With a new school year now in full swing, educators are in a bind. They want to implement innovative edtech tools in the classroom but don’t necessarily have the time to research and evaluate solutions before procurement and classroom implementation.

Enter the concept of curated online marketplaces — a potential game-changer in the edtech landscape. These platforms aim to streamline the discovery and evaluation process, putting efficient search capabilities at educators’ fingertips.

To explore this further, EdSurge spoke with Shannie Yeoh, Senior Manager, EdTech Partnerships, Worldwide Public Sector, at Amazon Web Services (AWS). After leading business strategy transformation efforts for systems integrators, Yeoh joined AWS two years ago and now manages go-to-market strategies for edtech partners, helping them drive both growth and revenue. Yeoh shares her excitement about enabling educators to have easy access to tools they need to simplify their day-to-day tasks while creating a stimulating learning environment.

Shannie Yeoh
Senior Manager, EdTech Partnerships, AWS

EdSurge: What challenges do you think educators face when they’re researching, evaluating and procuring the right edtech tools?

Yeoh: Finding the right edtech tools, especially in the current environment, is never easy. A recent study from LearnPlatform by Instructure found that school districts access an average of 2,739 distinct tech tools annually. On top of that, an MDR study also shows that teachers are spending an average of seven hours per week just looking for instructional resources to use in classrooms!

There are three main challenges we hear from educators today. One is the rapid pace of innovation in this space. Security and privacy concerns are also a major hurdle since tools must protect the student data and comply with the relevant regulations. Then, obviously, the budget is always a top concern. Finding high-quality, cost-effective solutions that demonstrate clear evidence of their impact is also very crucial.

How are online marketplaces changing the way that educators can discover and access edtech resources?

In the past, educators often had to rely on word of mouth, conferences and their own extensive research to even learn about the new edtech tools; it was a very scattered and fragmented process. But now, with centralized online marketplaces, educators can actually browse and explore a vast catalog of vetted, curated resources in one place.

On top of that, the ability for educators to read the reviews, comparing the different options side by side, has been incredibly valuable. It allows them to make much more informed decisions about what will work best for their students. The fact that many of these platforms, including the AWS Marketplace, also handle procurement and deployment makes the whole process so much easier.

What resources are available to help educators stay informed about emerging edtech trends, and how can those educators maximize their use?

At the end of the day, staying informed and engaged with a tech landscape is vital, but it’s not just about keeping up. It’s about embracing these innovations and figuring out how to leverage them to drive meaningful, transformative change in education.

— Shannie Yeoh

First, I recommend tapping into information and insights available through online communities and professional organizations like ISTE and CoSN. We at AWS have worked closely with CoSN and the Council of Great City Schools to develop the generative AI readiness checklists. For higher education institutions, we have partnered with EDUCAUSE to create a similar checklist specific to colleges and universities.

I also encourage educators to use the EdTech Index in various ways. Teachers can check the Index before requesting products through the district approval process to identify trusted third-party validators. A district-level edtech specialist can use the “My List” feature to compare existing tools with teacher-requested ones that offer similar functionality, providing side-by-side comparisons of critical edtech information.

At the end of the day, staying informed and engaged with a tech landscape is vital, but it’s not just about keeping up. It’s about embracing these innovations and figuring out how to leverage them to drive meaningful, transformative change in education. I think that’s where all the true impact lies.

What emerging technologies or trends do you see as having the greatest potential to transform edtech in the next five years?

I think the first one would be personalized learning powered by generative AI. The ability to leverage AI-driven recommendations and seamless integrations with classroom management systems will allow us to create a truly personalized experience.

I’m also really bullish on the continued evolution of data-driven decision-making, empowering educators to make much more informed, evidence-based choices about the tools and approaches they use.

I’m also excited about the continued advancement of immersive technologies like augmented and virtual realities. These platforms have become more accessible and user-friendly, and I think the potential to create a truly engaging, contextualized educational experience will skyrocket. Imagine being able to explore the surface of Mars or witness historical events firsthand! That level of interactivity and depth of learning is unparalleled.

I think underpinning all this is the growing emphasis on accessibility, equity and inclusivity in edtech. I believe that we’ll see a much stronger focus on designing the products and platforms that serve the needs of all learners regardless of their background and ability. Accessibility can no longer be an afterthought; it has to be a core design principle.

How does AWS gather information about the impact of edtech tools and trends in the education sector, and how does that inform your approach to supporting the edtech industry?

Recommended Resources:

• The Top 5 Trends in EdTech
• How AWS Marketplace Works

We place a huge emphasis on measuring the real-world impact of the edtech tools and solutions available on our platforms. Areas like chronic absenteeism, staffing shortages and mental health are the three key themes that we have been hearing about, and not just from our own customer base.

We also collaborate extensively with a wide range of industry partners to get a more holistic understanding of the tech landscape. We host regular CEO roundtables and community forums where we can learn directly from education leaders and industry stakeholders about the challenges they are facing and the emerging trends they are seeing.

Groups like HolonIQ provide us with invaluable market research and data that we use to inform our decisions. This comprehensive impact data are then fed directly back into edtech future offerings, allowing us to identify the most effective and transformative tech solutions and double down on what’s working or fix what’s not — really filling in the gaps in this marketplace. Our goal is to continuously evolve and expand our ed tech ecosystem to ensure educators have access to the cutting-edge resources they need to drive student success.

© Image Credit: Miha Creative / Shutterstock

Xello is an online, K-12 college, career and future readiness program that helps students of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds cultivate their self-knowledge and skill building while exploring options for life after high school.

Founded in 1995 by a team of recent college graduates struggling to understand their career options, Xello builds solutions for students to become future-ready by equipping them with the knowledge, skills and insights to make informed decisions and build actionable plans.

Starting in elementary school, Xello sparks curiosity and excitement around exploring current interests and future options in developmentally appropriate ways. The reflective activities help students build social-emotional skills like communication, problem-solving, and self-advocacy. For older students, a series of assessments helps them dig deeper into their interests, aptitudes, and aspirations.

Students with access to college and career readiness programs in elementary school have been shown to have better self-knowledge, be more engaged in school, and be better prepared to plan for a successful future. Students spend over 1 million hours using the Xello software each academic year, with 20% of logins happening outside of school hours, making Xello 14 times more engaging than the average education software program.

The content is available in English and Spanish and optimized for mobile, tablet, and desktop. It can be accessed via single sign-in and incorporated into Google Classrooms and Google Drive, making it easy for students to log in at the 9,000-plus schools across North America that use Xello. For these reasons and more, Xello is the Winner of a Cool Tool Award for “Best Career Planning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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Helping educators build and maintain healthy literacy ecosystems to support transfer of knowledge at scale and improve student outcomes.

GUEST COLUMN | by Ethan Scherer

What does science and social studies have to do with moving the needle on nationwide reading outcomes? 

• Only thirty-five percent of 4^th grade students were proficient readers before the pandemic, and this has declined. 
• Research shows that high-quality science and social studies units can help build skilled readers.

The good news is that your ELA block doesn’t have to work alone to achieve your academic goals.

Instead, educators can steadily and systematically build connections over time to help students transfer explicitly taught knowledge to new, untaught topics —in the classroom and beyond.

‘…educators can steadily and systematically build connections over time to help students transfer explicitly taught knowledge to new, untaught topics —in the classroom and beyond.’

Developed out of READS LAB at Harvard University, Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) is an elementary science and social studies program that improves academic outcomes – including literacy and math. 

How does MORE do it? Schemas. What are schemas? They are knowledge frameworks that help students organize and connect information. 

READS Lab found that their schema-building program caused lasting improvements in elementary-grade students’ ability to read for understanding in science, social studies, and English language arts.

How did they get such powerful results?

It wasn’t just due to standards-aligned lessons. MORE’s unique focus on schemas and returning to topics and concepts year-after-year with increasing complexity, encouraged students to “hang” new vocabulary and topics onto existing knowledge to make connections and bigger patterns visible. For example, in economics, students “think like a buyer” in first grade and think about market systems as a whole by third grade. 

Through an innovative, digital portal that can be incorporated into a classroom Learning Management System, MORE equips teachers with three evidence-based tools:

• Lessons
• Digital activities
• Formative assessments of transfer

 

Teachers use these three tools flexibly to get their students reading, writing, and discussing complex science and social studies topics.

Thanks to the funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the team behind MORE was able to conduct a randomized controlled trial – a rigorous study using the highest levels of evidence –  to follow students who received MORE over time, as well as after the program completed. They found that:

• The difference in reading for long-term MORE students was equal to more than two months’ worth of additional literacy learning after embedding MORE within the science and social studies blocks for only 6 weeks per year.
• MORE also improved state mathematics scores.
• The results of MORE persisted two years later without additional lessons.

 

But teaching schemas doesn’t start and end in the classroom.

The MORE team spent years distilling research into core principles and practices that build schemas throughout the school day. The next phase is all about making these principles and practices available to a broader audience. MORE has developed a unique model to successfully scale up and transfer these significant results by:

• Building a low-cost, high-impact teacher training model that is being used by more than 1,800 teachers.
• Developing a robust technological infrastructure that lets teachers, administrators and district leaders cohere around a common goal and leverages resources, real-time data, and tools to adapt the program to their context.
• Empowering local educators to adapt the core concepts of MORE to meet specific needs of their students and fit flexibly into their school day.
• Increasing the number of students served by more than tenfold in the last three years.

 

Based upon this strong foundation, MORE won a highly selective federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant to continue to scale its impact to help kids learn to become skilled readers.  The combined support of CZI and the EIR grant expands the reach and access to MORE, and provides an additional runway to allow for long-term sustainability and growth of the program.The grant and CZI’s continued support will provide funding through the end of 2029, providing time to develop MORE’s self-sustaining model.

Here’s the bottom line: MORE’s core principles and practices – their emphasis on schemas and transfer – can be applied to any subject in any classroom. So, instead of skimping on science and social studies, try a schematic approach to improve academic outcomes. If you are a district with over 20,000 students and want to hear more, let the MORE team know via the MORE website sign-up page. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed about our offerings as we continue to scale.

—

Ethan Scherer is the Director of READS Lab at Harvard University. READS Lab helps educators build and maintain healthy literacy ecosystems to support transfer of knowledge at scale and improve student outcomes and created the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE). Connect with Ethan on Linkedin.

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This cool tool is perhaps the only comprehensive, career-first platform, shifting from the traditional ”college-for-all” model by offering diverse career pathways aligned with the 21st-century job market.

Contrary to tools focusing solely on career selection, MajorClarity by Paper guides students to make informed and thoughtful academic decisions throughout their educational journey, steering clear of common indecision pitfalls. Students are directed to courses aligning with their career interests, providing opportunities for deeper experiences like micro-credentials and work-based learning. The platform’s active learning approach engages students in a dynamic cycle of feedback, from immediate corrections in career simulations to color-coded course plans aligned with their chosen career pathway.

Emphasizing modern skill development, MajorClarity offers micro-credentials co-authored with industry partners, actively updated career pathways, and support for soft skills through journal reflections and practical tools like Resume Builder. Active learning and visual content significantly boost student retention, leveraged through Q-and-A videos, proprietary simulations, and test-drives, increasing the likelihood of students selecting a career-aligned plan by 189%.

The platform offers a comprehensive suite of pre-built and customizable reporting for administrators at district and school levels. Reports cover all data elements, including work-based learning participation, micro-credential completion, progress on checklists, state-mandated Academic and Career Plans (ACPs), and more.

To balance student ownership over 4-year Academic Plans with logistical needs, MajorClarity’s Customer Success team collaborates with partners, building custom pathways, training educators, and providing pre-built lesson plans.

Addressing software underutilization, MajorClarity prioritizes student activation, achieving an industry-high 70% activation among top-performing districts, compared to the 10-20% industry average.

For these reasons and more, MajorClarity earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Career Planning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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Today’s teens aren’t informed or confident enough about what they want to do after graduation – research shows that more than 65 percent feel they would have benefited from more career exploration during middle and high school. Moreover, 87% of middle schoolers were interested in ways to match their specific skills and passions with potential careers. This can’t possibly happen in the classroom alone, so why not meet them where they are—on their phones. Working with thousands of teens, American Student Assistance (ASA) created EvolveMe™, a free digital resource that gives teens fun digital experiences to learn about education and career possibilities that match their interests, along with building skills and confidence. It prepares teens for their career journey by incentivizing them to explore, experiment, and take actions via tasks related to mentorships, virtual internships, mock job interview coaching, and coding challenges offer transferable skills development, mentorships, and real-world experiences like virtual internships opportunities. EvolveMe works because we co-created it with thousands of kids who gave us feedback and direction on everything from features and functionality, platform names, color palette, fonts, and overall design. There are nearly two million users now and more than 200 career tasks. For these reasons and more, EvolveMe earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Career Planning Solution” as part of the EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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This student-centered approach engages students with math challenges, frees them to explore solutions collaboratively, and then connects the entire process to underlying concepts.

GUEST COLUMN | by Matt Haber

Throughout my years in education, I’ve often heard that a teacher’s role is to fill empty brains. Educators know that is not accurate. Students come to us with so much knowledge, cultural skill, and understanding of the world, and filling “empty” brains doesn’t work anyway. The only way to learn is to connect new experiences with old ones. We can’t shovel math knowledge into students’ brains like we’re filling a hole, but we can provide them with math-based experiences and collaborate with them to make those experiences relevant.

I currently work in Oxnard School District, where we put this idea into action by creating “thinking classrooms” for math learning, based on the book Building Thinking Classrooms. Thinking classrooms also allow students to practice skills that are in high demand among employers, including collaboration, perseverance, resilience, and problem-solving. As this approach to teaching and learning has made its way into other classes, I’ve seen students become more intuitive in subjects such as social studies and science, too. 

Here’s how my district helps our students understand math by beginning with what they already know and then encouraging collaboration and exploration.

Engagement, Exploration, and Consolidation

When I was in school, a teacher would teach us how to do something, for example multiplying fractions. Then we would do 20 problems just like the one we’d been shown. There was no thinking involved. We were just mimicking, following a process we were shown with no understanding of the logic behind it. In an effort to move beyond mimicry and encourage deeper understanding, thinking classrooms have three parts: engagement, exploration, and consolidation.

We begin with an engaging and exciting launch. Recently, for example, I put an orange and a small, very light block on opposite ends of a seesaw. Of course, the seesaw tilted all the way toward the orange. The question I asked was, “How many blocks will balance the orange?” I told the class I wouldn’t give them a scale, and asked them what they would need to answer the question. They said they would need the weights of the orange and the block.

It’s important to get started quickly with a conundrum like this that grabs students’ attention. When students arrive in the classroom, I don’t ask them to sit down. I just have them toss their backpacks aside and join me at the front of the classroom. Together, we go through the engagement piece and I provide them with enough information to be successful (without giving them too much detail) in the first three to five minutes. I split them into groups by having them draw cards and putting the kings with the kings, the queens with the queens, and so on. It’s important that groups are random so that students are working with a variety of peers and encountering a range of approaches to the concepts we are learning.

Once in groups, the class moves into the exploration stage, where students use vertical whiteboards in groups of three to work together on solutions. Students talk to each other, begin to develop their voices, and exercise their mathematical agency. I give my students between 15 and 20 minutes to complete their exploration.

Educators are not always accustomed to seeing as much self-directed learning in math as they see in my teachers’ classrooms. My experience has shown me that allowing students to explore rather than “sit and get” will lead to higher interest, deeper engagement, fewer behavior issues, and a space for deeper learning to occur. During exploration, I like to give classes three “slices,” which are three different challenges. Three challenges are important because they give students who figure out the first one something else to focus on while other groups are still working. 

To transition from their exploration to solidifying a solution, we move to the consolidation or closure stage, which provides students the ability to present their solutions to the class. This is where we connect the experiences they’ve just had back to math concepts, creating the opportunity to take meaningful notes about what they have discovered and learned together.

Another example of consolidation is to conduct a “gallery walk,” where all students go from board to board, writing on sticky notes to place on the boards. When we sit back down, students write “notes to my future forgetful self,” in which they sum up what they learned during the lesson. One way to encourage more meaningful notes is to have students create a math problem in addition to solving the one I gave them. 

Writing their problems and solutions down helps to cement concepts in their minds, and the notes themselves provide excellent exit tickets to help teachers decide which students, if any, need additional support or instruction.

Building Thinking Classrooms with Visual-Spatial Puzzles

One of the most important tools we use to launch thinking classroom experiences during the engagement stage is ST Math, created by MIND Education, which uses visual puzzles to illustrate math concepts. I’ve actually used it with my own children, and have even completed a few puzzles myself to refresh my mind on some middle school math concepts. Oxnard adopted ST Math to support our shift from procedural math to a more conceptually focused approach.

The first time I used it as the engagement piece, I was working with a 5th-grade teacher on a fraction lesson. We selected three puzzles, each increasingly difficult, to serve as the three slices. We printed out the puzzles and made copies. At the end of the lesson, we used the software to show students how their proposed solutions worked.

I was excited because the ideas behind Building Thinking Classrooms became the structure of the class and the visual and engaging puzzles became the curriculum. The prep was as easy as making a handful of copies of the puzzles, and even that could be eliminated by having students bring their computers to the front of the classroom with the appropriate puzzle on the screen.

Since that first experiment, we’ve developed a small cohort of teachers who are continuing to use and refine this approach to engagement.

Tangible Results

To gauge how well our new model for math education was working, I identified everyone among Oxnard’s 800 teachers who use thinking classrooms at least twice a week. I then tracked the change in their Star Assessments scores from fall to spring. Students in classrooms that used thinking classrooms at least twice a week had an average improvement of 10.46 percentage points, compared to just 3.89 points among other students. I did have a control group, but this was not a rigorous study, so I can’t say for certain that the difference is attributable to thinking classrooms. It could be that the teachers using this approach are more conscientious or exceptionally hardworking. Nevertheless, it is promising.

Over the past five years, I have consistently interviewed students about thinking classrooms. One of the most frequent responses I get is that students feel less anonymous when they are standing up and working in small groups than when they are sitting at their desks. They share that they like using whiteboards so they can easily erase mistakes and start anew, making it easier for them to take risks as they work through problems. 

Recently, I worked with one of our special education classes that was trying this approach for the first time. The teacher and the aides were really excited after the lesson was over because they had never seen this kind of engagement during math. There were even students who I was told usually could not work together, but who had collaborated beautifully throughout the lesson. It reminded me of the misconceptions we hold about what our students are capable of and how they want to learn. These students can work together in the right context, and many more children can thrive when we center them and unleash their agency than when we sit them at a desk with a worksheet to complete.

Building a thinking classroom like we have is logistically very easy, but as is the case with anything new, it will require practice and the space to do so. The key is shifting our philosophy about how we teach and learn. It’s not the way teachers are used to teaching, and students have been taught to learn in a certain way. If it doesn’t work the first time, that may simply mean that everyone needs a little more practice.

My goal is to create spaces for students to explore and collaborate. It took thousands of years for mathematicians to come up with the division algorithm. With a little practice, we can allow our students to have some of that same fun of discovering mathematics — instead of trying to fill their heads.

—

Matthew Haber is manager of mathematics and physical education at Oxnard School District. He has been developing mathematics teachers for more than 25 years. He taught all grade levels in the Los Angeles area, then began leading teachers on special assignments and developing and facilitating professional development. For 10 years, he led mathematics in LAUSD. In 2013, he was recruited by the San Joaquin County Office of Education to improve math instruction in multiple districts. He has written two books, including New School Math for Old School Parents, a title for teachers and parents centered around supporting learners in the 21st century. Write to: mhaber@oxnardsd.org.

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Kaplan Career Core is the first example of a shared career service across multiple universities allowing for both highly-personalized and high-scale work readiness to prepare students for whatever’s next. This innovative model provides valuable career services and resources difficult for individual universities to offer, equipping students for their first jobs and ongoing career success.

It features access to generalist and industry-specific career coaches and an academically rigorous, asynchronous career education curriculum. Developed in partnership with Wake Forest University, this pioneering model enhances schools’ existing career programs with complementary capabilities, enabling them to meaningfully improve their career services affordably and efficiently, while still providing a flexible and tailored program.

Career Core’s self-paced online curriculum is divided into three phases to help students examine, explore and apply. Courses include world-class video content focused on personal and professional development, as well as self-assessment plans for career discovery. The engaging content is all in digestible learning units for thoughtful exploration.

Live, interactive group coaching sessions for in-demand fields including data science, technology, and finance, are available including on nights and weekends, meeting students where they are. This guidance helps students identify career goals and prepares them for a confident entrance into the professional world. Career Core coaches come from diverse backgrounds to mirror the diversity of students.

Schools receive real-time data, including enrollment, page views, and coaching sessions scheduled. Student satisfaction surveys, administered after live coaching sessions and completed learning journeys, have an average score of 4.8 out of 5.

For these reasons and more, Career Core from Kaplan earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Career Planning Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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CaHill Resources and subsidiary CAHill TECH have a mission to solve the labor gap in the trade space, with an initial focus on heavy highway, road, and bridge construction.

The company is committed to the vision of making trade-based training available to anyone, anytime. Using a digital platform and mobile application, they provide risk reduction and operational savings to construction companies that employ millions of frontline workers.

aQuiRe™ offers over 350 modules in their library, empowering users with knowledge about different subjects like Site Operations; Machine Inspection & Maintenance; OSHA & Field Safety, and much more.

In addition, aQuiRe Construction Academy is serving the “entry organizations” side of the market and offers diverse learning materials, including Module Videos, Resources, and Quizzes to cater to different learning styles. Whether a participant learns best through visual, auditory, or written means, the program provides an array of resources to support their unique needs. CaHill Resources is a certified WBE-DBE organization.

Currently, they support 29 municipal/private clients in New York State. They are also on the Eligible Training Provider List (ETPL) which will help gather students to complete the aQuiRe Construction Academy and receive construction training.

Upon the completion of a set of modules, learners earn a badge or micro-credential, signifying their achievement in the related Modules of Study. As participants progress and complete multiple micro-credentials under the same Library, they can earn different or multiple stackable credentials. These stackable credentials demonstrate that participants have acquired valuable knowledge and skills in construction training.

For these reasons and more, CaHill Resources earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Badging/Credentialing Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 and aQuiRe™ earned a Cool Tool Award Winner for “Best Mobile App Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2022 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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A music education game with fish to teach note names, ChimeCandy was made by Richard Hurley of Hurley Piano for kids with special needs at the Williams Community School, a dedicated special needs school in Austin, Texas. A music puzzle game set in the ocean where fish swim to unlock the sound of notes in the current, players drag the fish diagonally down the screen to the right and drop the fish into its note slot. They’ll hear the note sound when they do so.  

Interns from Austin Community College wrote the code; the development team includes: Angel Barbosa Olivares, Lenny Muldoon, Clinton Nyagaka, Wayne Stovey, and Richard Hurley.

“The game does for note learning what ABC does for alphabet learning,” says Richard. “It is an early introduction to pre music lessons learning in music.”

The game, for now, can only be played on destop and laptop. iOS and Android are in the works. ChimeCandy earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Arts, Music or Creativity Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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Writable scaffolds student learning and builds lifelong writing and reading skills for students in grades 3-12, while saving teachers time on daily instruction and feedback.

Writable is research-backed and an award-winning solution used by over 16,000 schools and districts. It’s proven to save teachers time, increase assessment scores, and grow proficient student writers.

Writable has long been a leader in AI support for teachers and students with popular features like GrammarAid, Originality Check, and RevisionAid. Writable’s new generative AI-powered tools for teachers help to increase teacher confidence and agency, scale the impact of teaching by reaching every student in the moment with targeted, skill-aligned feedback, and save a ton of time without any setup needed. These tools help to:

• Unlock creativity and save time on prep with AI-powered prompt suggestions and AI assisted assignments (including AI-generagted multiple choice questions and answer keys).
• Increase the impact of your feedback with AI-suggested comments that drive revision.
• Save time and build grading confidence with GradeAssist (AI-generated scores).
• Protect authentic learning with the AI-writing indicator from TII and Authorship Alerts from Writable.
• AI scoring and commenting are configurable at the district level.

Writable also offers student safe AI features. As students write and review they can access (teacher-selected) on-demand feedback tools. These AI-powered tools guide students to improve their writing in the moment. These include GrammarAid, which provides suggestions for grammar, mechanics, and styfle, RevisionAid, which provides students with on-demand feedback on structure and organization, and Originality Check from Turnitin to help students cite sources and check authenticity.

For these reasons and more, Writable earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best AI Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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An AI-based English learning app, ELSA leverages machine learning and advanced speech recognition technology to improve users’ English pronunciation and fluency. Their suite of products includes Speech Analyzer, which provides detailed feedback on overall speaking proficiency, and ELSA AI, offering personalized conversations with AI to enhance communication skills. The ELSA Speech API allows their technology to integrate with other platforms and applications.

Millions of users have improved their skills using the app, and now there’s ELSA AI—a tool to help people teach and practice natural conversational English using Generative (Voice) AI, available right at their fingertips through a mobile device.

The platform not only offers roleplay scenarios for learners to listen and reply, it is able to provide in-depth and accurate English fluency analysis and feedback to ensure progress. Using voice, not just text-based learning, ELSA AI helps learners master English language fluency, building their confidence.

For these reasons and more, ELSA Speak earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best AI Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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Colleges and universities risk fragmenting their missions without unified software solutions that provide clear direction grounded in the ethos of educational impact. Watermark’s Educational Impact Suite (EIS) is an innovative solution suite that unifies disjointed higher education technologies. EIS was born out of the need to centralize systems that drive critical action in leadership, student success, and continuous improvement. The suite dramatically improves operational strategies for leaders, administrators, and faculty to enhance engagement and impact with insight.

With its legacy of supporting over 1,700 higher ed institutions globally, Watermark has crafted the EIS to connect tools for accreditation management, assessment activities, faculty activity reporting, course evaluations, surveys, curriculum management, and student success. This suite ensures institutions can make sense of insights with unparalleled efficiency, precision, and authority.

The EIS is more than just a tool; it’s an institution’s internal compass. It aids in institutional storytelling, providing data points essential for conveying impactful narratives, especially crucial for historically underfunded institutions. Moreover, EIS empowers faculty by equipping them with insights that fuel their involvement in institutional improvement, ensuring they become active navigators.

One of its unique features is its user-friendly interface that streamlines and digitizes processes, integrating all data into one hub for contextual viewing. As institutions grapple with their post-pandemic identities, the EIS offers a chance to evolve by digitizing and consolidating processes.

EIS is tailored for higher education institutions aiming for improved performance, educational quality, student equity, and support throughout the student’s educational journey. For these reasons and more, Educational Impact Suite from Watermark earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Administrative Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

 

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There is a significant shortage of full-time teachers around the country these days. So, to keep classrooms staffed, schools use substitute teachers to fill in for teachers when they are sick or can’t come to school. However, substitute teaching jobs are tough to recruit for, manage, and fill. One complication is that quite often, a teacher absence isn’t discovered until that morning when schools scramble to post an opening. This uncontrollable and unavoidable reality coupled with the dramatic shortage of substitutes who are qualified and ready to go is a significant problem in our nation’s schools.

The process of how to fill short-term or even long-term teacher absences with substitute teachers has not changed in 50+ years. Even the modern communication modes of emails, text messages and robo-phone calls are not any more effective at solving the problem for the angst-driven and uncertain process of finding substitute teachers.

Enter Swing. Swing brings a 21st century solution to a 20th century problem. Swing leverages social communities and technology to not only improve communication but put power back into the hands of substitutes and the schools that need them. Instead of scrambling to find anyone who will answer the phone – or for the sub – being completely in the dark about if there is only one opening today or ten, now both stakeholders have power: schools have power to match the best person for a particular need, and subs have the power to pick the best job for their day or week ahead.

For these reasons and more, Swing Education earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Administrative Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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Scribbles Software is a leading provider of K-12 records and enrollment software to help schools enhance, streamline, and simplify the student and family engagement experience through online student records management, enrollment systems, choice programs, lottery management, and reporting solutions.

ScribChoice, one of Scribbles’ flagship products, is a configurable online solution that allows districts to manage all school choice processes – from specialty programs to district transfers – all in one easy-to-use, online system.

ScribChoice also improves families’ access to these programs by allowing them to easily apply for choice programs online.

For the 2023-24 school year, ScribChoice added a “Mass Lottery” feature to help districts automatically configure multiple lotteries of any size and level of complexity. The mass lottery feature significantly decreases the time it takes for districts to process lotteries. Processes that used to take weeks, now take just minutes.

For example, a district with a dual language immersion program at 10 schools in grades K-12 can now run all school and grade-level lotteries at once with a click of a button, rather than selecting each school and each grade separately. The system automatically offers seats to students, and then once the deadline passes for those students to accept, it offers any remaining seats to the next students on the waitlist, factoring in students’ preferences and how they’ve ranked their choices.

For these reasons and more, ScribChoice from Scribbles Software earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Enrollment and Admissions Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.

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Want to save time and money in the procurement and referendum process? Here is a cool tool that helps with exactly that. With SchoolNetwork, you will find:

A catalog of K-12 bonding efforts nationwide. These include current and past efforts, upcoming, proposed, passed and failed. You can specify the characteristics of the district or project type you want to view and look at the efforts made by districts just like yours. You can set an alert for specific district capital improvement efforts and receive regular updates on their progress. You will learn who the key contacts are for each effort along with links to local news coverage and published articles.

An index of rated solution providers that you can sort by industry. Services to help you with your capital improvement or procurement efforts rated by school district administrators like yourself. Learn the track record of potential solution providers so that you work with the best fit for your needs.

Actual documents used to promote and create procurement and bonding campaigns. Save time and effort by borrowing from documents created for other procurement or bonding efforts.

View the actual Requests for Proposal (RFP) and Requests for Quotation (RFQ) used by other school districts. See the materials used to promote their projects, past and present, nationwide. Upload your own documents for solution providers to see. Receive alerts to see new and revised documents.

For these reasons and more, SchoolNetwork earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Administrative Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more. 

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CodeGuppy is a free coding platform for schools, coding clubs, and independent learners. Teachers can use codeguppy.com to teach students the JavaScript language by building video games with sprites and sounds. A ton of example projects are included with the platform. With CodeGuppy, students learn coding by building games and fun applications.

With CodeGuppy you’ll learn to code real games and applications directly in your browser. You don’t need to install any software on your local machine. Any Windows, Mac or Chromebook computer is perfect for CodeGuppy.

At CodeGuppy.com they teach JavaScript – the most used and popular programming language nowadays. Their multi-scene code editor is empowering beginners to type their first line of code as well as advanced users to create multi-scene platform games.

To make coding fun and engaging, CodeGuppy provides you with a full library of animated characters, background images, and sounds that you can use in your games and applications.

Learning to code is easy and fun with the right platform. Teachers, parents, and students can use this platform in the classroom, coding club, or at home. The entire curriculum of lessons and projects is tailor-made for students with activities such as interactive graphics and game creation. Using this platform, students love creating programs and sharing them with their friends.

For these reasons and more, CodeGuppy earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Coding, Computer Science, Engineering Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2023. Learn more. 

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An AI data scientist co-pilot for education data, Doowii allows educators to interact with their data as if they had a personal data scientist in their backpocket. Using just natural language commands, they can query data, create visualizations, build dashboards, and run analysis just using natural language.

Doowii aims to solve two main issues with data: 1) Accessibility, and 2) Interoperability. 

For accessibility, Doowii has an AI conversational interface that allows users to talk with their data in an easy, streamlined manner. For interoperability, they’ve created an innovative and flexible AI-powered ETL pipeline that ingests and automates data integrations from multiple upstream sources. This allows it to pull in data from a wide range of sources, and automate data relational mapping so that users can add and remove data from the data warehouse in a quick and easy manner.

The data warehouse is integrated with a predictive analytics layer, so users can also quickly get predictive analytics on their as well. The solution performs predictive analytics using a wide range of models, so that allows the platform to create predictive and prescriptive results with flexibility and ease.

For these reasons and more, Doowii earned a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.  

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High-quality professional learning is foundational to educators’ success—and, ultimately, the success of their students—in the classroom. 

To provide educators with the high-quality support they both need and deserve, Edthena recently launched VC3, the next evolution of the company’s award-winning video coaching platform. It features new coaching tools that empower teachers and instructional coaches to collaborate more efficiently, gain deeper insights into instructional practice, and engage in more meaningful professional learning.

The core of the coaching experience happens within the platform’s video conversation page. This is where educators add timestamped feedback to videos of classroom teaching. Not only does the updated conversation page in VC3 make it easier to leave comments, it encourages teachers and coaches to deepen their reflections. One example of this emphasis is the Insights tab which helps jumpstart the video analysis process for both coaches and teachers.

The Insights tab includes several AI-generated tools: open-ended questions to help the observer determine what to look for in the video; a student-to-teacher talk time graph to support a deep-dive into student engagement, language development, and confidence; and, a visual representation of the most frequently used words within the lesson to get a sense of the academic language used in the lesson.

This reimagined platform draws upon Edthena’s 14 years of experience helping educators add more than two million comments to nearly seven million minutes of classroom video. This includes educators from schools, districts, and teacher education programs from more than 20 states and multiple countries, including Alief Independent School District in Texas.

“With the help of Edthena, we are harnessing the power of video and innovative AI tools to level up our coaching practices,” says Amanda Maceo, professional development implementation strategist at the district. “We love the automatic summaries and closed captioning—they provide us with valuable insights. Plus, the talk time graph makes it easy to set clear and measurable goals for improvement.” Learn more.

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Co-founded by the creator of the Canvas LMS, Devlin Daley, and former Googler, Ryan Brown (pictured l-r), Derivita is an affordable, all-in-one supplemental math courseware platform. Derivita offers educators the opportunity to easily create and deliver their math activities, assignments, and assessments directly within their existing LMS course, from any device, including smartphones and tablets.

The Derivita platform includes a Math Item Bank with 125,000+ items, covering concepts from Middle School to Calculus III (and beyond). Each item is equipped with 10s-100s of randomizations, immediate and personalized feedback, and fully, worked-out solutions.

Educators can also author their own questions or utilize SpotCheck to create formative math assessments in real-time to increase class engagement.

Derivita offers a grading interface with intuitive reporting and the ability to review digital student submissions alongside images of handwritten work to support data-informed decisions.

Derivita works with a growing number of schools, districts, and higher-education institutions in 29 states across the country. In Charleston County School District (CCSD), the second largest district in South Carolina, Derivita was adopted to support the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum in Grades 6-8 and Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2. As a result, CCSD saw a significant increase in student engagement and Algebra 1 test scores (“C” or better) increased over 10% from 2021 to 2022.

Derivita also partners with a number of state and regional organizations including: the Utah Education Network (UEN), Utah STEM Action Center, and the Texas Community College Teachers Association (TCCTA) to offer discounted pricing, implementation support, and professional development.

For these reasons and more, Derivita is a Cool Tool Award (finalist) for “Best Math Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.

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