Making personalized education possible

The team here at Edufy wants to wish all of you a happy back to school period and sincerely hope all of you are having a positive start to the school year.

We thank everyone who has been actively contributing over the summer months to build out our learning activities for Earth Sciences. We have well over 200 in just a few short months which is very exciting to our team. More recently you may have noticed some new activities being posted, activities that are less about the earth and it’s formation and more about how things interact with the earth in motion, space, and time. In recent weeks, we have invited our friends focused on Physics to join us in our adventure and begin contributing learning activities. We are just getting started but every step is a major one for our team and one we hope will be beneficial to all of you.

For those of you attending the NSTA conference in Baltimore, we look forward to meeting you to discuss how Edufy can be a more effective partner in improving education at the individual teacher-student interaction level.

Over the weekend, you may have noticed a few changes to the site. As you know we are constantly and aggressively improving based on your feedback so sharing any thoughts both positive and critical are very important to our team. Please continue to share with us using this blog or by using the Contact Us button on the site.

Most notable of the changes we made this weekend was the introduction of Commenting on each activity. We believe developing and maintaining quality activities is reliant upon the power of the community. We encourage you to start commenting on other activities on the site that your fellow volunteers have created.

Another minor but important change is when you view search results; it is now possible to see the ‘rating’ for each activity.

Other changes are less noticeable and primarily  bug fixes. In about a month we hope to introduce another more significant set of improvements to the site which will include enhancements to the experience for creating and editing activities. These changes will be based on your feedback so don’t be shy and share your thoughts openly and freely.

We cannot thank you all enough for taking time out of your summer to help us on this adventure.

-Ben

I’ve learned a few things in my quest to be a better teacher. Clearly outlining the objective is a great educational practice which definitely applies to this blog:

Objective of this blog: The reader will… learn about the latest improvements to the site, and discover the great activities that work well in the Edufy format.

Ben, Will, and Kirk will give updates when we’ve implemented cool new features that the community has asked for, and I’ll share great activities that work well in our “find the pieces you need” approach. Here’s two I want to highlight:

• Liz posted an activity to model the layers of the Earth with Interior of the Earth Foldable.
• Dottie posted an exciting Observation vs Inference demo. It features the teacher eating a burning candle! This was a big hit on the NSTA listserv, so she posted it here too.

We can’t wait to have enough activities shared  (8/15?) so we can start to invite our colleagues before school starts. At that time, anything is possible. Imagine the power of 30,000 Earth Science teachers posting even one great idea.

A big thanks to Ben for setting up this blog, thanks to everyone helping out this summer, and thanks for helping to make great teaching easier.

Best wishes,
Phil