On Nov. 1, Microsoft will be releasing its newest Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial, which, according to a recent announcement, could be "possibly the most adventurous tutorial yet." The company has teamed up with Code.org for the release of "Voyage Aquatic," in which students "explore aquatic worlds and uncover hidden treasure" by writing code to instruct agents to execute commands.
The Khan Academy has launched a new series of videos focused on civics for students in K-12 and higher education — and anybody else interested in learning how government works in the United States.
The U.S. Department of Education has developed two toolkits for educators and developers on how to use educational technology to instruct English language learning students.
Actively Learn will operate as a stand-alone unit within Achieve3000, and Jay Goyal, co-founder and CEO of the first company will serve as president.
Elementary math encompasses essential first steps on the path to understanding numbers and their uses, patterns, and relationships. Along the way, students learn the skills of counting, estimation, rounding, representing data, and measurement. These concepts are used in everyday life and are an essential first step to understanding science and its processes.
Nonprofit Khan Academy has launched Khan Academy Kids, an educational app designed for early learners (ages 2 to 5). The full app is available free for iOS and is in beta for Android.
VictoryVR, a company that creates virtual reality curriculum for grades 5–12, will be making its science content available for the Oculus Go beginning this summer.
Gale has updated its resources to be compliant with Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 standards and Deep Linking from the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The move enables single sign-on and allows instructors to embed content from their library's Gale collections to into any learning management system that supports the standards, including Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Schoology and more.
Binge-viewing could be coming to a library near you. RBmedia, which owns Recorded Books, has released an unlimited streaming video service for libraries, as well as a new version of its app to allow patrons to access multiple content services, including the streaming shows. RBdigital, the specialized streaming video service, will give library users the chance to view videos from RBmedia's licensed content in the same way they watch shows on Netflix. They'll be able to watch as many shows as they like in a seven-day period while the library pays for a single checkout.
The new version of DBQuest from iCivics was redesigned for easier sharing, use on tablets, teacher tracking of student progress and simpler addition of new teaching modules. The work was supported with a grant from the Library of Congress and relies on the use of primary sources from the library's online collections.