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Amazon throws hat in the edtech ring with launch of Amazon Inspire
At the ISTE, Amazon announced the launch of its free online teacher education resource with thousands of lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional materials. With this announcement Amazon has joined the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google who are pushing technology in education.
Exposure of education to technology has so far been only through smart classrooms, or teaching aids or the document share feature called, well, Google Documents. However, tech titans from the Silicon Valley are constantly pushing the boundaries of education with their products. The latest offering comes from Amazon which is making a foray into the education technology market for primary and secondary schools, a market that Apple, Google and Microsoft have extensively staked out.
At the beginning of the week Amazon announced that it would introduce an online marketplace with thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional materials for teachers in late August or early September.
Modelled similar to the existing Amazon shopping website, the education portal called ‘Amazon Inspire’ aims to provide a familiar experience to users including a search bar at the top of the page, user reviews, star ratings for each.
Tory Patterson, co-founder of Owl Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in edtech start-ups feels that by starting out with a free resources service for teachers, Amazon is using ‘foot in the door’ strategy to initially establish a foothold in the market and then rapidly expand into a one-stop shopping marketplace — not just for paid learning materials, but for schools’ wider academic and institutional software needs
“Amazon is very clearly positioning itself as a disrupter with this move,” added Mr. Patterson.
The Amazon Inspire announcement was timed to coincide with ISTE, the annual conference of the International Society for Technology in Education, which about 16,000 teachers and school officials are attending in Denver this week.
Amazon was not the only tech company to make an announcement at the ISTE. Other tech giants also unveiled new education ventures during the conference. On Sunday, Microsoft said that it was working with ISTE to help schools introduce and integrate technology in classrooms. The project includes training programs for school administrators, online leadership courses developed with edX — a learning platform created by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — and services to support schools as they adopt digital learning approaches.
Google announced that it was making Expeditions, a free virtual reality app for students which has so far been available on a limited basis to schools, openly available.
Google also introduced 2 new products for schools: ‘Quizzes’, an online feature that teachers can use to administer tests and automatically grade multiple-choice questions, and ‘Cast for Education’, a free Chrome app intended to encourage class discussions by enabling teachers and students to share what is on their screens with one another.