Ideaphora Insights

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Ideaphora Connecting Knowledge Grants. After careful review, the judging panel has selected three well-deserving educators:

• $1,500 grant winner: Mike Jones, STEM instructor and technology coach, Bloomington School District 87, Bloomington, Illinois

• $500 grant winter: Kayley Bowie, middle school teacher, Crestomere School (Wolf Creek Public Schools,) Alberta

• $500 grant winner: Christi Collins, second grade teacher, Wise Primary School (Wise County Public Schools) Wise, Virginia

Ideaphora is now available in the Edmodo Store! Teachers and students can easily access and use our concept mapping tool through Edmodo’s single sign-on experience and automatic class rostering.

Edmodo users seeking to use Ideaphora in their classroom can simply click to install our application from Edmodo Spotlight and enjoy automatic and quick access. Teachers can select one or more of their classes that are already set up within the Edmodo platform to give their students access to Ideaphora and begin assigning them concept mapping activities to support personalized learning. Educators can also log into Ideaphora from our home page using their Edmodo credentials.

Ideaphora is guided by the mission to help students build critical thinking skills and lasting knowledge from the digital content they are increasingly exposed to in and out of school by offering a first-of-its-kind concept mapping and learning environment. The strength of learners' knowledge maps depends on the quality of the content they use as sources to create connections among concepts. To that end, Ideaphora is seeking the best open education resources (OER) to provide a robust library of materials that educators and students can use in building their knowledge maps. We want to hear from you! 

As a participant in GSVlabs, a community of carefully selected startups, I had the opportunity to attend the ASU+GSV Summit earlier this week. The conference, designed for ed tech business leaders, startups and investors, featured a diverse range for speakers, including celebrities, authors, tech icons, nonprofit leaders and government officials.

One of the major themes stressed by speakers, Bill Gates and Tom VanderArk among them, was personalized learning—what it is and isn’t, and the aids and obstacles to implementation. VanderArk noted that while the technological capabilities now exist to fully realize personalized learning, it’s not implemented in all schools. Gates also stated that personalized learning is the future of education, but must scale up. Progress toward personalized learning varies widely due to a variety of factors such as insufficient infrastructure and funding.

Teachers and students can now take advantage of a broader range of open education resources in Ideaphora using PDFs and images. Ideaphora continually rolls out new features and enhancements based on our product road map and feedback from our users. Our goal is to enable teachers and students to use any digital content as source material and multimedia resources for their knowledge maps to provide a more enriching, visual, flexible, and meaningful learning experience. However, to ensure the most accurate and appropriate keywords are generated for the best possible learning experience, we must address different types of resources in various stages to adapt our semantic analysis engines to how best to work with them. Watch out for more coming soon!

This week we've enabled our technologies to deconstruct uploaded PDFs into relevant concepts that are automatically presented as keywords for users to drag and drop into their knowledge maps. We've also provided a way for users to easily grab images from resources already provided in Ideaphora, including PDFs and Wikipedia articles, as well as by simply copying and pasting images from other online sources, into their maps. 

Our beta testers and classroom pilots have shared amazing feedback with us over the past few months on what they see as the greatest benefits and features in Ideaphora, as well as what they'd like to see improved. While we started Ideaphora with a roadmap in mind for the product, the ongoing feedback and relationships we have with our users are paramount to our continued success and ensure our knowledge mapping environment evolves with the needs of educators and students at every level. We heard from them that they wanted greater flexibility and customization built into our platform. Today we're unveiling three new features that incorporate their ideas. 

For a century, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has inspired and enlightened - as well as confounded some - learners, scientists and enthusiasts around the world. Recently, his famous theory was proven by direct detection of gravitational waves at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). As one of the most exciting scientific developments in history that could impact research, technology, and many other disciplines, the news offers some thought-provoking learning opportunities for teachers and students. 

We're at it again. We've added numerous enhancements to the Ideaphora knowledge mapping environment to further improve the user experience for teachers and students. These updates are available to beta users and pilot sites as we move closer to the public launch of our subscription-based tool. During the beta testing phase, everyone can use Ideaphora for free.

The product improvements are focused on four areas:

• Tablet support
• Map sharing
• Content
• Classroom management tools (for pilots) 

Just two months ago, we released the beta version of our web-based knowledge mapping environment and asked educators and friends to join us in the journey and share their feedback to ensure we provide teachers and students with the most effective tool for interacting with digital content, such as videos and ebooks, and deepening their understanding of it. During that short time, we've gained valuable suggestions from testers and incorporated their ideas into our product to enhance and improve the experience for learners. Today we've released several updates that you can experience for yourself.