Advantages

Personal and interactive

At SKIES, our objective is to enhance learning between teachers and students. We want to make it easy for teachers to track and engage, and for students to speak out and contribute. We feel that there is a current trend in education to treat technology as an end in itself, neglecting the fundamental fact that teaching and learning are very personal endeavors. Our research and product direction is centered on improving the classroom experience in a meaningful way.

Easy to use

We make it easy for teachers and students to create content. As a teacher, you do not need to have an IT staff to create and administer your own curriculum. An iPad and an internet connection is all you need to create multimedia lectures and test questions for students. As a student, you can access and review your progress anytime and anywhere.

Collaborative

Students sometimes are their own best teachers! In our test cases, we have witnessed this powerful assertion ourselves. We have thus made it easy for students to enter the kind of brilliant and original thoughts and answers that only students themselves can create. Teachers, fear not — you have ultimate control of what students can add and see from other students.

Feedback

We have received enthusiastic feedback from instructors:

• "Enjoyed it. The students did not have to wait and take turns. The SKIES software allows two or more students to ask questions or post experimental results simultaneously. The instructor could manage his time better, after all the questions had been submitted."
• "Great interaction"
• "I really like the SKIES software program. It enabled each person (high school student, teacher, or volunteer) to follow along with the lesson that the Caltech instructor was presenting. It also was great for allowing the students to take pictures using the microscope attachment and uploading those pictures to SKIES, so that everybody else in the classroom could see their pictures of their fingertip, orange skin, chocolate chip cookie, leaf, etc."
• "Better form of collaboration."
• "The final grades [in a class where SKIES was used] were astonishingly high – almost all A’s and A-pluses – the best I’ve seen in the 15 years I’ve taught the course."

as well as students:

• "We could all help each other learn better with the use of the cards on the SKIES app, we can quiz each other."
• "Skies was excellent"
• "Amazing"
• "[I]t was easier to make question cards than to raise my hand because I’m shy so it was helpful."
• "It was great I loved seeing my classmates' examples"
• "It made learning feel personal"