Called Amazon Inspire, it’s now in an invite-only beta testing with educators and school districts, who are using it to upload lesson plans and download everything from college rankings to Shakespeare reading guides.
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Amazon wants to give teachers a leg up.
Teachers will also be able to publish materials they’ve developed and curate their own collections of resources to share with others.
The search capabilities of Amazon Inspire.
This isn’t the first initiative of its kind – while other tech industry giants are certainly successful, Amazon’s main competitors are other tech startups that aim to disseminate online resources to teachers as well.
Amazon Inc. made the announcement on Monday, during a “Transitioning to OER” session as part of the National Conference on Education of the AASA, the School Superintendents Association, held here.
“But lately, Amazon has been making inroads in early education as well”. Amazon also said the states of Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont have endorsed the program.
A Collection page on Amazon Inspire.
Amazon is launching a new site where K-12 teachers and schools can upload and access unlimited educational and classroom resources – lesson plans, videos, tests, projects, games and other content – in collaboration with their peers across the country, free of charge.
“Designed to look and operate much like Amazon’s well-known flagship site – but without the e-commerce back-end – Inspire lets users sort content by relevance, user ratings and popularity, along with several criteria pertaining specifically to the materials at hand (level, skill, etc.)”, writes Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch.
Among the resources will be the Folger Shakespeare Library, which will eventually include more than 2,000 pieces of educational material including classroom instruction.
The service is free to use for teachers.
“Our ultimate goal is for every teacher in every single subject to benefit from Amazon Inspire”, Rohit Agarwal, GM of Amazon K-12 Education, tells GeekWire’s Todd Bishop.
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“If we could enable every teacher to contribute resources or help discover them, we could collectively raise access for the 3 million-plus teachers out there”, he said. One contributor is the Newseum in Washington, D.C. However, there’s now a bevy of schools using the service already, including school districts in Visalia, CA; Mineola, NY; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; El Cajon, California; Missouri; Nashville and Tullahoma City, Tennessee; and Virginia Beach. The program is meant to help reduce the amount of time teachers spend online hunting down learning materials for their students.
