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.
Ideaphora supports personalized learning by enabling students to easily build knowledge maps from digital education content, such as ebooks, videos, articles and images. By creating their own connections among concepts presented in the material, students assimilate information in ways that are personal to them. Concept maps are a visual representation of the students’ own thinking and learning, and leads to lasting knowledge, proven by scientific education research that was the basis for the development of Ideaphora. It is our hope that our focus on supporting students as they interact with the rapidly growing array of digital content available, we (and companies like us) become an amplifier to assist in the “scale up” Bill Gates referred to.
Schools and districts can cost-effectively bolster personalized learning in their classrooms by adding Ideaphora to their mix of digital curriculum, cloud-based software applications, and open education resources. Ideaphora’s semantic analysis engines can work with any online materials to extract key concepts that students can easily drag-and-drop into their knowledge maps in a seamless learning environment. Ideaphora enables schools and districts to maximize their investment in digital content by transitioning students from consumption to creation in which personalized learning is a natural consequence. Educators interested in exploring the benefits of Ideaphora in their classrooms can sign up for our free Classroom Pilot program.
I came away from the conference energized by the continued focus and more in-depth discussions that took place around personalized learning. Personalized learning is certainly not a "trend" that must disappear due to a lack of supporting technologies. I feel strongly it is the responsibility of companies like Ideaphora to assist in making true personalized learning a reality for every learner.
All of the keynote presentations can be viewed here: http://asugsvsummitlive.com. For more conference highlights, EdSurge has provided a succinct and tantalizing round up of here: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-04-18-heard-overheard-on-day-1-of-asu-gsv-summit.
