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Course: Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute > Unit 4
Lesson 2: Blended learning softwareBuilding customized software and solutions
Created by Silicon Schools Fund and Clayton Christensen Institute.
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- Can you sent me procedure of, who to build a software?(2 votes)
- hallow how study software make(1 vote)
- Tutorials for Creating software for learning may be better discussed in another class our course. This class if only for Blended Learning. The Creation of learning software, I believe, is under software development, information technology, etc.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Schools often are tempted, as they get into this work, to think, "Oh, we'll just build our own software "to drive our teaching." And you may remember that
Summit Public Schools actually did this when they created those individualized learning playlists and they curated lots of
content for their students. - Right, and the obvious upside
to this is you get exactly what you want, it's
customized, you built it. Unfortunately, it's also
really, really hard, and it's something that even the experts with dedicated teams
can spend months doing. So, just like I would not advise a school to go build a customized bus themselves because they want the perfect
transportation option, we generally don't think
schools should necessarily get themselves into the business of having their teachers staying up at night learning coding and
building customized software. However, one model that we have seen work really well is the idea of schools working in closely-aligned partnerships
with a software company. And when we talked about Summit earlier, they built their new Activate platform with a company called
Illuminate Instruction. Illuminate needed what
Summit knew how to do, which was how to build really good content and find what students wanted. And Summit needed what
Illuminate knew how to do, which was to create
really robust software. The interdependence was the key here, so when a new feature was developed, they could get it quickly into the school and the teachers could
pilot and try it out. Then, that feedback would get back to the software developers,
who could quickly iterate and create a new tool. And that mutual
interdependence has created what we think is a very
promising new software product that neither of them probably
could have built on their own. - A few years ago, my
CAO and I had a vision for what could exist. This was the early
vision for our playlists and what might be possible there. But we didn't have the skill
or the ability to create this, and while we could
imagine it, we had no way of making it happen. We got lucky, in that we
got introduced to some really thoughtful, committed,
educational entrepreneurs who wanted to work with educators like us. So we got into a room,
we literally flew down, got into a room, and spent
about five hours whiteboarding what we thought would solve
a lot of our problems, and how they started to think about and could imagine their
technology being able to meet that need. From there, a relationship was born. Fast-forward several years. We have worked side by side in an interdisciplinary team, if you will, to build the Activate platform. This is a platform that
we're now making available to anyone and everyone, free by design. We had a common interest,
common values, and a real desire to build something that we felt like would enable blended learning and
next generation learning for all kids and for all teachers. That experience has been invaluable for both parties, I believe.