From January 28-31, we will be in sunny Orlando, FL to bring you coverage of the 2014 Florida Educational Technology Conference, or FETC. This years conference is the 34th annual FETC. The FETC is the conference to go to for all things ed-tech, and we are excited to bring you FETC Faster.
Feel free to drop us a line Or give us a shout on Twitter if you will be there and think we should see your booth.
VEX IQ is a robotics platform designed to transform STEM learning for young students and their teachers. Students as young as 8 can jump right in and snap robots together using this intuitive, toolless platform while educators can utilize the free VEX IQ Curriculum to help teach them valuable lessons and skills that are needed in today's changing world.
The Learning Bird platform benefits students, teachers, and parents. Students are given "access to an online database of lessons matched to their learning styles, region and grade." Teachers benefit in several ways. They are given access to the database of lessons that can serve as teaching tools; they are allowed to watch and learn teaching methods and styles from said videos; they are paid for their additions to the database when their videos/material help a student on Learning Bird. Parents are allowed all the benefits of providing their child with a traditional tutor, at a fraction of the cost. A win-win-win.
To boil the essence of the software down, a MapStory is an open-source platform for creating mapped displays of data sets. Think of a MapStory as a sort of video, showing trends, movements, events, or locations (among many others) on a map, over time. The MapStory pictured to the left, for example, shows how the 1988 Yellowstone shifted and grew over the course of several months. MapStory has the potential to become a sort of Wikipedia for visual data.
While we were at The 2014 Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) we had a chance to visit the Picaboo booth. They really opened up our eyes to a problem that you don't really think about too often: yearbooks. Maybe not a problem, but standard high-school yearbooks are riddled with inefficiencies and could be much, much better and less expensive. That is exactly what Picaboo does
In what was probably the most straightforward concept of any company/booth we visited at the 2014 Florida Educational Technology Conference, we had a chance to speak with representatives from Mac of All Trades. While simple, Mac of All Trades provides a much needed service. Imagine that you just purchased the new, top of the line [...]
ArchieMD is "a physician led company that creates innovative health and science education products for a broad spectrum of students, consumers and professionals." They have built a wide variety of applications and software that covers everything from anatomy and physiology, to diagnosing and treating common injuries and sickness, to performing invasive surgery, and everything in-between.
Audio quality is one of those things you don't ever think about until you hear either an incredible quality, or a very poor quality. Even then, we tend to only think about our bad audio experiences. One bad experience that really stands out, for me at least, was the classroom audio at my undergraduate college. [...]
The CPALMS 3D Initiative focuses on producing STEM curriculum resources related to 3D modeling and 3D printing. These resources will fall under four distinct model categories: demonstration, archive, problem-solving, and open-ended design.
Building on their early successes as a book publisher, Budding Biologist is gearing up for the March 2014 release of their first educational video game, Lizard Island. Lizard Island was built for students from grades one through five, and is in line with the Next Generation Science Standards, as well as Common Core Standards
Lightning Grader allows educators to easily build assessments using the multiple choice format (à la Scantron), but also allows such other formats as true/false, math equations, as well as both short answer and essay questions. What's more, the Lighting Grader assessments are printed on normal, regular printer paper, thus eliminating the need for special paper.
