Thank you Karen Billings and everyone from the SIIA for another successful Ed Tech Industry Summit this week.
Lots of interesting companies, and here are some highlights. First the three winners from the Innovation Incubator:
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Farimah Schuerman watching Curtis Linton receive School Improvement Network's Codie Award |
Derek Luebbe of Jetlag Learning won most innovative product for simCEO. By placing students in the roles of CEO and of investors around virtually any educational topic, simCEO energizes students to learn. Saad Alam of Citelighter won the educator’s choice award. Citelighter allows to students to research and write more efficiently by allowing them to curate, annotate, organize, and collaborate. |
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James McClafferty of Brain Parade won the most likely to succeed for See.Touch.Learn. See.Touch.Learn is a visual learning and assessment system which has proven especially helpful in reaching special education students. Lil Kellog won the Ed Tech Impact Award for her many years of contributions to education. |
Derek Luebbe of Letlag Learning and James McClafferty of Brain Parade |
Dr. Dustin (Dusty) Heuston of The Waterford Institute won the Lifetime Achievement Award, and provided his thoughts on where US education needs to go.
- We must focus on early learning. By the time students are in third grade, it is virtually impossible for most of them to catch up; students who had been slow learners would be expected to learn at twice the rate of other students for five or more successive years. By Kindergarten, students from low SES environments face an incredibly wide knowledge gulf. Their lack of cognitive stimulation has impeded brain development. Their vocabularies are 1/3 as large as high SES student, which creates a substantial obstacle throughout their academic sojourn. Their lack of reading readiness will leave them far behind their cohort.
- We must broadly deploy technology that uses adaptive learning to individualize instruction. We cannot merely improve the efficacy of our current education system, especially when we are also trying to cut education costs. We must transform it through the use of technology. Limitations in the current delivery system means that teachers can provide students with barely 1 minute of individualized instruction a day. Even if we could improve the current education system, the limited gains would not be keeping pace with the rest of the world. As tech continues to become more powerful, accessible, and cheaper, it can improve and replace much of the role teachers play in delivering cognitive learning, while enhancing the teacher's role as coach and leader.
These are detailed in Dr. Heuston’s new book, The Third Source: A Message of Hope for Education.
Congratulations to all of the Codie Award winners. We want to send special congratulations to our clients:
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Lisa Barnett with Atomic Learning's first two Codies of the evening |
Lisa Barnett of Atomic Learning for Tech Skills Plus Training Package winning Best Postsecondary Learning Solution, Best Postsecondary Solution, and Best Education Solution. Curtis Linton of School Improvement Network for PD 360 Mobile’s winning Best Educational Use of a Mobile Device, and thank you for your kind words. PD 360 is the leading Professional Development platform for educators. |
Berj Akian of Classlink winning Best Cloud Application Service for LaunchPad iOS and Touch Apps. LaunchPad allows schools to deliver a personal virtual desktop to all students to any device through the cloud.
Looks like our next conference will be ISTE in San Antonio. We'd love to talk to you there, so let us know if you're going.
