Sure, thank you for having me involved with this course material. I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my experiences in way of my background. I have been working in really had a cross section of media entertainment and EdTech for the past 25 plus years. I started squarely in entertainment and then gradually moved by virtue of really being focused on the kids and family demographics. I moved towards early childhood education through both the EdTech applications products and services, and audiovisual entertainment with educational value. And my career time spent with major organizations such as the Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers where I was involved with the kids and family business five years with the company behind the hugely successful ABC mouse. Product called The Age of Learning and I currently serve as the president of Albert Whitman Media, which is the entertainment and EdTech venture of Albert Whitman and company. A 102 year old children's book publisher with a great library and a mission to help people or help kids rather read good books. So, that's what I do now. Sure so, as I mentioned, the parent company has been around for over 102 years and when it was founded it was a very simple mission. Let's make good books that children would want to read, let's create a safe space for them to learn about themselves and their society and their environment. So, that's kind of publishing mission if you will so, squarely building on that really extending these products and being able to present these books to kids on platforms where kids are actually spending a lot of their time. Primarily mobile devices, laptops, etc, and really packaging the books in ways that are very engaging, interactive. Yet we'll still have the child along the learning path or reading literacy and reading comprehension. So, that's one aspect of what I do, [COUGH] the other aspect is to turn literary classics into television, dramatic podcast, and feature film adaptations. For the most part, all of the books that we work with, all of the intellectual property they come with universal themes and social emotional learning aspects. So, for example the Boxcar Children which is a classic that the company has been publishing since the 1940s, the early 40s. Universal themes are it has multi-generational appeal, it's about courage, creativity, encouraging kids along a journey of independence, grit, perseverance, the importance of family. So, these are some of the social emotional values that the Albert Whitman book catalog would impart, and that's what we carry forward into. I would say that squarely educational shows, but shows that we'll have educational value in the development of the child. Well, I think the reason they should care about EdTech is because the EdTech is here to stay, it has been emerging for many years and I think you're very familiar with the capital inflows that the sector has attracted for good reason. And especially now with sort of in the year two or year three of this pandemic, these hybrid models that are comprised of some in person in classroom learning, plus some remote learning this hybrid model I think is here to stay for the long run. So EdTech is really the component that can fill the gap relative to impersonal learning on the one hand, and on the other hand it gives rise to opportunities for supplemental learning, whether that's in the classroom or in the home. Yeah, I would kind of draw the highlight on the supplemental aspect of it. So, there are materials that can be used in the classroom and they can be used in the home, and they augment the curriculum, and they aligned with the curriculum. So, I think in that regard they have emerged as important resources whether they it's focused on fundamental learning aspects such as early childhood math, or literacy, or coding, or social emotional themes. Ultimately, if you're the parent, you want to be engaged with your child's or children's education, you want to understand where they are in the learning journey, you want to help them along. And so the EdTech services provide great variety and high quality resources that parents can utilize in that journey. Well, I think that a successful ethnic product must be able to result in measurable learning outcomes, and so long as there's a measurable learning outcome, then that resource is a valuable resource now how you express that. Is it by virtue of engagement data? Is it through efficacy studies? Is it various formal and informal assessments? There are different ways to approach it, but I would say outcome based learning is very important. The other aspect of it is make sure that it's kind of research based and research validated as well, and so, those are the few things that I would highlight. I personally don't love the word entertainment, but I understand it's a phrase that's often used which is fine, I sort of refer to it maybe more as educational media. But regardless of the terminology that we use really what we're talking about is creating a set of compelling experiences that children will want to interact with, but at the same time did not distract them to the extent that it would take them off the learning path. So it's really, you're giving them engaging content and engaging features that they will want to come back on a daily basis or a weekly basis to have a recurring interaction with the learning product. But at the same time while they're being engaged and entertained, make sure that you actually have a learning path that's measurable. You're sort of drawing out a very important aspect of the challenge really, and I've seen this firsthand when I was at age of learning ABCmouse pursuing international opportunities. Typically curriculum standards differ from country to country, sometimes [LAUGH] even within a country like in the US, you have the national common core but then you have state standards. So, you have even regional differences and adaptability to that relevant local curriculum standards is a big challenge. And with some subject matters it comes more natural, obviously math, coding, but even within math, right? The Singaporean math is the math that they teach in the US. You have sort of the need to be able to adjust the product to the local curriculum standard and that can be difficult to scale. For example, in language arts it's a huge challenge, right? Like how do you move from country to country? You really have to almost like rethink your language arts program if that's what you're focused on with math, it's a little bit easier. I would say with coding, coding is probably one subject that's most universal or at least it's one of the subject that's most universal. And then I would say social emotional with some language localization can also scale. So, it just depends on the subject matter and the region, but this whole scalability and alignment with the local curriculum standard is definitely very important consideration when you kind of look at the global marketplace. Well, I think that one of the holy grails of education and one of the successes that I've witnessed firsthand is really around the notion of an individual learning path, it's about having the mastery, the whole mastery learning aspect of it. So, that if you have a 1000 different students going through the program, they will follow a 1000 different journeys. And you have an algorithm a system a program that continually assesses their progression and when they identify challenges it takes them around two different learning paths. So, that whole notion of adaptive learning or mastery learning, I would say is hugely important. Because when you're in a classroom setting and you're a teacher and you have 30 students or 25 or 40, you're trying to teach to the median, the student who's at the median level. In reality, there are only so many students who are on the median level, you will have some high performers that ultimately will potentially get bored or they would want to move on. And then you have kids that may struggle and they fall behind and they need more assistance to kind of bridge some of these gaps. And if you have a solution that takes all that into consideration and create this adaptive and personalized learning path, I would say that's hugely valuable. To the teacher community and to education. Well, without making it into a self serving question, I would certainly [LAUGH] this is my ability to promote Albert Whitman media and Albert Whitman media's recently launched early childhood literacy app called the Book Club. The Book club is comprised of hundreds of Albert Whitman books, where all the illustrations are beautifully animated, we have professional voiceover, we have highlighting text sink to text highlighting. So, this is an example of one of those learning journeys where kids are fully engaged because the books looked beautiful, they come to life on the phone, or on the tablet, or on the computer. And then at the end of each book you have a set of comprehension questions and and many games that are designed to gauge the learners comprehension. It's also scaffolding to the US common core reading standards and can be used as a supplemental material in the home or in the classroom. So, I would say that's one product, I also have to I suppose pay homage to my former company, age of learning who I believe have successfully cracked the code on adaptive learning through their mastery math product. And I know that they are making inroads with other subject matters. So, there will be another example. A third one that is no longer independent is a company called Code spark, they've managed to create a very visually appealing and compelling experience to teach kids coding. And I believe they have recently been acquired by Homer, Learning Homer. So, they're part of that group now, but I personally have been a fan of that product just because of the way they managed to execute and a little bit similar to ABCmouse create this game defined and visually appealing experience for kids to learn coding. I think highly there's a company called Booker Booker Kids, they happen to be a Hungarian EdTech startup that have gained attraction and recognition across Europe and around the world and they are fundamentally about teaching English as a second language. And when you look at the importance of ESL the category itself there are measurable gains, economic gains that non English speakers gain once they learn English. And so they created a system, a reading based system that's based and in line with the common European framework of reference for language learning to teach kids whose first language is not English, to learn English. And I would also want to highlight them as I think a very notable startup. I think EdTech will continue to provide flexibility and scalability and education by virtue of enabling remote learning, hybrid learning, by virtue of creating some of these individual learning journeys that we discussed earlier in the program. I think it will empower teachers to be able to utilize their time in the classroom more efficiently. I think it will provide kids with a greater variety of tools and they can choose the resource between the parent and the teacher, they collaborate on their child's education. I think it just gives you a greater arsenal, things that are scalable anywhere anytime access, measurable learning outcomes, reporting dashboards, both for the parents and for the teacher that they can follow and monitor their child's progress. They can identify areas of challenges in their academic journey. So, I think EdTech represents a toolkit that longer term will only get more and more compelling and more and more powerful than education. Will it ever completely replace in classroom education? Probably not but I think it will continue to be an ever important and growing component of educational tools and resources, [MUSIC]
