Ariem Technologies Blog

January 30, 2010

Relevance of Technology in Education today

Filed under: Ariem, Bangalore, Innovation, Product Startup, Technology, education — Tags: , , , , , — Sreeja @ 9:00 AM

Why technology in education? What is this hype about? This is a question we get asked in many different forms, day in and day out. And, this is not from people who are skeptical about it, this is more from harried education management/principals, teachers who think that they are irrelevant in today’s context.

Given the above theme, I would like to introduce a slide deck I presented on behalf of Ariem at the School Needz Expo in Jan 2010. The topic was technology as an important resource in Education today. You can view it below.

Technology as an important resource in Education Today

There has always been resistance to technology adoption in education. To cite a few examples, back in 1700s when the Quill and Bark was mainstream and slate and chalk was launched, I can imagine the educators groaning about the “costly” slates and how the “skill” for developing “own” bark was being lost on the children. Let us take something even closer in history, ball point pens vs. ink pens and the hoopla that was created around handwriting to prevent one from shifting to using ball point pens.

We are at another such point of inflection and it is ever more important because today access to information via the internet can drastically transform the way we teach today. Educators can don the role of facilitators, instead of data banks, to instil reponsibility and the right perspective towards accessing, distilling, extracting, discarding, referencing and using information in today’s children. The teachers are digital migrants today while the children are digital natives, but the concept of mentoring and guidance are still as alive and kicking today. Hence, the call for creating simple technologies that help teachers bridge the digital gap and connect with today’s generation becomes all the more important.

With the empowerment of teachers through technology, it can act as a bridge to collaborate, enabler to reach the underprivileged, differentiator to keep the teacher relevant and a source of power to ignite minds. More on each of these perspectives in the next few posts as we talk about some real life case studies.

If you like what you read – kindly leave your comments, email us at sales@ariemtech.com and follow us on twitter @ariemtech. Would love to hear from you!

January 18, 2010

Enabling Technology in Education

Filed under: Ariem, Bangalore, Innovation, Product Startup, Technology, education — Tags: , , , , , — Sreeja @ 8:30 AM

The truth is technology has raced way ahead of the pace of change in our education system and no amount of catching up and getting people to “hop on” the bandwagon will get us there.

While lot of attention has been paid to the technology for bringing the children on board (eg., OLPC) , most have missed out the bigger picture of knowledge delivery hierarchy and the web of exams and evaluations that holds it together today. So if any solid change in the view towards technology needs to happen, it needs to start at the point of delivery while parallely working at getting a sympathetic ear from the system. Alan Kay in the last portion of his talk (starting at 18.25min) at TED points out how they can make 5 million of the $100 laptops to give away but to explore the depths of the learning software loaded on it, they won’t be able to produce a 1000 mentors over the same period. It is the same problem that we are facing today. The children born in today’s world are “digital natives” and the teachers are “digital immigrants”. If we are to lead the children through depth and ingenuity, there needs to be a platform to empower the teachers. That is exactly where Ariem is going.

At Ariem we strongly believe in simplifying the access to information for all, including the teachers.Using our product, RazorBee Teacher’s Aid, the teachers can access information available on the internet and use it in their classrooms to deliver audio/video content.

We attempt to overcome several barriers in the process of technology adoption in the teaching process ranging from complex operating systems to non-intuitive user interface while accessing information on the internet to the level of technological know-how required to deliver audio/visual content in a classroom.

Keep reading this blog, we will be uploading glimpses of how we empower teachers to create engaging learning experiences.

If you like what you read and would like to keep in touch – you can write to us at sales@ariemtech.com and follow us on twitter at @ariemtech.

January 16, 2010

Ariem @ School Needz Expo

Filed under: Ariem, Bangalore, Innovation, Product Startup, Technology, Web Console, education — Tags: , , , , — Sreeja @ 3:22 PM

Ariem recently participated at the School Needz Expo on Jan 9th-10th 2010. Below is a video from the conference. We received extremely positive response from the teachers, principals, school administrators, teacher trainers, current as well as future school owners who experienced our product at the stall. We would like to thank one and all for their participation and encouragement.

January 13, 2010

Of Occam’s Razor n Bees

Filed under: Ariem, Bangalore, Innovation, Product Startup, Web Console — Tags: , , , , — Sreeja @ 10:58 AM

Ariem’s first product in the market is called RazorBee – a rather unusual name at first sight for a product that primarily serves as a web console and helps deliver audio/visual content. However, I wanted to use this post to shed some light on the origin of the product’s name.

Occam’s Razor refers to a principle which states that “one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything” and the quality of Honey Bees is collecting the best from different places and making it accessible in one place. Put both of these together and you get RazorBee which can be used to collect information from the internet in the simplest way possible and make it available in one place for delivery.

January 2, 2010

Point of Existence

Filed under: Ariem, Bangalore, Innovation, Product Startup, Technology, Web Console, education — Tags: , , , , — Sreeja @ 10:12 PM

In the past decade, world over, computer has become a very prevalent official and personal tool.  Simultaneously, a larger revolution has happened in its backyard and transformed it from a tool to be “learned” to a tool for “day-to-day usage”. This was the Internet.  It has become the access point of information of all sorts but has been hidden behind the computer for the longest time. Now, mobile web is a reality too.

However, the questions we asked ourselves while starting out were - What if we could enable the access to information without the computational complexities? What could be the potential for that kind of a solution? How would we create a meaningful product for the many kinds of niches that needed to be “armed” with access to information available in the digital world?

And what we learnt was that, YES it would be great if we could have access to information minus the complexities and a way to put together something in a simple way to share with others. One of the most interesting segments turned out to be education. Two years down the line, here we are, with our first product for the education segment. It is called RazorBee Teacher’s Aid and is a simple device that helps teachers deliver audio/visual content in classrooms to aid their teaching process.

We have officially launched our product and have been talking to several schools about the product in the past one month. So you might be wondering – more technology in education! All we can say is keep reading this blog…we will be posting more interesting information on usage of technology in education, comments, thoughts and experiences in coming posts.

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