Noticeboard

KAMI NAMED ‘MOST INFLUENTIAL’ FOR 2022

Digital learning platform Kami has made Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies of 2022 list, under the ‘Leaders’ category, along with the likes of Spotify, Reddit and Airbnb. The prestigious list highlights businesses that have made a significant impact, based on relevance, ambition and innovation. It’s global recognition for the Auckland based start-up that has more than 30 million users in 180 countries.

More at time.com/collection/time100-companies-2022/

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES PRACTICE SETS

In an effort to help teachers create personalised learning paths for their students, Google is set to launch Practice Sets as a new feature in Google Classroom. The new tool will help automate grading, identify concepts that need review, and provide students with built-in hints and resources to support them as they work. “We spoke with educators around the world to see how we could help them become more effective in the classroom,” said Google for Education’s Daniel Kiecza. “Time and again, they said they wanted to spend less time on tedious tasks like grading, and more time focused on their students’ unique needs. So, we’re announcing this upcoming feature to help them do just that. Practice Sets will give teachers the time and tools to better support their students — from more interactive lessons to faster and more personal feedback. “We’re actively testing Practice Sets with some schools in anticipation of our beta launch in the coming months.”

AT&T JOINS WARNERMEDIA TO LAUNCH THE ACHIEVERY

The Achievery is a free digital learning platform featuring content from popular WarnerMedia films, TV shows and animated series. Videos are paired with lessons and learning activities that students aim to engage with wherever they learn – at home, in the community and in the classroom. Some examples of this are clips from the Wonder Woman film paired with reading and writing lessons; Aquaman film clips integrated with ‘lessons teaching responsible decision-making’; and animated clips from the Craig of the Creek series on Cartoon Network used in social awareness and language lessons. Teachers, students (13+) and parents can create accounts. Lesson plans and activities can be searched by subject, grade, academic standards, or media type. More at theachievery.com

COACH ADDED TO READING TOOL

Following last year’s release of Reading Progress, Microsoft is introducing Reading Coach, which builds on the former by identifying the five words each student struggled with the most and supporting them to practise independently. “Educators using Reading Progress seem the most surprised to see how it motivates their students to try multiple times and work independently to increase their scores – they are invested in their progress as readers,” said Microsoft Education’s Mike Tholfsen. “To expand on that enthusiasm, we’ve been hard at work creating Reading Coach! It can be enabled and customised by the educator, who sets up the Reading Coach when a Reading Progress assignment in Teams is created.”

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HUGE RISE IN PEOPLE LEARNING TO SPEAK UKRAINIAN

Between late February and late March, the number of people learning Ukrainian on Duolingo increased by 577 per cent. This moved the language to the 13th most popular on the language app, up from 33rd . (Russian currently ranks 8th.) “Language learning reflects all kinds of patterns in pop culture,” said Cindy Blanco, a senior learning scientist at Duolingo, “like the rise in Portuguese learners during the 2016 Olympics in Brazil and a rise in Korean learners after the Netflix show Squid Game.”

DO LESS FOR EDUCATION, BUT DO IT BETTER

A global study believes that developing countries can rebound from COVID-19 by not copying the advanced economies. As schools slowly re-open following the pandemic, many children are not coming back amid reports that child work, early marriages, teen pregnancies, and gender-based violence are all on the rise.

In ‘The Lean Education Manifesto’, Cognition Education’s Arran Hamilton and Melbourne University’s John Hattie combine findings from 900+ systematic reviews of 53,000+ studies. They urge governments in resourceconstrained developing countries to act fast, to get their children back to school and learning. Among their suggestions are: • Shortening and even stopping teacher training programmes; • Teachers need not have degree-level qualifications in the subjects they teach; • Reduce the hours per week and years of schooling that each child receives; • Teach learners in mixed-age classrooms, with peers tutoring one another • Different approaches to curriculum, instruction, and the length of the school day might be more costeffective ways of driving up student achievement than hiring extra teachers, reducing class sizes, or building more classrooms “We identified more than 100 things that education systems can remove, reduce, re-engineer, replace, or not start,” said Hamilton. “And, also, things that really are worth adding and growing. But it’s a lot like the game of Jenga: some blocks add little to the strength of the tower and others are crucial. So, we need to identify and wiggle the target blocks with great care.”

VIEWSONIC’S MYVIEWBOARD HITS 5 MILLION USERS

Visual display specialist ViewSonic has announced its myViewBoard solution now has more than five million users across 5,000 institutions worldwide. First introduced in 2018, the system is built to facilitate digital content creation, communications, and collaboration in classrooms.

“myViewBoard is continuously evolving, with an ecosystem that’s becoming ever more open, flexible, and accessible,” said Bonny Cheng, Chief Operating Officer at ViewSonic.

NEW ADDITION TO FLEXICOMMERCIAL TEAM

Flexicommercial has announced that Nichole Brussow has recently joined its Education Leasing team in Auckland. She is a leasing specialist and will be working with schools in the Upper North Island region. “I have been in New Zealand for four years and love it here,” said Nichole, who is originally from Durban in South Africa. “With more than 20 years’ experience in relationship management, I am passionate about the education sector and am looking forward to meeting and working with our school customers and education supplier partners.” For education leasing information, Nichole can be contacted at nichole.brussow@flexicommercial.com or 027 492 3315. Or, alternately, contact Jan Paterson at jan.paterson@flexicommercial.com and 021 554-001

CHROMEBOOK DEMOS FOR TREES

At last month’s Bett 2022 in London, Acer pledged to plant 100 trees for every demo booked for its Chromebook at the education conference. Across the three days, this added up to an amazing 21,300 trees.

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