Teachers can now use IBM’s Watson to search for free lesson plans — from edsurge.com by Stephen Noonoo
Excerpt:
IBM’s famous Watson computing system—which defeated Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings in 2011—is coming to education, if not quite the classroom. As part of a new IBM philanthropic initiative, the supercomputer is helping to power a searchable database of open educational math resources designed for teachers in grades K-5.
Today marks the first time the new tool, called Teacher Advisor With Watson 1.0, is open to the public after a lengthy beta testing period that sought input from state education commissioners, teachers unions, school board associations and more than 1,000 teachers.
“We wanted to build and design something for teachers by teachers, with the best information and the best technology available,” says Stan Litow, the President Emeritus of the IBM Foundation and a former deputy chancellor for New York City Department of Education.
The IBM Foundation has been flirting with ideas to apply Watson technology in education for a while, without knowing exactly what it wanted to do with it. The tech giant began last year by pulling in more than 100 top-level education leaders for a daylong event demoing the tech. From that focus group they narrowed the list of potential applications to professional development tools and, eventually, settled on a searchable database exclusively for elementary school math.
Populating the search engine is a collection of more than 1,000 OERs—from sources such as Achieve, UnboundED and statewide orgs like EngageNY—hand-selected by math experts assisting the program.
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