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A Clever Way to Measure How Students Actually Use Edtech (and Whether It Works)

If you buy it, you better use it. That

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If you buy it, you better use it. That especially holds true for K-12 school officials who altogether spend more than $8.3 billion on education software each year, according to estimates from the Software and Information Industry Association. Yet it can be tedious to manually keep track of how students interact with different pieces of software—or whether these tools are even being used. For many districts, it takes time and a bit of Excel wizardry to download data from each software provider, then combine and distill the information into a single dashboard. “We had to go into different websites, find different usage reports, talk to vendors,” says Matthew Raimondi, an assessment and accountability coordinator at U-46, a school district in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. “You run around to a bunch of different places to get information about whether students are actually making progress through the tools.” The days of hacking together spreadsheets may be coming to an end, however. Since last fall, Raimondi, along with technologists at 19 other school districts, have piloted a new service that automatically provides data in how students engage with different online education programs. Dubbed “Clever Goals,” the tool lets educators, students and parents see how long a pupil spent on different digital learning programs, along with their “progress,” which is defined differently depending on the kind of edtech software. (It could be books read, quizzes finished, activities completed.) Teachers can also set weekly usage targets for individual students and track their progress against those goals.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

While the pace of layoffs might be

Intellispark, an education

Course Hero named &# …

Course Hero, an online learning platform that

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Course Hero, an online learning platform that empowers millions of students and educators to succeed, today announced that it has been recognized as "Best of 2017" in the 16th annual Mobile Star Awards™ program, hosted by the mobile events and news site MobileVillage.com. Course Hero is being honored as "Best of 2017" in the "Best Educational App" category. Winners in other "Best of 2017" app categories include AirBnB, EventBrite, Adobe Scan, and Overstock.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

While the pace of layoffs might be

Intellispark, an education

Ford and Cisco are t …

Hiring full-time programmers remains a

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Hiring full-time programmers remains a competitive and lengthy process for businesses. That's one reason demand for freelancers and consultants is rising. Forrester predicts that spending on outsourced software help will accelerate by 6 percent in 2018. To find the best possible contractors for the job, large firms, including Cisco, Ford and Orange Telecom, are using artificial intelligence from a San Jose start-up called Tara Intelligence. Tara AI matches projects with freelance programmers who have the exact skills required to complete them. To do this, the start-up developed a "scraping engine" that constantly scours the open web, figuring out who worked on code that resembles a project that a business needs to get done. According to Tara AI CEO and co-founder Iba Masood: "Developers give us access to their Github. We see projects similar in nature to what you are trying to build. And then we connect you to the right and available talent." Tara AI's software also helps businesses automatically scope out and manage projects with freelancers, monitoring the pace and quality of their work, and making sure contractors are paid on-time for their code commits, for example. Developers who score work via Tara AI are paid flat rates, which are set automatically and correspond with a project's level of difficulty. Whether they're men, women, retirees or twenty-somethings with a fresh undergraduate degree, developers get paid the same wages for the same work. "Some people are better at negotiating," Masood said. "But we think developers should be paid based on their actual abilities and the work they deliver."

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

While the pace of layoffs might be

Intellispark, an education

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