Tag: K12

Due to COVID-19, schools quickly shifted to remote education to meet students’ needs and wrap up the school year. But with a new school year upon us and social distancing measures still in place, many classes will not gather in traditional classroom settings. Millions of students are now learning in their homes. And public sector leaders are creating new models to ensure learning is sustainable and accessible to all. These changes certainly carry their own set of challenges, but they also open new possibilities for the coming school year. Check out examples of how the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred important solutions to existing problems from primary school to higher education, and how the cloud has opened up new possibilities for educators and students as they start the new school year.

This year, AWS is hosting the first IMAGINE: The New World of Education Webinar Series. In these webinars, we will feature conversations that provide best practices, guidance, and advice as millions of students and educators worldwide continue to adjust to remote teaching, learning, and working. You’ll hear from education industry leaders as well as subject matter experts on how the cloud has helped bridge the divide between campus or the classroom and remote learning and instruction.

Pearson delivers anywhere, anytime digital course material and learning opportunities for students globally using AWS. As a global company, Pearson turned to the cloud to deliver content globally, build agile, accessible solutions, and to power its digital transformation. With Revel and Pearson eText, Pearson provides flexible, digital learning solutions for students and instructors, including digitized textbooks with interactive, multimedia content, and assessment features. Building on AWS has helped Pearson to iterate quickly, innovate on behalf of students and educators, scale on demand, and reach learners globally.

The impact of COVID-19 has K12 and higher education institutions working hard to prepare for students to return to learning that will be anything but typical. The 2020-2021 academic year will include various teaching and learning modalities—virtual, hybrid, and face-to-face—and most expect a shift from one to another throughout the year. Globally, EdTechs are working with AWS to accelerate features and solutions to better support students and educators in teaching and learning, physical and mental wellness, and health and safety.

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.