EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY
Businesswire | April 03, 2023
“We’re honored to be recognized by The EdTech Awards for our Unified Classroom® solution, which unites the critical teaching and learning tools that educators and students need in one place,” said Marcy Daniel, Chief Product Officer at PowerSchool. “We understand the needs of educators today and are proud to provide innovative solutions that support every student.”
PowerSchool was also recognized as a finalist in the following Cool Tool award categories:
• Administrative Solution for PowerSchool Unified Administration™
• Career Planning Solution for Naviance by PowerSchool
• Classroom Management Solution for Unified Classroom® • Curriculum and Instruction Solution for Unified Classroom®
• District Data Solution for PowerSchool Unified Insights™
• E-Learning, Blended, Flipped Solution or Remote Solution for Unified Classroom®
• Enrollment & Admissions Solution for PowerSchool Enrollment
• Higher Education Solution for PeopleAdmin’s Faculty Solutions
• New Product or Service (releases in 2020 or later) for Unified Classroom® and PeopleAdmin’s Course Evaluations
Celebrating its 13th year, the US-based program is the world’s largest recognition program for education technology, recognizing the biggest names in edtech – and those who soon will be. Featuring edtech’s best and brightest, the annual program shines a spotlight on cool tools, inspiring leaders and innovative trendsetters across the K-12, Higher Education, and Skills and Workforce sectors.
“A very big congratulations to all The EdTech Awards 2023 finalists and winners—and congratulations to all who endured the upheavals of the last few years only to come through stronger, more experienced, resilient, and resolute in laying out the future of learning,” said Victor Rivero, Editor-in-Chief of EdTech Digest. “To the innovators, leaders, and trendsetters of education technology, you are the way forward. Your future-focused mindset is welcomed, encouraged, and needed now more than ever—and we salute you!”
This year’s finalists and winners were narrowed from the larger field and judged based on various criteria, including pedagogical workability, efficacy and results, support, clarity, value, and potential.
About PowerSchool
PowerSchoolis the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America. Its mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their full potential, in their way. PowerSchool connects students, teachers, administrators, and parents, with the shared goal of improving student outcomes. From the office to the classroom to the home, it helps schools and districts efficiently manage state reporting and related compliance, special education, finance, human resources, talent, registration, attendance, funding, learning, instruction, grading, assessments and analytics in one unified platform. PowerSchool supports over 50 million students globally and more than 15,000 customers, including more than 90 of the top 100 districts by student enrollment in the United States, and sells solutions in more than 90 countries.
About Edtech Digest and The Edtech Awards
EdTech Digest, a leading source of cool tools, interviews, and trends showcasing the future of learning — annually honors the best and brightest people, products and groups working in edtech with The EdTech Awards. Cool Tool, Leadership, and Trendsetter honorees span the K-12, Higher Ed, and Skills & Workforce sectors.
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CORPORATE LEARNING SYSTEMS
iMocha | April 13, 2023
iMocha, the world's leading skills intelligence and skills assessment platform launches project-based assessments to its growing portfolio of assessment types. It is built for talent development teams to gather whether employees are skill-fit and ready to be deployed on projects and determine ROI of learning programs.
Today, tech assessments are usually done via single-task coding assessments, whiteboard interviews, and MCQs but that's seldom enough to gauge project-readiness of employees or know the effectiveness of the upskilling programs. Especially for job profiles like front-end developer, back-end developer, full-stack developer, assessments that go beyond algorithms, syntax, and logic are required. iMocha's project-based assessments help talent professionals overcome these challenges and determine skill readiness, including problem-solving skills, domain-specific skills, contextual understanding, and ability to think through a project.
In August 2022, the beta version of iMocha Projects was deployed for iMocha's existing customers that included enterprises and learning platforms. Through the project-based assessments, L&D teams were able to automate time-consuming, manual evaluations that could be subject to bias. Further they also received detailed skills analytics about their employees – which helped in creating accurate and personalized learning paths. Some of the most popular skill sets beta users utilized were ReactJS, Data Science and Machine Learning, Java Spring Boot, MySQL, and more.
Sujit Karpe, CTO and co-founder of iMocha, explained, "This is iMocha's version of capstone projects: we provide the data, the problem statement, and essentially everything required to successfully work on a project. Often, coding assessments fell short in determining real-life skills; they also cannot handle multiple project files like ReactJS, Angular, Jupyter Lab, and more. With iMocha projects, talent development leaders can bridge the gap between experiential learning and hands-on knowledge application by evaluating employees on real-world challenges, similar to what they would be facing on the job."
He continued, "With iMocha Projects, talent leaders will be able to show true value gained via their L&D programs and measure training effectiveness objectively."
About iMocha
iMocha is a skills intelligence and assessment platform that enables talent leaders to make smarter talent decisions with its skills-first insights. 500+ organizations across 70+ countries trust the platform to acquire job-fit talent faster and to measure the ROI from their talent development initiatives. It empowers talent teams with the largest skill library with 2500+ assessments, AI-LogicBox (AI-based pseudo-coding simulator), AI-EnglishPro (AI-powered language analyzer), skill benchmarking, upskilling dashboard, talent analytics, proctoring, fraud detection, and custom assessment consulting, etc.
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CORPORATE EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Globenewswire | April 18, 2023
ClassIn, a world leader in hybrid, blended, and remote learning solutions, today announced the launch of its globally recognized platform in the United States. The ClassIn platform has been purpose-built for education and based on nearly a decade of research, development, and in-market experience. Through its software and hardware solutions, ClassIn provides the digital infrastructure for the hybrid future of education by building classrooms in both the virtual and physical worlds. ClassIn is the only end-to-end education platform with a full suite of innovative tools and features, all designed with hybrid-first pedagogy at its core. It supports active learning, student flexibility, and various teaching and learning methods.
While schools have worked to embrace technology for decades, innovation has been slow and fragmented, and most new technologies have been designed to solve a singular problem. Today, the average US teacher uses 148 different EdTech products and the average US school district uses over 1,400 EdTech solutions. The pandemic exacerbated this issue, as most schools implemented “emergency remote teaching” instead of pedagogically aligned instruction, cobbling together many disparate technologies that were not built or designed for education.
“Remote and hybrid teaching brought long-touted but previously out-of-reach, student-centric instruction to life, making room for self-guided learning, flexible schedules, and additional time to explore volunteer, hobby, and work opportunities,” said Sara Gu, Co-Founder, and COO at ClassIn. “We’re at an inflection point. The classroom of the future will be networked, digitized, and intelligent, which means our learning solutions must be built on a solid foundation: based on hybrid-first pedagogy and backed by learning science. With over 50 million students using our solution in 160+ countries, our hardware and software solutions reduce districts' need for the patchwork of over 1,400 different technologies by combining many of those capabilities seamlessly.”
ClassIn’s comprehensive suite of tools helps educators and administrators address multiple challenges by:
• Helping School Districts Address Teacher Shortages: According to the National Education Association, there is a shortage of roughly 300,000 teachers and staff across the U.S. The teacher shortage is particularly pronounced in rural school districts, where the need for special education teachers and STEM teachers is high. ClassIn allows schools to expand the reach of instruction from more experienced faculties to locations where those resources are scarce.
• Encouraging Equitable Learning by Leveling the Playing Field for Virtual and In-Person Learning Modalities: From two-way interactive blackboards to breakout rooms, class polling, real-time interaction, and personalized learning, ClassIn encourages student engagement and interaction and allows teachers to design a classroom that goes beyond successful lectures, incorporating other modalities of instruction and teamwork.
• Offering Strategic Hardware Solutions: ClassIn X transforms traditional classrooms into outcome-driven hybrid learning spaces through an IoT hardware package that digitizes the physical classroom. It offers a 110’’ smart board that comes with ClassIn software, an AI-enabled multi-directional microphone that clearly captures the sound in an 800-square-foot classroom, and a stationary face-tracking camera, which makes it easy for remote students to see the teacher’s face and gestures.
• Providing Fast, Seamless Technology: Built to handle virtual, hybrid, and blended learning, ClassIn’s technology allows up to 2,000 students to interact in a single classroom, with millions more learners able to view and listen to the livestream in real-time.
• Streamlining School & District Administrative Tools: The administration dashboard streamlines school management, enabling batch lesson planning for the entire semester and generating data-rich reports that reflect student participation during and after class. The wide variety of functionality allows schools to handle hybrid and blended learning on their terms in a way that works best for their school district and classrooms. Administrators can also easily review and analyze teacher and student performance through over 40 metrics, including attendance, classroom activity, and test and homework data.
ClassIn makes it easy to teach, learn, and build learning communities with minimal friction, freeing up teachers to do their best work, and students to do their best learning—all in an active, supportive, and flexible environment.
About ClassIn
A world leader in learning environment solutions, ClassIn has pioneered the digital and physical infrastructure for the hybrid future of education. Purpose-built for education based on nearly a decade of research, development, and in-market experience, ClassIn is the only end-to-end education platform with a full suite of tools designed with hybrid-first pedagogy at its core. ClassIn serves over 50 million students across 160+ countries. ClassIn has partnered with more than 80,000+ educational institutions including Oxford University Press, Sony Education, EF, The British Council, Pearson, and Udacity. The Series D company has raised more than $500 million and is backed by Hillhouse and Tencent, among others.
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