AWS Public Sector Blog

Summer 2018 Hot AWS EdStart Startups: FilterEd, Kornukopia, and SchooLinks

AWS EdStart members are pushing the limits in education, creating products and solutions to improve teaching and learning. FilterEd, Kornukopia, and SchooLinks use AWS to revolutionize parent-school communication, assess school’s learning technology needs, provide a complete education management ecosystem, and prepare students for the careers of the future.

Read on to learn about these EdTechs:

FilterEd: GreyED (FilterED’s parent company) automated its proven, comprehensive technology needs assessment process and developed FilterED in 2017. This cloud-based, adaptable data analysis tool allows school districts to diagnose the current state of teaching and learning technology within their organization. The tool assesses the components of six elements that impact technology adoption and implementation. This occurs through an adaptive inventory process to produce visual data representations of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses that can be viewed by stakeholders within a K-12 organization.

“Using AWS makes rolling out new features and scaling painless for development and transparent for the user. The variety of available services gives GreyED the confidence to build new functionality quickly without worrying about underlying infrastructure maintenance and reliability,” said Dr. Julie Carter, FilterEd Co-Founder & CEO.

Kornukopia: Kornukopia provides tools for learning institutions. Leveraged by over 3,000 schools in over 150 countries, Kornukopia’s support for 13 languages helps make education tools available to schools throughout the world. Their goal is to provide schools, students, teachers, and parents with an easy-to-use interface that provides them with management tools for classrooms, lessons, assignments and course presentations.

“Often Kornukopia is a school’s primary system, so reliability is a strong concern.” said John Shine, CEO, Kornukopia. “Kornukopia configured Amazon’s RDS Aurora Database and Elastic Beanstalk for load balancing across multiple availability zones. Of course, everything is done around security and privacy, which is incorporated into Kornukopia’s infrastructure and architecture leveraging finely tuned VPCs, IAMs and Subnets; encrypted database with strong back-up and restore features; as well as security specific solutions like; GuardDuty, Inspector, and CloudWatch.”

SchooLinks: SchooLinks is a modern, intelligent college and career readiness platform built for today’s students. It engages students through self-discovery, career exploration, and college planning from 6th through 12th grade. This student-centric experience helps students visualize their future plans and make the connection between career aspirations and how to get there through academic course planning and goal setting.

“We’re fortunate to have AWS’s toolsets to simplify our data workflow,” said Mike Discenza, Chief Data Scientist, SchooLinks. “S3 makes hosting a data reservoir easy and we have many ways to spin up additional processing power when needed. Our team can spend more time understanding data and generating insights and less time managing infrastructure. AWS has enabled us to efficiently scale our application and as a result, scale our impact for students.”

Just in case you missed it, AWS EdStart recently held two pitch days, one in San Francisco and at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC. Learn more about the winners of each competition below:

Don’t miss out on AWS EdStart community happenings, invitations to special events, and information on new products and services. Sign up for the AWS EdStart mailing list today.