LiftEd is an iPad application that enables special education professionals to measure students’ academic & behavioral performance on individualized learning goals, analyze learning trends to modify instruction and intervention methods real-time, and ultimately share student progress with districts & parents on-demand. It resembles an EHR and acts as a centralized repository for a student’s case team to track progress, collaborate, and maintain a transferrable record longitudinally. LiftEd aims to strategically focus on schools to provide aggregate data for administrators that can aid in compliance with federal funding mandates. In addition to significantly saving educators time and providing the ability to work remotely, LiftEd also increases the transparency of student data for parents in order to mitigate risk of lawsuits. It also enables a real-time analysis of progress and modification to classroom activities in order to accelerate student learning. All of these features are accessible from a tablet. The flexible data collection methods and intuitive applied behavior analysis caters to all educators, not just advanced professionals in clinical settings.
STORIE will help students of the Berkeley Unified School District and UC Berkeley jointly investigate the issue of educational inequality and tell their personal stories of how inequities have affected their lives. The project will work specifically with Studio H at REALM Charter School, a design and build program that teaches critical thinking and technical skills through a community project completed over the course of a semester. They will work with the teachers of Studio H to develop an educational equity project that will allow students to investigate educational trends on a national and local level, and will then offer a complementary, afterschool, documentary filmmaking project that would enable students to investigate inequities through the stories and experiences of their peers. In partnership with the Studio H teacher, they will apply the studio’s creative inquiry process to help the students’ research inequities, map out key stakeholders, and ground trends in lived experiences. Specifically, STORIE will invite community leaders, including representatives from the City and District 2020 Vision process, to speak to the students, and will travel to interview Cal professors in the Graduate School of Education. Together, the afterschool project will edit interviews into a 10-15 minute documentary that STORIE will show at a 2020 Vision community event and on the University of California, Berkeley campus.
The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 displaced over one million, and resulted in over 300,000 deaths, including a staggering 18,000 fatalities of highly-skilled professionals. Haiti’s largest public institution of higher learning, the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti (UEH), lost 90% of its physical infrastructure. In a response to the need that arose from this devastation, a group of UC students and faculty organized the UC Haiti Initiative (UCHI) to address the higher education and training needs that is critical to ensure Haiti’s long term success. UCHI believes that partnering directly with UEH students, faculty, and administration is the most promising poverty alleviation strategy that UC, as the world’s greatest institution of higher education, can engage in. UCHI will help train a new generation of leaders, researchers, and policy makers in the arena of global development. UC students and faculty will contribute to the creation of a progressive model of development: engaging an entire campus community in a respectful, sustainable advancement of higher education and community development in a global context, while also assisting in training Haiti’s future leaders and instilling confidence in the international community in a Haitian-led reconstruction process.
