Category: Education

Happy New Year! As we start off 2019, we wanted to share the most popular posts from 2018. With a focus on developing our next-generation of cloud practitioners to best practices to get started in your cloud environment, read the top ten blog posts from the AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofit blog.

My grandma is 88-years old with reduced mobility. She lives alone, without a caretaker, in a small village. If she falls, then she is in danger. If something goes wrong when she’s in bed, she might need assistance. With an AWS IoT button, she can call for help in a simple way and potentially save her life. Her village provides free Wi-Fi coverage, so I built an emergency alert system using AWS. When she clicks the AWS IoT button, a series of events will take place to get her the assistance she needs. This can help her in difficult situations. It’s a solution that others can create as well. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to get started.

AWS EdStart members are transforming education in every corner of the globe. Read on for more about three of our members – ArcLab, Lightbulb Education, and Yellowdig. Each of these EdTechs rely on AWS to create a more student-centric learning experience.

Developed jointly by Singapore’s five polytechnics, PolyMall is a one-stop portal to access online learning content across multiple sectors and disciplines. In PolyMall, students are able to access high-quality learning resources at their fingertips for an engaging online learning experience. PolyMall provides a common platform for the five polytechnics to share online learning packages among both students and staff.

Amazon today announced the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to promote sustainability research, innovation, and problem solving by making key data easily accessible and even more widely available. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative leverages Amazon Web Services’ technology and scalable infrastructure to stage, analyze, and distribute data, and is a joint effort between the AWS Open Data and Amazon Sustainability teams.

From Cape Town, South Africa to Herndon, Virginia, Amazonians hosted over 140 events across the globe with over 1,760 employees volunteering their time to teach an Hour of Code to over 28,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade. Employees across Amazon volunteered for Hour of Code to help inspire the workforce of tomorrow.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed application streaming service that lets students access the applications they need for class through a browser. It doesn’t matter whether they’re using Macs, Chromebooks, or PCs, or whether they’re in the classroom, the library, a cafe, or at home. For example, Cornell University uses AppStream 2.0 to deliver CAD/CAM applications to its engineering students without the need for computer labs.

To celebrate Computer Science Education week and the Global Hour of Code, AWS Educate has launched a new experience for students between the ages of 14-17. Students now have access to a new website experience and three new badges with learning content to discover and grow their cloud expertise. The website offers a dynamic, streamlined navigational experience so students can easily dive into interactive challenges and hands-on activities. Teachers can also access supplemental guides for the challenges that map to core computer science principles, enabling both students and teachers to explore, invent, and build.

Fife Public Schools provides a device for every kid in the district. But like many schools with 1:1 programs, they ran into challenges when trying to provide specialty software programs to students. CTE (Careers and Technical Education) classes were using specialized applications like CAD, Project Lead the Way, and Photoshop – all programs that were only accessible via computer labs during school hours. Fife began exploring how they could offer students access to these programs at any time on their 1:1 devices.

During the first week of December, students all around the world will learn computer science during the annual Hour of Code event led by Code.org. It’s an important effort, aimed at helping kids from all backgrounds learn to code and work toward successful careers making use of computer science skills.