Thanks for joining us for the mEducation Alliance 10th Anniversary Event and Award Show!
The virtual mEducation Alliance 10th Anniversary and Award Show was successfully held on February 11, 2021 as a celebration of the Alliance’s work over the last 10 years. During the event, we had many Alliance members and other friends reflect on some great moments and memories of Alliance activities, events, and partnerships — while also celebrating all of those institutions and individuals that have contributed to its success. This included red carpet interviews with some of our supporters and great dialogue between our MCs which is featured in the Dear mEd section of EdTech Connected Issue 2. We also featured an amazing mid-show music performance provided by Adara and Muzology!
Additionally, we honored EdTech organizations and individuals working in lower-resource developing country context in our first annual mEducation Alliance Award Show. Through our work and extensive Alliance member networks, we are aware of so many exceptional organizations working in this space that deserve recognition for their amazing efforts. Winners and nominees for each category can be found below. Congratulations to our EdTech Champions!
Full Event Recording
10th Anniversary Video
mEducation Alliance Award Winners
Please see below the list of categories and associated winners and honorable mentions. Thank you to everyone who nominated EdTech Champions for the awards and to our voting body, the mEducation Alliance Members. Winners were announced live during the event.
Numeracy and STEM
Pratham Education Foundation – PraDigi Open Learning
Pratham’s digital initiative focuses on helping children build competencies pertaining to school, work and life. For school subjects such as Math and Science, Pratham creates content (available online as well as offline after downloading) for children to explore through self-learning, project based learning, and experiential and creative learning. The program has a current reach of more than 12,000 communities and 700,000 learners across India. Pratham has created multiple videos and games for Math and Science available in 11 regional languages and English, and has the distinction of having the largest repository of content in local languages.
Honorable Mentions
Akshara Foundation – Math Learning App “Building Blocks” for Foundational Numeracy
Learning Equality – Kolibri
Literacy
Rising Academies – Rising on Air
Learning from experiences during the Ebola Crisis, Rising Academy Network adapted to the COVID19 pandemic by creating a distance learning solution called Rising On Air; a 20-week program of free, ready-to-air, radio scripts and SMS content. The program leverages Rising’s proven, high-quality structured curriculum content, re-designed for delivery via existing, widely available technologies. The content covers literacy/language arts and numeracy/maths for five different levels across K-12. In addition, Rising has created complementary content aimed at teachers to support their professional development, as well as health and safeguarding content to help keep children safe while out of school. The initiative is available via an open-access web portal and a podcast platform and has a growing community of partner organisations and governments around the world, currently spanning more than 25 countries. The program has reached upwards of 10m children and has been translated into French, Arabic and 10 other languages.
Honorable Mentions
Integrated International – Let’s Live in Harmony (LLH)
SIL International – Bloom
Youth and Workforce Development
International Youth Foundation – Passport to Success Traveler
Passport to Success® Traveler (PTS Traveler) is a comprehensive, mobile-first, low-bandwidth optimized course to teach critical soft skills to youth entering the workforce. PTS Traveler is a mobile-first adaptation of IYF’s flagship in-person soft skills & work readiness curriculum. The game-based course features a global travel theme, and was designed by, for and with young women and men from diverse communities around the world. It is available in English, Spanish, Hindi/English, and Arabic. PTS Traveler tackles gender equity and social inclusion gaps in the workplace. Since launching in January 2020, PTS Traveler has reached more than 25,000 young people across 6 continents.
Honorable Mentions
The Rumie Initiative – Rumie-Learn
Quest Alliance – Quest App
Crisis and Conflict Response
Education Above All Foundation – Internet Free Education Resource Bank
The Internet-Free Education Resource Bank (IFERB) is a collection of over 120 project-based learning resources that provides a weeklong learning experience for learners of ages 4-13+ in several subjects including science, English, mathematics and social studies. Most projects also cover several skills including literacy, numeracy, 21st century skills and social and emotional learning. These resources are freely available and provide students with an engaging learning experience that can be achieved with minimal resources and no internet access. They are available in 9 languages, aligned to 5 international curricula and are developed keeping in mind the needs and realities of students from under-resourced communities, which is reflected in the themes and design of the projects. IFERB has been successfully piloted with over 20 NGOs in 4 countries so far with promising results. Learner and teacher satisfaction in some contexts is as high as 90% and an 18% student growth in academic and 21st century skills has also been observed.
Honorable Mentions
Amal Alliance – We Are in This Together & Colors of Kindness
Department of Education, Philippines – DepEd TV
Inclusive Education
World Around You – World Around You Platform
World Around You (WAY) is a technology-based multi-lingual platform with the goal to increase global literacy outcomes for deaf children by providing greater access to sign languages, early grade reading materials, vocabulary, reading instruction, and digital games. WAY is a library of storybooks about different topics, including COVID-19, folktales, deaf experiences, cultural items and foods, and sign language genres. WAY promotes community inclusion and engagement by allowing deaf and hearing contributors to create, publish and distribute multi-lingual signed stories with written text collaboratively across the Internet. WAY reinforces global literacy for deaf children and global sign language documentation of local, regional and national sign languages by Deaf people.
Honorable Mentions
Benetech – Bookshare
Grapho Group Ltd – GraphoGame
EdTech Researcher Extraordinaire
Sarah Pouezevara and Carmen Strigel – RTI International
For the past two decades, Carmen and Sarah have led and contributed to dozens of EdTech research and program design and implementation efforts, in over 25 countries. Sarah’s research has converged around leveraging mobile devices for teacher training and delivering basic skills instruction, beginning in 2006 with a mobile-enabled school-based teacher training program in Bangladesh that compared teachers’ content knowledge outcomes to a comparison group of traditional in-person workshop participants. As part of the same study, Carmen led research on eResources to support instruction in remote schools in Mongolia and Samoa, identifying and publishing enablers and barriers to effective EdTech integration. Recently, Sarah has developed a framework for scaling equitable EdTech and used this model to develop a program of research in the Philippines. Carmen is taking forward applied research on expanding the use of Tangerine to support large scale teacher coaching and teacher continuous assessment in Kyrgyzstan. (Full nomination with links to research HERE)
Honorable Mentions
Christopher Kurz – Rochester Institute of Technology
Kenneth Y T Lim – National Institute of Education, Singapore
Policymaker EdTech Champions
Department of Education, Philippines
In response to COVID-19 related school shutdowns, the Department of Education in the Philippines began training teachers to record lessons that would be broadcasted to students through television, radio and online platforms such as YouTube and DepEd Commons. Local TV personalities were tapped to select, train and mentor 107 teacher-broadcasters in a span one month. In the first phase of the project, the Department was able to produce 130 episodes per week covering all the major subject areas in the curriculum. In the second phase of the project which targeted for this March, the Department will increase its resource pool to produce 220 episodes per week that will cover all the subject areas in the curriculum and ensure that learning continues despite the suspension of face to face classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find the recorded lessons on the DepEd TV YouTube Channel.
Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education, Sierra Leone
The Sierra Leone Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education was nominated because as their nominator put it, their use of mobile technology supported “the radical inclusion of all students in Sierra Leone.” The ministry consistently uses technology to support data-driven decision-making and evidence-informed policy development. In February 2021, they launched the first phase of the One Tablet Per School program which will collect dynamic data and manage school-based teacher professional development with the goal of improving learning outcomes by strengthening the education workforce. This initiative builds on their recent efforts of creating a digitized Annual School Census. At the same time, the ministry has also used GIS mapping to support school catchment area planning and the development of new school approval guidelines. All of this work directly contributes to their mission of providing free quality education.
Alliance Member Award
Mike Trucano – World Bank
Mike is the World Bank’s Senior Education & Technology Policy Specialist and Global Lead for Innovation in Education, working on issues at the intersection of technology use and education in middle- and low-income countries and emerging markets around the world. He currently co-leads the World Bank’s global edtech team and global solutions group on ‘technology and innovation in education’, which maintains the World Bank’s knowledge base on related topics; provides technical support and guidance to large scale national education projects around the world. Mike also leads research and analytical work under the World Bank’s flagship Systems Approach for Better Education Results initiative as it relates to information and communication technologies, including a related working paper series. He is also known for writing numerous blog posts for the World Bank, including one in 2014 called “Education & Technology in an Age of Pandemics” which has been revisited over this past year. Way to go, Mike!
