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:
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.
At the Content in Context Conference in June this year, Judson Wagner, Supervisor of STEM, CTE, and Instructional Technology at Brandywine School District in Delaware, explained that his hope for the future of education technology was to provide solutions that enable educators to make students' thinking visible. He expounded that he was seeking ways to evaluate when and how student engagement is translating into learning.
SEMANTIC ANALYSIS AND HOW IT WORKS
Ideaphora is the only knowledge mapping tool that integrates with digital content, enabling users to directly grab concepts from online materials and place them into their maps. Learners don’t have to fumble with toggling among multiple screens, cutting and pasting, or generating nodes and text themselves.
The Ideaphora web-based knowledge-mapping environment uses semantic analysis to identify key concepts in online content, such as videos, eBooks, PDFs, and webpages. These key concepts are presented to learners and are easily accessed through a drag-and-drop interface to enable them to construct knowledge maps. Ideaphora’s semantic analysis process continually identifies, presents and refines key concepts in the knowledge-mapping environment.
Open education resources (OER) have the potential to increase educator and student access to high-quality learning materials, no matter where they live or what school they are from, as well as help schools reduce costs as they transition to digital learning. The U.S. Department of Education has launched the #GoOpen campaign to encourage more districts, schools and educators to use openly licensed education resources. However, to truly maximize the potential of OER, students need to have opportunites to engage with those materials in ways that deepen their understanding of curriculum concepts and develop their critical thinking skills.
Faced with ever-evolving challenges, schools are looking for sound, research-based products that will help them meet their learning objectives. Ideaphora is not only filling an urgent need for a tool that enables students to seamlessly build knowledge maps with digital content, it’s also supported by a rigorous research basis and a continuous improvement process.
Digital Promise has released a new report, “Using Research in Ed Tech,” that shares promising practices, quotes, and examples from 38 developers. Ideaphora was among the companies highlighted that are using research to design and develop educational technology products. By showcasing examples of research-based product development, Digital Promise aims to help researchers, developers and educators collaborate to use scientific and user research to improve student outcomes and better understand learners.
Our private beta is live! And educators from across the country and the globe have the opportunity to help us fine tune our tool to be a catalyst for deeper learning and a pathway to preparing learners with the skills they need for success in school and beyond.