Category: K12

The 2021 IMAGINE Education conference brought together education leaders and executives from across the country and around the world in an all-day event to discuss the future of education. It was my honor to deliver the keynote address to highlight some of the ways that the education community in the public sector are transforming the very essence of learning with the cloud. I was joined by Kathryn Finney, the chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Genius Guild and General Partner of the Greenhouse Fund, who expressed how educators are driving innovation for their students and making the impossible, possible.

Discovery Education (DE) provides standards-aligned digital curriculum resources, engaging content, and professional learning for K12 classrooms. Learn how they worked with AWS to enhance its K12 learning platform with machine learning (ML) capabilities.

The Barnes Foundation is home to a legendary art collection, including some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings. At the core of its mission is the advancement of education and art appreciation. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person tours and classes, the Barnes Foundation used the cloud to quickly pivot to develop and launch new online programming to continue to deliver their educational mission, and allowed them to triple enrollment in online courses for adults and reach 40 percent more school-age students during the 2020-2021 school year compared to in-person courses in pre-pandemic years.

According to EdTech Magazine, at the height of the pandemic, 94 percent of educators agreed that students will need increased social and emotional support throughout the school year. There’s a renewed focus on social-emotional learning (SEL) support in the classroom, with educators looking for additional ways to help students be healthy and engaged in class. Four AWS EdStart Members are addressing different aspects of SEL and helping to positively impact the student experience.

For school systems across the U.S., making sure students have a secure environment to use the internet is not only the right thing to do— it’s the law. When the Kentucky Department of Education switched to 100 percent remote learning, they turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Lightspeed Systems to keep students safe and engaged in online learning at home.

Children become aware of traditional careers at a young age. But the careers in modern science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) that are likely to be among the most in-demand when the children enter the workforce aren’t traditionally introduced to younger students. Many cloud occupations are absent in the aspirational pathways commonly discussed in STEAM education. Aspiring tech students are not aware of the full breadth of cloud jobs that exist, and are often pushed a narrow view limited to coding, video game production, and software development. To address these gaps, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Flight Works Alabama (an Airbus Americas 501c3) created the program We Build It Better.

AWS Partner ITZ Data, with support from UNICEF and the Canadian Embassy in Guatemala, helped Ministerio de Educación de Guatemala launch Mineduc Digital—the country’s first online platform where students can access digital self-study guides from any device connected to the internet. The Ministry implemented the solution in less than two months, paving the way for the digital transformation of their education system. The solution was built on AWS.

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the thought of preparing and teaching your students online? It’s a challenging task at best but remember to keep it simple. Leveraging cloud technology can help make teaching and learning remotely more manageable for our students, our community, and us. Picking the right tools in the AWS Cloud can help you with course development. Let’s explore a research-based method called technological pedagogical and content knowledge (or TPACK) that helps plan learning experiences.

Around the world, exams are administered to help students and adults further their education and advance their careers. In the US, approximately eight million high school students took a single standardized college entrance exam in 2019. As the pandemic shifted life to virtual work and learning, it also interrupted high stakes exams typically administered in person. For years, EdTechs like ExamSoft, Sumadi (part of Laureate Education), and ProctorFree have been developing remote proctoring and digital assessment solutions using the cloud.

As schools and other educational institutions turn to remote learning solutions, organizations are reconsidering traditional IT infrastructure, aligning digital solutions to current learning and teaching models, and gearing towards the industry’s new measure of success: student engagement. A hybrid approach allows schools and districts to deploy both on-site and in the cloud, allowing staff and students to take advantage of productivity and collaboration services, to provide business and learning continuity. For more than a decade, To support critical learning applications and infrastructure during natural disasters and other disruptions, West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District chose to use VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) to extend its on-premises VMware vSphere environment.