iCivics exists to transform civic learning through inventive and interactive resources. Founded in 2009 by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the group creates free educational materials – print-and-go lesson plans, digital literacy tools, and award-winning video games – to ensure all students receive a high-quality and engaging civic education. And their games work. Students step into the shoes of the President, a Supreme Court Judge, or even a county-level activist, and do the jobs they do. iCivics makes learning relevant to kids, and allows them to play a part and change the outcome. Their philosophy is simple: you learn best by doing.

Today, iCivics is a thriving network of educators, students, and active supporters. iCivics is used by 125,000 teachers across all 50 states. And over 4 million students benefit from their resources each year. iCivics is the largest provider of digital civics curriculum in the nation. SCE has partnered with iCivics to support their ambitious agenda: expanding the curriculum into high school, and modernizing their most popular games for greater user-access. With iCivics, young people – by the millions – will learn to become knowledgeable, curious, and engaged in civic life.

Announced this fall, Common Sense Media forged a partnership with Univision to bridge the digital divide and expand access to high-speed internet for Latinos.

The “new joint initiative, ¡Avanzamos Conectados! (Connected, We Advance!), is an unprecedented, multi-year national media effort designed to inform and connect Hispanic students to broadband technology.”

Part of this national media effort will also help Latino youth and families navigate digital media for learning, leveraging the learning ratings platform built by Common Sense Media with support from SCE.

Read more from Common Sense Media about the initiative here.

Based on marketplace inefficiencies, the warp speed of change in the digital environment, and a need for stronger guidance from both parents and professionals, new divides in the quality of educational experiences for low-income households have emerged. SCE is thrilled to partner with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and First Book, a nonprofit organization that connects publishers and community organizations, on a research project that will offer one of the first major assessments of the technology infrastructure and content needs of those groups looking to help low income and socio-economically disadvantaged kids.

The goal of the “Mind the Gap” initiative is to build a more robust, evidence-driven distribution and support network for both developers of digital learning products and education professionals in order to better reach underserved communities.

Through this partnership, the Cooney Center and First Book are exploring opportunities to deliver high-quality digital content to underserved youth through First Book’s vast network of over 185,000 pre-school, schools and community-based programs. The Cooney Center is analyzing market data and funding opportunities related to afterschool and other informal learning spaces, and producing case studies of developers and investors and the professionals who use digital media in their instruction of underserved youth.

A survey of over 1,400 teachers and school administrators as well as out-of-school program directors and instructors highlights some of the needs and opportunities for those wanting to use games to engage and educate. Forty-Seven percent of teachers and school administrators and 34% of out-of-school program directors and instructors have expressed interest in learning more about using game consoles and other gaming tools to teach. What are the major impediments to those educators unlocking the power of game-based learning and other e-learning tools?

The barriers to the use of games and other technologies echo what we have heard before from general surveys of teachers. Still, for those serving lower-income students the challenges often are more complex than in other schools. The big three barriers both in- and out-of-school folks reported were:

• Cost
• The age of technology
• Lack of training

The results are an initial look at a far larger analysis of the state of video and other digital games in the classroom that will be released in 2016.

The Cooney Center is releasing a series of reports and tools on gamesandlearning.org to inform developers and investors interested in reaching afterschool markets and low-income communities. Here are a few of the recent reports:
Cost, Training Top Challenges for Low-Income Providers

Major Project Looks at Digital Access among Low-income Kids

Low-Income Programs, Schools Surveyed on Tech Use

 

Games for Change, the leading organization dedicated to celebrate the power of digital games for learning and civic engagement, has teamed up with the NYC Department of Education for a game design challenge for public middle and high school students citywide.

In the NYC Games for Change Student Challenge, students are invited to design and code original digital games about social issues in their local communities, based on five themes. The themes and their affiliated sponsors are:

• Animal Welfare (A Kinder World Foundation)
• Smart Cities (Mayor’s Office of Technology & Innovation)
• Civic Journalism (The New York Times)
• Literacy (XPRIZE Foundation)
• Youth Justice (ACLU)

The theme partners provide multimedia assets for students to use in their games, and facilitate in-person meet-ups to give students opportunities to interface with experts in the field and connect their game making to issues they care about.

To prepare students for the Challenge, 20 NYC public school teachers have received training and financial support to run game design courses using the Globaloria blended learning platform, teaching their students how to code digital games. Professional game designers will mentor these students throughout their game making process.

Students can work either individually or as a team of up to four. A jury of top game developers and social innovators will evaluate submissions and select the winners. Prizes, which include paid internships and mentorship opportunities with game studios, will be presented at an awards ceremony at the Museum of the Moving Image in March 2016. The winning games will be unveiled there in a public exhibition, and featured at the Games for Change Arcade at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. The deadline to submit games is January 30, 2016.

Melissa Tortora, who teaches 9^th grade English at Hudson High School of Learning Technologies in Chelsea, is one of the teachers who has gone through the game design training. “Game design does not necessarily require a technology background or advanced math skills,” she commented. “What it is about most is logical thinking. I’m excited to share what I’ve learned with my students and to see what they come up as they enter the competition.”

The Challenge is being developed and hosted by Games for Change in collaboration with the NYC Department of Education through two innovation initiatives, iZone and Digital Ready, and leaders in the social impact games sector Globaloria, Institute of Play and the Museum of the Moving Image. A consortium of cross-sector partners is providing additional resources, prizes, and expertise, including leading game platform Unity and digital learning advocate Susan Crown Exchange.

Throughout the Challenge, Students will develop 21st-century skills such as systems thinking, problem solving, and inquiry-based learning through hands-on, collaborative learning experiences. Teachers are empowered to use game design as a teaching tool, and provided with professional development and in-class support. NYC communities will benefit from increased civic engagement and awareness around social issues.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with organizations committed to bringing digital gaming into classrooms and after-school programs,” says Susanna Pollack, Acting President of Games for Change. “This winning combination of games and social change is core to G4C’s mission and we look forward to bringing the Challenge program to other cities in following years.”

For more information or to submit a game to the Challenge, visit www.g4cstudentchallenge.org.

Success in the 21st century requires more than academic achievement alone. Thriving involves a new set of skills, including adaptation, problem solving, emotional intelligence, digital literacy and above all, learning how to learn both in the traditional sense, and through use of the powerful technological tools at our disposal.

Gooru and SCE have embarked on a new project to enhance learning by increasing awareness and discovery of 21st century skills through online learning content.

The goal is to empower educators to go beyond traditional pedagogy and draw out the opportunities for collaboration, problem solving, persistence and empathy inherent to learning any subject, from math and science to the arts.

Gooru, an SCE Digital Learning Challenge winner, offers a personalized learning solution that enables teachers to find, customize and share collections of web resources on any K-12 topic. With SCE’s support, Gooru is extending the platform to support tagging digital resources and collections to 21st century skills, a process that resulted from an analysis of 21st century learning strategies and skills from the 10 largest school districts in the United States and a comprehensive research review. The new taxonomy incorporates the frameworks of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning initiative, and David Conley’s Four Keys to College and Career Readiness. Now, educators using Gooru can create and cross-tag content aligned to 21st Century Skills and Common Core State Standards for other educators to remix and use.

In addition, Gooru is developing courses for grades 7-12 that are framed around 21st century interdisciplinary themes including financial literacy, social and emotional learning, and environmental literacy.

Click here to learn more.

Last year, SCE launched a challenge initiative to identify and partner with organizations working to increase access to the most engaging, educationally effective digital learning media, particularly for underserved populations.

We were thrilled by the response we received and were able to learn about many high-impact organizations working to increase access to quality digital learning tools. We saw some incredible proposals, but CFY’s PowerMyLearning and Ednovo’s Gooru demonstrated the greatest potential to increase the supply of high-quality digital learning media, and foster greater use of these products in environments that maximize learning.

We recently checked in with Pram from Ednovo and Elisabeth from CFY to share an update on their progress, thoughts on how the digital learning field is changing and ideas about how we can continue to develop an ecosystem that supports the development and distribution of high-quality digital learning tools.

A few moments with Prasad Ram (aka Pram), Founder, CEO and Chairman of Gooru

Tell us a bit about Gooru.

Gooru was founded in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a mission to honor the human right to education by developing innovative technology to positively impact learning. Gooru accomplishes this by delivering the best resources on the Web to teachers and students through a free search engine for learning. With over 10 million online resources and 1 million questions, Gooru makes it easy to discover topic relevant and standards-aligned K-12 content to address specific students’ needs. Teachers share lessons and homework with students through Gooru collections, playlists of videos, digital textbooks, games, and quiz questions they can customize for their class. View this video to see how Gooru works.

What challenges or gaps are you trying to address and how is Gooru impacting the digital learning space?

We all know that teachers are strapped for time. As the amount of information and access to technology increases, teachers and students are now challenged with filtering through the noise. Gooru saves teachers time by giving them personalized access to the best materials on the web, the ability to organize and remix content into playlists and share with students in class or as homework. Like familiar sites you use to find movies or shop online, Gooru learns users’ preferences and unique needs through their effort and performance on the site. Gooru can suggest to teachers the exact set of learning resources that meet individual student needs, giving them a scalable solution to differentiate the materials they share with their students.

What impact does Gooru have on how and what children are learning and how are you measuring that impact?

Gooru brings the vast content of the Web to teachers and students in a way that immediately addresses their specific needs and learning styles. Students use Gooru for independent learning or when directed by their teachers during class or through homework assignments. Diana Herrington, a veteran and honored Mathematics teacher based in Clovis, CA, used Gooru to help her students learn more efficiently, and to be able to evaluate whether material is beneficial for their learning process. Using this teaching method, Diana’s participating students saw their unit test scores increase 10-15 percentage points above those who didn’t. Diana says, “my students learned that Gooru gave them an alternative for engagement in the curriculum.”

In your opinion, what is the most exciting thing happening right now in digital learning?

It is clear that personalized learning at scale through digital learning environments has the greatest potential to produce positive learning outcomes. As personalization technology is used to extend the benefits of the Web and technology for learning we are seeing innovative approaches in traditional and non-traditional learning environments propel forward with strong momentum. This can be seen by the growing number of students who are enabled to take ownership of their education with custom learning pathways based on their interests. There is compelling research showing that students who are empowered to use resources that they learn best from and at a pace that they are most comfortable with, approach learning with greater motivation.

We are also excited to see more and more classrooms coming online with smart phones, tablets and laptops. It will take some time to have all classrooms in America technology ready, though one can feel that the digital classroom with all its great benefits for learning is within reach.

How can funders, investors, educators and consumers help to develop the innovation ecosystem needed to support the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools? What barriers or gaps do you see in the field?

Teachers and students have a large number of tools and learning resources accessible to them today. These independent tools and content have been supported by funders and investors over the past decade. Teachers and students are however demanding integrated solutions — not point products. They want capabilities such as search, social, wiki, analytics, personalization and assessments to work as a tight knit solution. For education to succeed in this new technology-centric era, it requires a vibrant ecosystem of funders and companies working together to foster open systems. Funders can help by requiring their grantees to develop open solutions and content and avoid duplicative efforts by leveraging open solutions. The greatest source of friction to a world of open education is the absence of platforms that every edtech company can build upon. Similar to the iOS and Android mobile platforms, or enterprise platforms such as SAP and Oracle, education needs a platform that the world can rally around.

How do you see digital learning transforming education over the next decade?

We envision a world where every student will have access to the highest quality of education and personalized learning is becoming widely accepted as the way forward to achieve this.  While technology is viewed as the catalyst for this shift in approach, it is clear teachers will continue to play a crucial role in facilitating an environment of autonomous and pervasive learning for students. This means a future education paradigm that extends beyond the four walls of a classroom and a learning path that is mapped based on a student’s interests and optimal pace administered by teachers through technology.

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A few moments with Elisabeth Stock, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of CFY 

Tell us a bit about PowerMyLearning.

PowerMyLearning.org is a destination for thousands of the best free online learning activities from across the web. Developed for K-12 children, and their parents and teachers, it offers an engaging way for kids to learn while having fun. PowerMyLearning makes it simple to find and use carefully curated games, videos, and simulations that have been tagged by subject, grade, individual Common Core Standard, and more.

The platform also includes powerful tools, like our Playlist feature, which lets teachers sequence activities (like songs on iTunes) and assign them so each child gets material that’s right for them. Kids can then access these Playlists anywhere, providing them with a fun educational resource to propel achievement.

The next generation PowerMyLearning will be launching in September and will include lots of great enhancements. Later this fall, the learning experience will become even more engaging, social, and personal for kids as we integrate gamification features funded by SCE.

What challenges or gaps are you trying to address and how is PowerMyLearning impacting the digital learning space?

PowerMyLearning addresses a major challenge in the digital learning space – the dizzying array of learning content available on the web that makes it hard to know what’s trusted, what’s high-quality, and what’s age-appropriate. PowerMyLearning addresses this challenge by making it easy to find and use the most engaging and effective activities available. PowerMyLearning can be used to help children learn, by enabling them to catch up if they’re falling behind, encouraging them to push ahead if they’re not challenged enough, or just empowering them to pursue a topic of interest. A team of professional educators has already vetted the content found on PowerMyLearning so kids and their families and teachers know it’s trusted.  This team has also tagged the content by subject, grade, Common Core Standard, and more, so kids and their families and teachers can easily find and use what they need.

What impact does PowerMyLearning have on how and what children are learning and how are you measuring that impact?

PowerMyLearning helps children learn and empowers them to take charge of their learning. By making available thousands of activities, PowerMyLearning enables kids to enrich their education through exploration, sparking new interests in the process. It also offers pathways for self-remediation. Kids learn in different ways and PowerMyLearning provides them the diversity to learn in a way that works for them. Kids quickly become cognizant of their academic strengths and weaknesses and know how to help themselves advance their learning.

To measure impact, we look at academic gains at partner schools using PowerMyLearning. A New York Times article highlighted the results at one school where the use of PowerMyLearning resulted in real gains, especially for the most struggling students. Kids who had previously withdrawn from studies were suddenly re-energized by the range of fun and engaging educational activities they could access and explore on their own. We also look at time on assigned versus unassigned activities. Data shows kids spend approximately half their time on PowerMyLearning using teacher-assigned activities and half exploring activities that they have found on their own.

In your opinion, what is the most exciting thing happening right now in digital learning?

The most exciting thing happening in digital learning is the explosion of content children can now access online to meet their specific learning needs. Kids can use this content to get immediate feedback on how well they understand what they are learning and to get to know themselves better as learners. They can also use this content to explore and enrich their learning. One factor that is making this happen is the transformation taking place in the K-12 education marketplace. Basically, the marketplace is undergoing the same transformation that the music industry has already experienced – evolving from offering content in large chunks (such as a comprehensive software product or “music album”) to offering content in small granular and modular chunks (such as a short learning activity or a “song”). The benefit of this shift is that small pieces of content from different publishers can be mixed and matched and mashed up with teacher self-generated content to create the best possible learning experience for each student. We see the PowerMyLearning platform as an integral part of this transformation to granular, modular content.

How can funders, investors, educators and consumers help to develop the innovation ecosystem needed to support the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools? What barriers or gaps do you see in the field?

To encourage the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools, we need to change the current ecosystem. Right now, small developers have no easy distribution mechanism for getting their products into the market and instead must sell their products via relationships in a fragmented marketplace. One way funders and investors could change this ecosystem it to help platforms like PowerMyLearning remove these barriers so we can have a more vibrant marketplace where small developers can thrive.

How do you see digital learning transforming education over the next decade?

Over the next decade, we see digital learning transforming education by enabling teachers to fully personalize the learning experience for their students and also enabling kids to drive their own learning at their own pace. We believe that it’s essential to propel both a personalized instruction cycle and a student-driven learning cycle in an integrated manner. If we can do this, we can improve academic achievement nationwide and better prepare kids for college.

The Challenge didn’t start with a Challenge. It began with a question: Why isn’t the best stuff getting to the most kids? And by “stuff,” we meant “digital learning media.”

During late 2011 and early 2012, our staff and board talked through this problem with our partners and advisors. At one point, it was “building the School in the Cloud.” At another, it was “creating the systems integrator for digital learning.” We thought someone should build The Platform for digital learning, but we knew it wouldn’t be us. As with everything SCE does, we were looking for a high-leverage way to address a multibillion-dollar problem.

We settled on an idea, inspired by our board member Paul Jansen, an expert on prizes and innovation. Why not just put up a vision of what we think should exist, and let the experts in the field tell us how they’d build it? That became the Digital Learning Challenge.

The Knight Foundation and Gates Foundation are two of many organizations using similar methods, with great success. There would be two key differences from what we’d seen before:

1. We were more specific about the world we wanted to create
2. We were more focused on system-level change than the success of individual projects.

We were thrilled to receive nearly 100 letters of inquiry in response to our Request for LOIs. Our first-round screening process focused on five core criteria (rating each on a 1-to-10 scale):

• Vision: Does this project offer a compelling vision for changing the field?
• Strategy: Does the LOI describe a realistic plan for achieving its goals?
• Organization: Is this organization capable of executing successfully on this strategy?
• Alignment: Is this project aligned with SCE’s Challenge focus?
• Accountability: Will we be able to measure the project’s success?

About a dozen rose to the surface for our review team. After discussions with our board, we solicited detailed proposals from five organizations that seemed most aligned with SCE’s goals and our capacity to be strong partners. From that group, we worked with our advisors to select CFY and Ednovo as our two key partners (see earlier announcement).

Here are 5 things we learned about our field during the process:

1. The field is smarter than we are. That there is wisdom in crowds—and in unexpected places—is no secret. But after nearly three years of deep exploration in the education technology sector, we were still surprised to surface dozens of great ideas and great projects we had never heard of.
2. SCE is a little different. We thought our goals and our process were ambitious, but straightforward. Yet throughout the process, we heard feedback that we were doing something unlike our grantmaker peers. The downside was that we received some blank stares (or their digital equivalent) when we described the Challenge externally. The upside is that many of the field’s most forward-thinking leaders really got what we were doing, and became passionate about spreading the word.
3. Everyone thinks they’re the platform. We know that there won’t be one platform for accessing digital learning product, but we do expect major consolidation around how children (and the schools, programs, and people that serve them) access digital learning media. It seems there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who disagree with us. We’d love to be proven wrong.
4. People still love school. Edtech boosters seem to fit into two categories. Those who see kids playing videogames all the time, and say, “Hey, let’s bring videogames into school, and make education more like a videogame.” And then those who see kids playing videogames all the time, and say, “Wow, that’s a lot of kid time. Maybe we should get them to play different games, or better harvest the learning that’s happening in the games that exist.” From the looks of what we saw during the Challenge process, most people are still stuck in the former category, and (more disappointing, at least to us) trying to slot technology into traditional school paradigms instead of rethinking new models of blended learning.
5. Content has a long way to go. We read a lot of strong proposals from content developers. But most of them focused on the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic), not on more complex Deeper Learning skills or social-emotional skills. And the products themselves weren’t pushing the boundaries of technology: we saw zero alternate reality games, only a few virtual worlds, and a surprisingly small number of tablet apps. One of our next big post-Challenge initiatives is aimed at helping developers and entrepreneurs create path-breaking learning products. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. We’re so glad the selection process went as well as it did, and we welcome feedback as we look to try it again.

We are excited to announce this year’s Digital Learning Challenge partners: CFY and Ednovo!

CFY will use the SCE Challenge grant to enhance the user experience of PowerMyLearning, its platform that aggregates the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and makes them easily accessible and usable. Ednovo will create Gooru: BLEND, which builds from Gooru’s existing education search engine to provide students with a cohesive, personalized digital learning experience.

We saw some incredible proposals, but CFY and Ednovo clearly rose to the top. Here’s a little more information on who they are and what they’re working on with our support:

• CFY has more than a decade of experience delivering educational tools and technology to underserved learners natiowide. Its PowerMyLearning project aggregates the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and makes them easily accessible, usable, and free. The Challenge project will allow CFY to enhance the user experience of PowerMyLearning, including introducing new viral marketing and engagement features and improving the platform’s look and feel. We expect this catalytic work will create a virtuous cycle of greater demand, which drives new development of digital education content and in turn more demand for PowerMyLearning.  The ultimate objective is to enable children to make greater and more effective use of high-quality digital learning activities.
• Ednovo has built Gooru, an innovative search engine for learning. The Challenge project will allow the organization to create Gooru: BLEND, which will build from Gooru’s existing platform to provide students with a cohesive, personalized digital learning experience. The project’s primary improvements will be building the infrastructure for “Collections 2.0”—curated, guided collections of digital learning resources, with quizzes that provide learning feedback in real time. In the long term, Gooru: BLEND will become a blended learning suite that is engaging, affordable (free except for the cost of the device), and relevant for students across all subjects. This project also provides funding to design and create a prototype for collections in the high-need subject area of middle-school math.

Our team had a great time reading about so many high-impact, under-the-radar organizations, and becoming acquainted with the finalists. It gave us great faith in the education sector as a whole, and in digital learning entrepreneurs in particular.

Look for another post in the coming weeks about the Challenge process and what we learned. And yes, we expect to run another Challenge in the near future.