Su-Kam Intelligent Education Systems (SKIES)

SKIES has been featured on the Caltech home page, as well as the Pasadena Weekly and the PCC Courier.

SKIES is a collaborative learning app currently running on iPhones and iPads. In a classroom setting, it functions as a bulletin board. Teachers and students post class materials in the form of “cards”, which may contain text, pictures, drawings, audio clips, web links, or videos; as well as quiz questions in many different formats. The cards are linked together into an easy-to-browse “class tree”.

Teachers and students have found many ways to use SKIES. Teachers can upload lectures onto the system — any sort of PDF file can be converted into cards.

    

Teachers can prepare questions for students to answer throughout the lecture, to determine how well students are understanding the material. Or they can encourage students to create questions for others to answer. Students can be teachers!

SKIES also works well as an electronic notebook for organizing labs and projects. Students use it to organize their results, and can post results for everyone to see. Teachers can go through the cards to discuss and draw conclusions from class data:

SKIES can also be used in a more personal way, as a textbook and learning guide. Students can track their own progress, and teachers can track the progress of the class as a whole.

Teachers have used SKIES as a collaboration tool, to plan lessons and create curriculum together with other teachers. We are building a network of teachers working together to create next-generation classroom experiences.

We are developing classes which use SKIES to integrate collaborative learning with instruction on core concepts and hands-on lab activities. Videos describing the Community Science Academy at Caltech:

We are currently in private beta. If you are interested in evaluating our app, please e-mail us at skies@skieslearn.com.