Announcing Amazon Inspire

Announcing Amazon Inspire, a Free Service for Digital Educational Resources

Press Release

An interesting blog note came across my desk from Tech & Learning eNews that Amazon had launched a new free service called Inspire that Amazon hopes will make it a major player in the tech education industry. It launched in late June with thousands of free education resources such as worksheets and lesson plans. This new service is meant to provide teachers with students anywhere from kindergarten to 12th grade a place to find and share free education materials.

Amazon Inspire Features

• Smart search — With smart search, teachers can explore resources by grade level, standard or even from a particular district. Educators can filter search results using more than 10 criteria to find great resources that best fit their needs.
• Collections — Educators can group resources into collections. They can describe the collection, curate the resources in it, recommend an order for going through the resources and share the collection with other teachers.
• Simple upload — Amazon Inspire offers an easy to use and intuitive upload interface. Educators can drag and drop files they want to share, add basic metadata such as title, description, grade and subject, and publish the content on the service, all in a few minutes.
• Customer reviews — Teachers can rate and review resources on Amazon Inspire, helping their colleagues around the country select the best resources for their needs.

• Accessibility support — Amazon Inspire has built in accessibility features. For example, educators can navigate Amazon Inspire using popular screen readers and users are also able to indicate the accessibility features of resources they upload.

see additional information at EdSurge

Educators across the United States are invited to learn more about or join the Amazon Inspire beta at www.amazoninspire.com.