Back to school is here and Austin students across the city are getting ready for the new year. As technology continues to change the way we look at Education, Austin tech companies are jumping at the chance to improve the industry. From helping high school students master the basics in STEM to making SAT prep affordable for everyone, these companies are making learning easier, fun and at your fingertips.
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Skoop is a social-networking app for campus-specific communication. Basically, if you're headed off the college, you need Skoop. It delivers updates on college-specific events through a tripartite system. Its Events function publicizes parties, study groups, and other campus happenings; it allows students to buy and sell goods and communicate via an instant messenger service; and the news feed, Heartbeat, publishes bazaar listings, events, and other updates pertinent to the student population. Users can create and upload eight-second videos to each of the three platforms. All content within Events and Heartbeat is user-submitted.
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Maybe you're not in college yet, but you're getting ready. Prepify is a source for free online SAT test prep for aspiring college students. By providing gratis instruction, Prepify aims to narrow the opportunity gap between socioeconomically disadvantaged students and their more privileged peers. In addition to delivering free instruction, Prepify offers curricula that are designed to be adaptive to a student’s learning style and rate of progress. They dynamically adjust in “real time” to a student’s strengths and weaknesses, presenting her with questions deemed relevant by proprietary algorithms.
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LivingTree
Alright, this one might be more for the parents than the students, but LivingTree makes sure everyone is on the same page about a child's education. The private, secure and hierarchical social network that enables convenient communication among parents, teachers, students, schools, districts and community organizations. Teachers share pictures from the day. They post homework assignments, request chaperones and remind users about field trip permission slips and report cards. Schools easily send weather alerts or announcements about school achievements, be them academic, artistic or athletic. Furthermore, LivingTree provides engagement analytics to schools and districts, allowing them to properly monitor their networks, a valuable feature especially in Texas, where Carswell said schools must conduct a self-assessment on community engagement each summer.
