Month: January 2021

CAMBRIDGE, MASS — iCivics, the U.S.’s leading civic education provider, has partnered with Kami, one of the world’s fastest growing educational technology companies, to equip educators with interactive, accessible digital lesson plans. The new partnership will make iCivics’ curriculum even more adaptable for use in-person or remotely as virtual learning continues into the spring of 2021 due to COVID-19. And with social and political crises, more and more educators are in need of non-partisan, high-quality, engaging civics lessons to approach challenging conversations around current events to help inform their students—whether they are behind a desk or a screen.

Kami, which is based in Auckland, New Zealand, is used by more than 23 million educators and students around the world, including more than two thirds of US-based schools. Kami’s innovative technology allows teachers and students to annotate digital documents or teaching resources of any kind, empowering them to think, collaborate, and succeed in more creative ways. 

iCivics offers digital games and a full civics curriculum that includes hundreds of lesson plans, and is used by more than 120,500 teachers and 7.6 million K-12 students each year across the U.S. The partnership with Kami will help bring iCivics’ lesson plans to life by enabling teachers and students to write, draw, type, annotate, comment, augment, enhance, illustrate, embed audio or video, all within their web browser. And it will enhance both individual and collaborative student work in real-time or asynchronously. 

This partnership comes at a time when educators across the U.S. are striving to help their students grapple with complex current events, and must do so from home or in hybrid settings. iCivics has seen a significant increase in usage over the past year, as teachers seek more help dealing with civics topics in the news such as the 2020 presidential election, social unrest, and the insurgency against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

“We are thrilled to partner with Kami to make our high demand digital civics resources even more accessible and interactive for teachers and students alike. Teachers asked, we answered,” Julie Silverbrook, iCivics’ Senior Director of Partnerships, said. “We are grateful to the Kami team for helping us make our resources even more engaging, especially at a time of hybrid and remote learning. We are committed to making sure we continue to meet the real-time needs of civic educators and students across the country.”

Use of Kami on iCivics.org will be free for educators, as is all of iCivics’ content. Kami will allow teachers to assign iCivics lessons, and then students can use Kami’s interactive tools to complete their work and submit the assignments. 

“I have been using my own Kami account with iCivics for several years now and am so excited that Kami will now be accessible right on iCivics’ website. I strive to have a paperless classroom, and Kami allows students to interact with documents in a number of ways, including typing in answers, highlighting text, and drawing on the documents. It helps students who learn in different ways be able to manipulate the documents in a manner that best suits their learning style, and the fact that Kami and iCivics integrate fully with Google Classroom is an added bonus,” noted Kymberli Wregglesworth, a high school social studies teacher from Onaway, Michigan and member of iCivics’ Educator Network. “I know that this partnership will save me time and allow me to better serve my students, both those who are in-person and remote.”

Kami will add a number of new features to iCivics’ lesson plans, including:

• Text box: allows students to place text anywhere in the document
• Highlighter: students can mark up readings and activities (active reading support)
• Drawing: freehand drawings to be placed anywhere on the document
• Dictionary: allows students to select and define a word
• Text-to-speech: reads text aloud
• Equation: create equations by using the symbols palette 
• Shapes: draw shapes, ideal for marking areas that need to be quickly recognized
• Eraser: erase shapes, text, and drawings that have been made on the PDF
• Insert Image: easily insert images into a document, such as maps or diagrams for drawing on

“At Kami our goal is to make the lives of educators and students easier by making learning more accessible, engaging and equitable. We’re excited to be partnering with the team at iCivics to reimagine civic education and create a more informed generation during these challenging times,” said Kami CEO, Hengjie Wang.

For more information, visit: iCivics.org/Kami