AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Education

Alexa Edu SXSW winners

Congratulations to the winners of the HAQM Alexa EdTech Skills Challenge

For the first-ever HAQM Alexa EdTech Skills Challenge, HAQM Web Services (AWS) teamed up with SXSW EDU to challenge U.S.-based EdTechs on how they would use Alexa to transform education. Out of six finalists, AWS recognized two winners: judges’ choice SayKid, the recipient of $50,000 in AWS Promotional Credit, and people’s choice VOGO Voice, the recipient of $25,000 in AWS Promotional Credit. The other four finalists will receive $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credit.

Food bank food insecurity

Mission: Addressing food insecurity

The topic of food insecurity is personal for so many of us. Both of my parents were school teachers in Pulaski County, Kentucky, a county that has a 21.3 percent food insecurity rate for children—the same rate of childhood hunger as where I live now in Washington, DC. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), more than 11 million children across the country struggle with hunger and live in food insecure households. Here are ways that AWS technology is helping address this challenging issue.

CEU Universities Spain

CEU universities in Spain launches cloud computing education program with AWS Educate

In September 2020, CEU University will launch the Cloud Computing Program in collaboration with AWS Educate at three Spanish universities: Universidad CEU San Pablo (Madrid), Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera (Valencia), and Universidad Abat Oliba CEU (Barcelona). This is the first program of its kind in Spain. The news was announced during a virtual event on May 14.

Fix This episode 14 - Mission critical cloud: Remote education

Mission critical cloud: Remote education, on the Fix This podcast

The second part of the Mission Critical Cloud Fix This podcast mini-series by Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector at HAQM Web Services (AWS), is now live. We explored remote education with the Los Angeles County Unified School District (LAUSD), Athabasca University, and Pearson.

AWS Educate Webinars

Advice and resources for transitioning to remote learning, from the AWS Educate community

In March, AWS Educate launched a global survey to understand the biggest issues facing educators during COVID-19 while also seeking educators experienced in remote learning to volunteer in a series of online workshops and webinars. As a result of the survey and through the support of AWS Educate educators, AWS Educate launched two efforts in April to provide remote learning resources: an educator-to-educator (K20) webinar series on remote instruction and a workshops from home series for educators and students that provided access to online classes for cloud skills, computer science, robotics, and machine learning. Throughout the remote learning resource series, educators had tips for teachers transitioning to remote education.

Photo by person on computer looking COVID-19; Patrick Assalé on Unsplash

Updates and early lessons from our COVID-19 HPC Consortium research partners

The concept of a COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium emerged from a roundtable discussion at the White House in March and included input from industry, government, and academic leaders. Following the announcement of the consortium, AWS has been collaborating with teams on a growing number of projects to provide cloud computing resources from AWS. I want to share three early learnings and insights into some of the innovative projects on which we are collaborating with the world’s leading researchers.

Automating HAQM WorkSpaces

Automating deployment of HAQM WorkSpaces from an Active Directory group

With the increase in remote work and education, government, education, and nonprofit organizations, are adopting virtual desktop solutions like HAQM WorkSpaces. Large scale deployments of virtual desktop solutions can decrease administrative burden and save time. In this post, you can learn how to deploy HAQM WorkSpaces with less engineering effort by leveraging a PowerShell script.

Open Government Solutions

Open source in the fight against COVID-19

As we continue to work with public sector bodies around the world, AWS understands how valuable open source software and development communities are at this time. To accelerate the combined global response to COVID-19, we gathered examples of third-party open code, tools, and standards that reformers in the public sector can immediately use. We’ve included these in a new resource now available in Open Government Solutions.

AWS Public Sector Summit Online(

Developers’ guide to the AWS Public Sector Summit Online 2020

The annual AWS Public Sector Summit is now an online experience. At the virtual event, developers can build their own agenda, choosing between two session tracks as well as multiple virtual booths, zones, and activities. If you’re a developer who has registered or are thinking about registering, here’s what you need to know.

containers

Announcing HAQM Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in AWS GovCloud (US)

HAQM Elastic Kubernetes Service (HAQM EKS) is now generally available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Now government organizations and commercial organizations in government-regulated industries who adopt Kubernetes as their standard for orchestrating containers can use HAQM EKS to deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS. According to the 2019 Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of their community, HAQM EKS is the leading method for deploying Kubernetes.