ISTE Ed Tech Conference At-A-Glance
I recently attended the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, PA with the goal of researching the eportfolio space in the K-12 sector. I was surprised by the lack of representation by companies we here at rrripple consider to be players in the eportfolio space. I was even more surprised by the size of the conference and the different products addressing pain points for students, teachers and administrators.
This conference had everything…interactive whiteboards of every shape and size, projectors, remote response devices, LMS’s, SIS’s, security firms, STEM robotics companies, web-based learning games, learning apps for tablets and of course physical and digital textbooks. The exhibit hall was massive! I’ve been calling it the CES of education.
There were three main things I took note of as I attended various workshops over the three-day conference:
1) Learning via Tablet PC’s and apps will become the primary device in and out of classrooms in the next 1-2 years.
2) Google apps for Edu have made a real impact with schools by providing free sites, email and docs and tying in collaboration throughout.
3) Now is the time for rrripple to really disrupt and innovate the ePortfolio space with our vision of highlighting users’ digital content on a platform that allows them to capture, curate, collaborate and privately/publicly publish to selective audiences. These four features will allow users to actually learn from their entire digital footprint that will include things like student information, collaborative projects and their social graph.
I look forward to sharing our vision with our users in the coming weeks. We look forward to creating the best application possible to authentically impact people’s lives and help them achieve their goals.
As always, please don’t hesitate to give us feedback on how you’re using the product and suggestions for how we can improve it.
Best,
#teamrrripple