Amira Learning’s award-winning app brings literacy to life for younger learners
Amira Learning
Education, like many sectors across the globe, has found an increasing need to develop technologies that support a new ‘normal’ following the initial and transformational impacts of Covid-19 on teaching and learning.
Many learning challenges for students remain the same even if the landscape has fundamentally changed from traditional brick-and-mortar schools to digital classrooms and e-learning experiences. The time, for EdTech, to answer has come faster than the sector might have previously forecasted and all eyes are on the results of technology investments that are outpacing years prior.
While advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have saturated our digital experiences and impacted consumer behaviors, there is still a struggle to see tangible AI applications in the day-to-day of teaching and learning.
Maybe that horizon is closer than previously expected.
Amira Learning, and their AI-powered reading tutor for children, recently announced the receipt of a $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The grant will be used to support the 66% of American children who are not proficient in reading, with a specific focus on children in disadvantaged and underserved communities.
The effort will rest on the shoulders of over 20 years of research conducted at the AI and Robotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in partnership with Amira Learning. Time Magazine named Amira’s iOS app, ‘Amira & the StoryCraft’ one of the 100 Best Inventions of 2021.
I sat down with Mark Angel, CEO and co-founder of Amira Learning, to better understand the complexities at play that are actually simplifying learning through authentic and intelligent technology.
Rod Berger: Could you paint the 10,000-foot view of Amira Learning, but more importantly, why Amira Learning personally resonated with you at this stage of your career?
Mark Angel: Great, well, let’s start with what Amira is. It’s the first reading assistant software that can listen to children from five years old read out loud. Amira can assess the mastery and understanding of the reading skills that that student has, or is acquiring, and use that to report back to the teacher to then deliver direct one-to-one personalized tutoring.
For me personally, I started down the Amira path because I had the privilege of being the CTO at Renaissance Learning, which produces the two most widely used school reading applications in America.
What we learned is that even though those pieces of software were the best we could do at …….
