Tag: K12

Boolean Girl is educating girls to code, build, invent, and animate. It provides enrichment classes, all-girl camps, special events, and partnerships, preparing girls everywhere to explore computer programming and engineering. Boolean Girl hosts its website on the cloud and is core to everything it does: telling its story, registering students and taking payment for camps and after-school clubs, processing donations, organizing events, building our email lists, and running its online university. Boolean Girl uses the AWS Nonprofit Credit Program to cover vital IT expenses while achieving its mission.

Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS) in Virginia uses machine learning on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to predict the county’s rate of chronic absenteeism in high schools. CCPS includes 64 schools and over 63,000 students. They started with a high-impact project that would use data the school system was already capturing about its students. to tackle predicting chronic absenteeism.

Students from two secondary schools on opposite sides of the world used AWS DeepRacer to learn about machine learning (ML). Using AWS DeepRacer, students from a school in Vancouver, Canada and Instanbul, Turkey learned how to design, train, and deploy a model car using ML. These students competed on virtual racetracks against each other—all within the AWS Management Console.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that public sector organizations need modern infrastructure, capabilities and controls to overcome the disruption caused by global health outbreaks. Organizations that embraced cloud services proved more responsive. They were able to continue operating remotely and serving their customers and citizens, demonstrating agility, scalability, and speed. In How Governments Can Build Resilience in a New Normal: Emerging Practices from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, a new policy paper from the AWS Institute, we outline how organizations can use the cloud to recover from the disruption that the virus brought, as well as become more resilient for future challenges.

Robotics and machine learning (ML) aren’t just for the technology industry. Robotics are being used in education to advance student learning through one-to-one support, adaptive learning algorithms, and immediate feedback mechanisms within K12 schools. Robots can use ML algorithms to adapt to student learning styles, teaching children to code through interactive, fun games and supporting core curriculum in classrooms with high student to teacher ratios. These four Amazon Web Services (AWS) EdStart Members are using robotics to revolutionize K12 education.

K12 educational organizations are modernizing their institutions by providing secure anywhere, anytime access to learning for students. Whether a district or school is a cloud veteran or forging new ground, the cloud is helping break down barriers to opportunity, like the ability to access applications through any device. By using the cloud, many K12 institutions—including schools, districts, educational service agencies, and state education agencies—are having breakthroughs in educational models and student engagement.

Research shows that social emotional learning (SEL) increases student engagement at school, increases academic achievement, and helps students to be more successful in all aspects of life. FamilyBookForm, an AWS EdStart Member, aims to encourage SEL through their online book creation tool that allows K12 students to interview members of their family or community to collect spoken stories, in any language. The tool uses speech-to-text voice recognition technology and is powered by the AWS Cloud.

The second part of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast mini-series by Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is now live. We explored remote education with the Los Angeles County Unified School District (LAUSD), Athabasca University, and Pearson.

In March, AWS Educate launched a global survey to understand the biggest issues facing educators during COVID-19 while also seeking educators experienced in remote learning to volunteer in a series of online workshops and webinars. As a result of the survey and through the support of AWS Educate educators, AWS Educate launched two efforts in April to provide remote learning resources: an educator-to-educator (K20) webinar series on remote instruction and a workshops from home series for educators and students that provided access to online classes for cloud skills, computer science, robotics, and machine learning. Throughout the remote learning resource series, educators had tips for teachers transitioning to remote education.

With most everyone off campus, parent and student communications are top of mind for school districts and universities. Amazon Alexa can help extend the classroom to home through integrations with commonly used education technology applications. Now Amazon Alexa can aggregate information across education skills into one response, creating a faster, streamlined, more convenient way to access information.