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Distance driven today: 242 miles / 390 km
Cumulative distance driven: 1,945 miles / 3,130 km (15,000 miles to go)
Today’s trip: Prince George, British Columbia, Canada to Jasper, Alberta, Canada
Schools with donated e-readers visited: 1
Hours spent proving tech support on e-readers: 3
Hours driving in pouring rain: 2
Canadian province borders crossed: 1
In my professional life I work at the main Amazon campus in Seattle. Our CEO Jeff Bezos, often says that for Amazon and the Internet, it is still Day 1. By this he means that most of the innovation and growth opportunities lie ahead of us, and that we are still very early on in the history of the company. He believes that we should keep taking on big bold risks, and try to build and deliver superior customer experiences. A testament of how central this attitude is in the cultural DNA of Amazon, if the fact that two of campus buildings are called, yes you guessed it,
Day 1 North and
Day 1 South!
And it was the thought of that it is still Day1, which crossed my mind this morning, when I spent 3 hours with
principal Brent Arsenaut, at the St. Mary’s Catholic school in Prince George. Last winter we donated Kindle e-readers to one of his classes, and today was time for an in-person visit. What striked me, as I was providing hands-on tech support with the Kindle e-readers and with Whispercast (the online tool for devices and content management that the school uses), was that there is still so much to do when it comes to digital literacy and K-12 education. It feels like it is still Day 1 for the educational sector, and we are just at the very beginning of the transformation of our educational system into the digital era.
Principal Brent hadn’t had time to organize the physical devices in a cabinet or cart, so I found the devices in the cardboard box in his principal’s office! After Brent gave me a quick tour of the school, and walked me through the history of the school, we sat down to look at the devices. The first thing I explained to Brent was that, all the books that he had purchased, and sent to students, are actually tied to the student account, and
not to the devices themselves.
This turned out to be a hard concept for Brent to fully understand, so I decided to do a demonstration; seeing is believing as they say!
I took one of the Kindle e-readers, unregistered the current user account, and logged in with my own personal Amazon Kindle account, and voila, suddenly all of my own personal digital books, showed up on one of the school devices. I then signed out of that device, and grabbed one of the school’s iPads. We download the Kindle reader application on to the iPad, and at this stage I could see that Brent was wondering what I was up to. I then singed in to the Kindle Reader app on the school iPad, again with my personal Amazon Kindle account, and suddenly we were staring (again) at my own digital book library, but this time on the school iPad. And to prove the point, I then had Brent open the browser on his laptop, pulled up the Cloudreader.com web page, and, yes you guessed it, I once again signed in with my personal Amazon Kindle account and have access to the same digital books, but now through a browser page. That’s
when it finally clicked for Brent, and he got “the cloud” concept. I could tell that he was impressed and amazed at the same time. I gave him a quick explanation of what is going on behind the scenes, i.e. some of the internet cloud magic, which can enable his students to read their books not only on the Kindle e-readers, but also on pretty much another device, anywhere they want. You could say, that Brent witness a miracle (of a sort), and this in a Catholic school!
In total, we spent a little over 3 hours going through various scenarios for how Brent could re-organize the grouping of his devices in Whispercast (Amazon’s dedicated online tool for device and content management for schools) and how to best utilize them. Brent filled two whole pages in his notebook with tips, questions to follow-up on with his staff and with Amazon’s customer support team, and new ideas around the usage and capabilities of the e-readers.
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