Brian Suda, does not need any introduction in the Icelandic Startup Scene. He also writes a pretty well read blog
@optional.is. I stumbled upon this post by Brian on
Skolapulsinn.is which he and a couple of other hackers put together for solving a big problem in Schools, to gauge the pulse of the
students. Typically this is captured by asking the students through Surveys, but Skolapulsinn.is makes that feedback look much shorter and allows for School Administrator and Teachers to react in
real time on what is going in the school system. He has written a very detailed post on this in his blog
here. I have to be honest I was not aware that this tool was hacked together in 2008 and has surveyed more than 12000 students, thats pretty impressive data set. I need to talk to Brian today and understand where is this data and what can we learn from it. I bet you could ask a whole lot of questions and this data can be used to understand the living breathing student community in
Iceland in real time. I like how Brain refers to the school system as a living breathing thing rather than a stoic institution. We could ask important questions like how involved are the parents in the
school work of the students, because time and time again it has been proven that kids whose parents are more involved with their kids work, make better students. We can actually give a more real-time report card rather than wait for the year to be over or solicit the opinion of the teacher. It is the kid who knows whether their parents are involved in the
home work or not. In addition, we could ask questions about the general feeling of the students to access whether they are feeling positive about school, their self confidence etc. This tools is a fascinating introduction to me and I obviously am going to bug Brian about how this is used in the Icelandic School System. If it is not used, then I want to lobby to the
Ministry of Education and get them to use it. We need innovation like this to Tinker and
Learn to improve our educational system, after all is'nt Education about Learning?
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