ISKME GoPro Learning Challenge Announces Winners

Novel Proposals for Capturing Learning with Wearable Cameras

PRLog (Press Release) - Jun. 16, 2014 - HALF MOON BAY, Calif. -- ISKME, an education nonprofit pioneering global access to open education resources (OER), and GoPro, maker of versatile cameras and enabler of some of today’s most engaging user-generated content, today announced five winners of the ISKME GoPro Learning Challenge. The challenge, announced at ISKME’s Big Ideas Fest 2013 last December, was designed to inspire creativity inside and outside the classroom by integrating GoPro’s cameras and editing software with ISKME’s OER Commons, a site for sharing high-quality education resources.

“The basis for this partnership,” said ISKME President and Founder Lisa Petrides, “is discovering ways teachers can use video as both a teaching and learning tool.

“The opportunity GoPro gives teachers and students to visually document how learning takes place combined with ISKME’s OER Commons could vastly expand our knowledge about innovative practices for achieving optimal learning,” Petrides adds.

Challenge winners will receive GoPro’s award winning HERO3+ camera and be provided training on GoPro cameras and software to help them create their educational resources. All the videos will be openly licensed and shared on OER Commons, so that learners everywhere can access and use these resources.

“We are excited about the many possibilities of using our cameras in the classroom as teachers look to new technologies to further enhance the learning experience,” remarked Wayne Sexton, sales manager for education & government sales at GoPro. “We have already embarked on some amazing projects in the education world that have taken us from the Artic Circle to the South Pacific and we are looking forward to this Challenge and learning from all the participants.”

The judges, who included educators from other institutions, were asked to evaluate submissions on the novelty of the idea for impacting student learning using GoPro cameras, as well as on the efficacy of the project and the potential for engagement with students to achieve relevant learning goals.

For a look at the five ISKME GoPro Challenge winning proposals -- which included using GoPro cameras to study how different objects react in water; shadowing the lives of migrant workers during the seasons; documenting local issues in the news by taking innovative approaches; and exchanging videos on agricultural and cultural practices between the U.S. and Liberia -- go tohttp://www.bigideasfest.org/iskmes-gopro-learning-challenge.

GoPro will be attending the upcoming International Society for Technology in Education conference in Atlanta from June 28 – July 1.