December’s Edtech conference in New York showcased new educational products and services for the digital age with its Innovation Incubator programme. Many focused on new tablet and mobile applications, and brought ideas from social media and gaming to their learning design.
Start-ups, university think tanks and old companies with new ideas all competed to pitch their concepts to an audience of educators, publishers, technologists and venture capitalists. Here’s a quick look at seven of the contenders:
1. The Connected Learning Gateway is an elegant portfolio of solutions designed to automate the building of e-learning environments. It integrates teaching, peer-to-peer learning, and parental communication through a social networking environment similar to Facebook.
2. Screenchomp is a free app that turns your iPad into a recordable, digital whiteboard that allows teachers and students to work with homework, share a great idea or explain a tricky concept.
3. Fluidmath is a very cool piece of software that combines hand-writing
recognition with tablets and interactive whiteboards to demonstrate and
deconstruct complex maths and physics problem. This won the audience vote for
Most Innovative Product.
recognition with tablets and interactive whiteboards to demonstrate and
deconstruct complex maths and physics problem. This won the audience vote for
Most Innovative Product.
4. The First 4,000 Words uses game-based techniques and speech recognition
technology to teach the 4,000 most frequently used English words, and assess
listening, reading and comprehension.
technology to teach the 4,000 most frequently used English words, and assess
listening, reading and comprehension.
5. Another vocabulary builder, Footsteps2Brilliance is an early learning
platform that accelerates student achievement by applying features from mobile
gaming with the latest in cognitive research to “bring rich language to language
poor homes”. This won the audience vote for Product Most Likely to Succeed.
platform that accelerates student achievement by applying features from mobile
gaming with the latest in cognitive research to “bring rich language to language
poor homes”. This won the audience vote for Product Most Likely to Succeed.
6. The Geodome bills itself as an ‘immersive learning platform” that deploys a
transportable physical dome structure to present data visualisation and a game
like learning experience.
transportable physical dome structure to present data visualisation and a game
like learning experience.
7. eSpark is an iPad app to help search and find educational apps, creating
customs playlists for students based on their individual learning needs.
customs playlists for students based on their individual learning needs.
It will be interesting to look back in a couple of years’ time and see which of these innovators managed to create a sustainable business from their ideas!
If you come across any particularly impressive piece of educational technology, leave a comment here for others to share.
