London, November 14, 2018 – Tes global, home to a community of 11.6m teachers and others involved in education, is to run a pilot with AI company Wizenoze, that would see teachers gain access to a set of tools to help them create resources matched to student needs, saving time and improving quality.
- Tes and Wizenoze are launching a pilot that could help teachers produce high-quality resources, well-targeted by abilities such as reading level and potentially reduce the time they take to create.
- The two partners share the goal of supporting teachers to produce and source teaching and learning resources of the highest professional standard.
- The partnership will test how and to what extent the technology may support teachers to become better at meeting the reading levels of individual students when producing resources.
- Tes hosts the world’s largest collection of shared teaching resources, which is used by over 11 million users, downloading up to a million resources a day.
- Wizenoze, a specialist AI company, uses machine learning and natural language processing to create a simple 5 scale ‘reading index’, which is matched to different audience levels including the UK and US school stages e.g. Key Stage 4.
The partners aim to demonstrate best practice in the creation of teaching resources, following recent calls from the Department of Education for teachers to make use of materials that are quality-assured.
Over the next few months, Wizenoze will work with Tes resource authors to explore a new framework of quality indicators for teaching resources, applying access to technology.
“With more and more demands on the teaching profession to use technology to support the needs of individual learners, Wizenoze is excited to offer its easy to use technology to help practitioners apply simple checks to ensure their resources meet the reading level for each student. If a resource is easy to read, then the student has the best chance to comprehend the learning task provided.”
Dr Leila Walker, UK Director, Wizenoze
“We know there are already hundreds of thousands of brilliant teaching resources on Tes – but we want to get even better at ensuring teachers see the ones that are the highest quality first. So we are working on a range of initiatives on this topic, and are especially proud to be partnering with Wizenoze, and with Dr Leila Walker, who we regard as a real authority on how the quality of teaching materials should be judged.”
Mr Michael Shaw, Director of Resources, Tes
Editor’s notes
About Tes
Tes is a digital education company, home to one of the largest digital communities of any profession, with over 11 million members. We believe in the power of great teaching. We support and connect teachers and schools worldwide, helping them improve children’s lives through education. For more information visit tes.com.
About Wizenoze
Wizenoze is on a mission to help students all over the world at school, in libraries and at home to find relevant content online. Wizenoze specialises in the readability and modern classification of written texts. The company was launched in 2013 by Diane Janknegt (ex-Director, Microsoft) and Prof. Dr Theo Huibers (Strategy Advisor & Professor, Twente University).
Founded in Amsterdam and with a global office in London, the company is passionate about its mission to close the readability gap on the web, especially for students and second language learners. Working with teachers and supporting schools lies at the heart of that mission. Today, their online content collection, the Web for Classrooms is deployed in varied learning environments to provide easy access to relevant web-based information at the right reading level.
An active supporter of the global literacy movement. Wizenoze was selected by the world’s leading education company, Pearson, to participate in the Project Literacy Lab, the world’s first international partnership focused on supporting rapid growth ventures that are positioned to close the global literacy gap by 2030. The Web for Classrooms has been recognised as an innovative use of Ai that has the ability to quickly scale, worldwide.
Wizenoze is proud to have received an Innovation Credit from the Dutch Government and has also been awarded a prestigious development grant by Google in recognition of its advanced technology. In addition, Wizenoze’s UK expansion is actively supported by the UK Government’s Global Entrepreneur Programme at the Department for International Trade, which encourages successful European companies to open up UK offices. More broadly, latest investments have also been focused on worldwide expansion and the technology is now being deployed in India, Tajikistan, Kenya, the USA and the UAE.
For interview requests or for further information, please contact Diane Janknegt at diane@wizenoze.com.
