Aiden Is Back In School

It's back to school time and learning is in full swing. Some kids are getting more screen time (the good kind) as more schools roll-out iPads. Here's where a company called eSpark is making a difference helping teachers achieve goals for their students.

Using the technology of iPads in the classroom, eSpark is focused on education that is student-centered—working with the needs of an individual student. Each child gets a personalized assignment, called a quest, using particular apps to achieve defined goals.

"eSpark empowers teachers to transform their classrooms with technology.... Teachers can focus iPad instruction on students' individual needs to improve their academic outcomes."

Rather than creating educational apps for their platform, eSpark scours the vast ecosystem of iPad apps to identify highly engaging and challenging activities. Apps are vetted through a strict rubric to ensure Common Core alignment, academic rigor, and engagement.

The Prisoner of Carrot Castle is privileged to be one of the hand-picked kid's apps used on the eSparkLearning platform. Kids in 4th grade might be assigned The Prisoner of Carrot Castle for Reading Literacy (Common Core aligned to RL 2 and RL 9) in their prescribed quest.

I hope you'll visit eSparkLearning to find out more of how their teaching process works. It is very cool. Those kids are really learning to dig in and be critical thinkers... even creating a video to re-teach and reinforce the learned concepts from their quest.

Here's a video from the Chicago area (Home turf for eSpark) from news station Fox32 on the Good Day Chicago program featuring eSparkLearning.

If you have kids in school, do you volunteer in the classroom? What have you learned about the use of technology in teaching today (called edtech)?