Teach Middle East Magazine May-June 2017 Issue 5 Volume 4 | Page 3

Wand.education Brings Learning Content 3.0 to Every Teacher in the UAE W hile most teachers create their own learning materials, the field of content creation has barely evolved in the past decade, with most tools being just a more user-friendly version of the traditional PowerPoint. A recent study showed that nearly 99% of the teachers in K12 education are creating their own teaching resources. This led to two trends: • PowerPoint becoming the de-facto tool in education to create and deliver content on the whiteboard; • Content repositories, where teachers upload their resources. The current state of learning content reminds us of the first stage of the World Wide Web, the so-called Web 1.0: • Content is static; • Presentation-oriented; • Presentation: Galleries, Timelines, Mindmaps, Facts sheet, Bulleted List • Whiteboard interaction: Plenary, Pool, Quiz, Exit Ticket, List three things, Wordle • Assessment: Single Choice, Multiple Choice, Matching, Ranking, Fill-in the blanks, Hot-spot • Learning Games: Puzzle, Crossword, Classification Factory, Match It, Drag It • Memory Games: Flashcards, Mnemonics, Memory Palace Multimedia meta-search Teachers spend on average 25 minutes to create an activity, and 13 minutes searching for the materials. To reduce this time to seconds, Wand provides teachers with an integrated research that includes a multimedia library, more than 4 million pictures and videos, YouTube and Vimeo search, Google Images, and Ted Talks. • Minimal user interaction; The best multimedia resources are now just one-click away. • One flow of information, from teachers to students. Pedagogical Compiler At Wand.education, we think there is a better way to enable teachers to create learning content that fits their needs. Pre-built templates Teachers are highly repetitive in their design, constantly making use of several activities. In fact, our research showed that 80% of the content that teachers create is a variation of the same 50 learning activities. Wand provides teachers with a growing number of pre-built templates: While even the most basic software is able to detect errors, there is no content creation tool that provides teachers with suggestion on how to correct instructional design mistakes. Analyzing the most common mistakes, Wand is able to help teachers radically improve their lessons. Start from where you are As teachers have hundreds of already developed resources, Wand provides them with a 1-click automatic import of their existing slides. Then, teachers can enhance their materials in Wand by adding interactive content, delivering on any device and getting data on student progress. Monitor progress Wand.education enables teachers to monitor their students’ progress using smart reports that generates actionable data. This allows them to continually improve both content and the teaching process. Marketplace Teachers are massively reusing materials created by others. However, current marketplaces have one major flaw: metadata. This means teachers have to manually filter the content among thousands of search results. Wand.education analyzes key information on teachers (teaching subjects, devices used, student grades, abilities) and uses more than 40 parameters based on reliable metadata tagging. This is how Wand provides teachers with the best 10 search results that really matter. Wand.education enables teachers to make a natural shift to learning content 3.0. All takes place in a platform that understands the content they are creating, while opening the door for new instructional approaches, actively engaging students, giving them a voice and enabling social interaction. Wand.education is now available for a free trial period for teachers in the United Arab Emirates. To register, simply sign up at https://www.wand.education/ and join the Wand community of teachers.