Calling All Chicago Education Innovators!!!

Reprinted from Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC)

Written by Jason Hoekstra, SLC

Join us at our SLC Camp codeathon on September 8th and 9th in downtown Chicago’s Merchandise Mart hosted at the digital community “1871”.

Are you in the Chicagoland area? Are you passionate about technology? Do you have a school-aged child, nephew or niece and wonder why she doesn’t have the same access to digital tools to improve her education that streamlines your work? Do you have a teacher in the family who shares painful stories of juggling six applications plus hours of searching through digital content to manage his classroom from week to week?

(Teachers, please excuse the next two paragraphs of buzzwords as I have a moment with my fellow geeks. I promise we won’t burden you with tech speak at the Chicago Camp.)

The SLC is a collaboration between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop a secure, open-source, common education API-enabled data store. Today, data integration and interoperability are difficult and costly barriers for new implementations of digital teaching and learning applications – equally challenging for new startups and experienced companies. Districts have numerous data formats within their schools: from teacher-produced CSV spreadsheets to mainframe-generated flat files to unstructured documents to well-formed XML files (and an occasional EDI file – seriously!). Implementers are fortunate at times to find these files in well-known education data standards, but many are forced to engage in lengthy data mapping and conversion activities. This is a significant drag on the potential to innovate via education technology, impeding efforts from the startup with a parental notification mobile app all the way up to the large, experienced team producing an integrated adaptive personalized learning platform.

The newly developed SLC technology removes these barriers by providing a flexible, common real-time hub of education data. We’ve built-in a number of connectors to the data store to best suit your application and development preferences. We have a real-time REST-based interface that speaks both JSON and XML (sorry, no EDI support in the roadmap). We have a bulk ingestion zone to upload XML data en masse. We have a CSV to XML conversion tool that will bring life back to those old spreadsheets filled with useful classroom data. We have a SIF adapter in the works to interconnect existing enterprise-level district applications to the SLC data store. If you’d like to “SLC-enable” your application, we’ve designed our infrastructure to listen and speak in the dialect that makes the most sense for your app dev team. The idea is to raise all boats out of the data tall grass and into higher value activities in a vast ocean of possibility for education innovation.

So what does this have to do with Chicago? We’re hosting an activity-driven SLC Camp codeathon in my fine hometown with its delicious deep dish pizza, a hot-dog done right, many miles of leisure lakefront space, world class museums and rivalrous baseball teams (go Sox!!). Our event needs technology innovators (coders, designers and biz dev) and passionate educators (teachers, administrators and other instructional professionals). Tech folks: we’ll have a few talks about how to connect into the SLC APIs and then be there with full support to enable your great ideas for classroom apps. Education experts: we’ll have a few talks about how our “content tagging” technology will help you find good online resources for lesson plans – in far less time than the hours you spend today. After that, we’ll provide plenty of hands-on activities for an early preview of new tools that will save time for more personalized instruction in the future. Also – if you wouldn’t mind, could you work with our smart developers by letting them know the challenges you face today and verify whether their app ideas would benefit your classroom?

We’ll have other important details to share at the SLC Camp. First, data security is our #1 top priority with the SLC data store – but we’ll coach you on how to interact safely with education data and how school districts will grant you access. We have 5 pilot states coming online in 2012 and 4 more in 2013 so that, in effect, the SLC will shorten the distance for an opportunity to connect with school districts. We’ll cover that and more in person on September 8th and 9th at the 1871 tech lab.

Also, we’ll provide some good local food throughout, a t-shirt to show you were a part of the early days and fun activities and prizes to keep the creativity flowing.

REGISTER HERE

So you are in? Great! What’s next?

1. Register now for a free ticket and let us know whether you are a technologist or an educator.
2. Teachers: after registration, you are all set!  We’ll see you September 8^th. Bring a laptop if you have one!  (We promise, the food will be good – no stale conference sandwiches!)
3. Developers: a few tips to jumpstart the way to coding on the SLC:
   1. Register for a Sandbox API account.  If you need help, check out this step-by-step YouTube video or printable guide.
   2. Register here on dev.slcedu.org.  You’ll need this to interact in forums or submit your app to be showcased.
   3. Passionate, but new to education?  No problems, we’ll talk through this at the Camp.  Also, check out our top 10 scenarios document where over 800 educators told us what they’d like to see in tomorrow’s classroom.
   4. Keep an eye on our SLC Camp wiki for more developments.  We’re filling this with stuff you need to know – camp schedule, how to get to the 1871 tech lab and some common education terminology.  At the Camp, you can use this to tell folks what you are working on and make a call for help if you need a hand.

We’re very excited to see you come to our inaugural SLC Camp in the Windy City of Big Shoulders.  Please let us know if we can answer any questions, and if not, we’ll see you soon!