Tag: K12

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.

Students’ educational achievements—including academic transcripts, work history, and skill credentialing—are often scattered across multiple institutions and disparate IT systems. EdTechs are adopting blockchain technology to simplify this process, with credential portability, data privacy, simplified workflows, and added data security.

Families and students now learn with Alexa in their homes, and EdTech companies are using Alexa to help bridge the gap in engaging and accessible at-home learning. Two EdTech startups, NuMoola and Ecree, announced Alexa skills to help facilitate student learning using voice.

The Global Data Egress Waiver (GDEW) program helps eligible researchers and academic institutions use AWS cloud storage, computing, and database services by waiving data egress fees. GDEW can be a valuable tool that gives eligible researchers and institutions a more predictable budget, which in turns allows them to have more direct access to the cloud than they might otherwise. Find out if your team is eligible to take advantage of the data egress waiver program.

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.

iCivics is the education nonprofit that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded in 2009 to transform civic education and rebuild civic strength through digital games and lesson plans. It is the country’s largest provider of civic education content and is currently used by more than 120,500 educators and 7.6 million students annually. All of its games are free, nonpartisan, and available at www.icivics.org. Through their use of Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS CodeDeploy—and AWS security automation tools including AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon GuardDuty—iCivics has been able to scale and increase student engagement.