which has secured $1.6 billion in funding since 2011) and CampusLogic (which has secured $192.8 million).
However, both are focused on student loans and financial aid services, making them arguably more fintech than edtech. Lambda School is another highly-watched education startup, which again blends edtech with finance. Rather than charging its students outright, it uses income-share agreements (ISAs) to make money based on a portion of its graduates' career earnings.
These Western startups may be exciting, but for now, most of the largest edtech "unicorns" are in Asia. Will the U.S. and Europe pick up the pace? Or will American and European investors put more of their money into foreign ventures? It will be interesting to see which well-funded startups end up shaking up the education sector.
Wrapping Up
There you have it: eight of the most interesting education technology trends of 2021. From AI-powered learning to eLearning and more, for PreK-12 and adult learning. Many of these trends are poised to disrupt the field of education as we know it.
Hopefully for the better.
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Education Technology
Article | May 11, 2022
For so long, we have deeply embedded technology in our everyday lives. Working and learning from home complement each other, creating an ecosystem of solutions. Even as organizations continue to lean towards remote offices and hybrid working, the same may not be possible with learning.
Businesses worldwide have blazed the trail for remote working. The past two years have seen both, formal education, and work taking a big virtual leap. While virtual learning has been around for some time, we have thrust it into the mainstream only because of the events following the pandemic. Remote work is no longer a trend or the domain of freelancers and tech workers. While organizations learned to maintain their productivity even as their workforce was scattered, schools and learning centers weren’t far behind.
Schools could shift learning online using the principles and technology businesses were using to stay productive.
Working and Learning from Home, Together
Zoom classrooms are no match for the physical learning environment provided by a school.Although online education existed as a part-time alternative, traditional schooling has always been a holistic, on-premise experience. Virtual schooling cannot be dismissed, as proven by the last two years. It is especially significant in today’s remote work era and as a precursor to it.
While there were mixed feelings about accepting the new normal, families enjoyed several benefits including lowered education costs, zero travel time, children’s safety, and a newfound work-life balance. Virtual schooling has become the norm. It worked only because parents could also stay back and help create a learning environment at home while they worked. They have now become integral to their kids’ learning and growth.
“In the higher education space, most schools were, and still are, predominantly focused on that in-person campus visit to do all those same things, but it’s expensive and it means only students and parents who travel to campus can get that real-life feel and experience.”
- Matthew Pellish, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at CampusReel
Cultivating the Workforce of the Future
Virtual learning will provide children with the bandwidth they need to become competent in a world where remote working is the standard. They will have already conquered the learning curve. Remote learning will equip learners with the technical understanding, attitude, and collaborative spirit needed to excel in a technology-driven world. In addition, it will prepare them not just for hybrid workplaces but for a hybrid life that promotes work-life balance.
Just as remote work enables easy access to talent worldwide, remote learning will help students access elusive academic programs and high-quality education in a flexible setting.
Final Word
The future has been transformed forever, and virtual schooling is gaining traction. It also looks set to follow the footsteps of remote working, a concept that is now solidifying in the form of hybrid workplace policies. Higher education institutes are realizing the advantages of virtual learning. They are incorporating a remote angle into their course delivery to make it faster, efficient, and more accessible. Will hybrid learning be the future of schooling? Looking at the course that online learning is set upon, it will.
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