Technology science works everyday to make our lives easier and smarter. In education, technology has historically been treated with parsimony. There is always the fear that the use of technology could get into an abuse of technology, so that students would depend on it without having to apply their own skills.
It’s not the same for teachers, though. Every teacher spends more than 12 hours a week only for researching learning materials for their lessons. There’s a new project by Amazon which could help them: Amazon Inspire.
Amazon Inspire, a platform with digital educational resources
Amazon Inspire is a platform where every teacher can find educational resources for their lessons, for every kind of discipline. Search is easy thanks to the resources organization in categories, for example the students target (e.g. “K-12”). Resources can be uploaded both by teachers and by institutions, and also by libraries and museums.
According to Amazon school general manager Rohit Agarwal, many teachers create exceptional content for their lectures. Most of the times, though, this content is lost because the sharing is missing. Teachers may upload their content on their personal website or blog, but it’s not easy to find them for students outside the classroom they teach to or for other peers. Amazon Inspire aims at creating a community. Thanks to the platform Amazon Inspire, teachers will save time in research and in the preparation of lectures.
Amazon always showed a great interest on Education, since the acquisition of company TenMarks three years ago: it is a software for mathematics studying on the internet.
Will Amazon Inspire be a high cost for teachers?
Amazon Inspire is not part of an economic revenue stream for Amazon. Teachers will subscribe for free, and digital educational resources will be free. Behind this new Amazon project, though, there could be a marketing strategy. In order to read and have access to the resources, teachers may have to purchase an ebook reader such as Kindle.
In United Stated schools the electronic devices market is always expanding. In 2015, between primary and secondary schools, more than $5 billion dollars were spent for these products. According to some analysts, the most promising field – forecast to generate more profits than the devices – is the one of digital educational content, like Amazon Inspire.
