Tag: Amazon Alexa

This week, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team is at the 2019 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISTE supports educators as they rethink the status quo and use technology to drive good practice. At the event, ACT, Frontline Education, and Kahoot! are rolling out Alexa Skills that make it possible for customers to engage with their products through Alexa.

Every year, students across the U.S. and around the globe begin preparing for college entrance exams. These tests are a key component of any student’s application to college. The ACT, a nonprofit organization that administers the ACT test, wanted to make the process of researching, studying for, and taking the ACT less stressful for students and parents. Today, they are announcing a new Alexa skill that helps guide high school students through the process of preparing for and taking the ACT.

From January 24, 2019 – April 22, 2019, AWS Educate hosted the Alexa Skills Challenge for student members in the United States. Students built solutions to address challenges in the academic setting related to student life, learning, and the community. Participants learned and built solutions using a variety of AWS technologies such as machine learning and conversational artificial intelligence. With AWS Educate’s resources and support, participants delivered helpful Alexa Skills. And now (drumroll please), here are the winners of the AWS Educate Alexa Skills Challenge.

In the current environment of digital transformation, there is a lot of talk on how best to educate students for new job profiles. Attempts to increase graduation numbers in software engineering programs are only part of the answer. All students need to improve their digital literacy and collaboration skills.

Saint Louis University (SLU) will become the first university to bring virtual personal assistants into every student residence on its campus and to equip them with a private, SLU-specific skill through Alexa for Business. This fall, SLU plans to place more than 2,300 Amazon Echo Dots in residence hall rooms and student apartments.

School district administrators deal with several daily questions: How many substitutes did my district have yesterday? What was the number of lost educational hours resulting from absences? How many open positions must be filled in my district? With AWS and Amazon Alexa, Frontline Education is able to serve the answers to these questions and more.

An Amazon Alexa badge with 10-15 hours of dedicated Alexa skills training is now available through AWS Educate. Alexa is Amazon’s voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices like Echo Show and Echo Spot. Alexa provides capabilities, known as “skills,” that enable developers to create a more personalized experience for their products and build natural voice experiences that offer consumers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.

At the University of Oklahoma, we asked ourselves: Can Amazon Alexa help engage college students and enhance their educational experience? How will students utilize voice technology as they graduate and move into their careers? Within the University of Oklahoma IT department, we aim to affect the student experience on campus in more ways than just delivering technology. We have found that the more a student is engaged on campus, the more likely they are to graduate. Technology innovation, like Alexa, will play a major role in that mission.

Federation for Internet Alerts (FIA), the nonprofit whose mission is to get crucial alerts in front of the right people at the right time and place, recently received multiple Creative Media Awards for its life-saving technology. It’s also the second consecutive year that FIA has won the Shorty Social Good Award for Technology. And this is just the start.

The Prince George’s County internship program culminated with the four teams presenting their apps built on Amazon Alexa, Amazon Lex, Echo Dot, and Echo Show. The applications addressed challenges faced by some public school students, such as reading impairments and language barriers. Learn about the different challenges and solutions below: Team I – B.A.S.E (Building […]