All posts by Mark Headd

Looking for some APIs to turn your great idea into a working app? We got you covered – there are literally dozens of APIs available for Education Hack Day participants to use.

For those ready to dive right in and start coding, we’ve got some code samples for select API partners in a GitHub repo that you can simply clone and start using.

In addition, ProgrammableWeb provides a great list of APIs that you can use in your Hack Day project. Here is a quick summary on some selected APIs.

OneSchool an easy way for you to connect to the people, places, and things around you on your college campus. Why not make things simple? OneSchool provides real-time bus tracking, an interactive map of classes and local eateries, a directory of students and professors, campus news, and more. It’s the ultimate college experience in the palm of your hand.

API: http://www.mashape.com/apis/oneschool

Face.com: Face.com’s face recognition is a service which allows computers to analyze facial information found in photos, and attempt to identify faces against a known set of users. They target the hardest problem in this field: identifying ‘faces in the crowd’, appearing in everyday photos, and match them against a large set of known faces.

API: http://developers.face.com/docs/

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DonorsChoose: DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. At DonorsChoose.org, you can give as little as $1 and get the same level of choice, transparency, and feedback that is traditionally reserved for someone who gives millions. We call it citizen philanthropy. Our simple JSON API allows developers to help classroom projects with their website or application.

API: http://developer.donorschoose.org

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Howcast: Howcast empowers people with engaging, useful how-to information wherever, whenever they need to know how. Known for high-quality content, Howcast streams tens of millions of videos every month across its multi-platform distribution network. With the Howcast API, you can integrate Howcast how-to videos and wiki guides into websites, interactive widgets, and applications on any device (maybe you’ll make the next iPhone killer app). The possibilities are limitless.

API: http://apidoc.teachstreet.com

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Haiku Learning Systems: Haiku is a learning management system that allows teachers to bring their classroom to the web and the web to their classroom. Features include website design and development, listserve hosting, assignment dropboxes, and more.

API: http://www.myhaikuclass.com/haiku_lms/api/cms_page/view

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Mendeley – Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Mendeley provides access to academic research papers.

API: http://dev.mendeley.com

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CoboCards: The Collaboration Cards – are online flashcards. Just create flashcards online and learn them in your browser or with our iPhone/Android Apps. Browse our Pool for flashcards and import them.

API: http://www.cobocards.com/api/

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Curriculum U: Curriculum U is a web-based application that enables you to create and share curriculum. Its API lets you search learning content and school levels and returns K-12 content standards in XML format.

API: https://curriculumu.com/api/

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Quizlet: The Quizlet API lets developers interested in building a flashcard application use Quizlet’s vast content database of about 30 million flashcards. Quizlet is the largest flash cards and study games website with over 7 million free sets of flashcards covering every possible subject. The Quizlet API lets users search for and download Quizlet flashcard sets for use in their own applications.

API: https://quizlet.com/api/2.0/docs/

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Dictionary.com: Use the Web’s most popular dictionary to look up words within your application. Provides access to the Dictionary.com dictionary, thesaurus, slang, word of the day and more. Only non-commercial applications are allowed and API keys are reviewed.

API: http://developer.dictionary.com

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Education.com: The SchoolFinder API from education.com gives you free school data on more than 130,000 public and private K-12 schools across the 50 U.S. states. Use this web service to get comprehensive information about a school’s academic performance, a school’s test scores, student demographics, teacher stats, and reviews from parents.

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GreatSchools: GreatSchools is the country’s leading source of information on school performance. With listings of 200,000 public and private schools serving students from preschool through high school and more than 800,000 parent ratings and reviews, GreatSchools has become the go-to guide for parents aiming to make a smart school choice.

API: http://www.greatschools.org/api/docs/main.page

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In addition, you can mash these education APIs up with other APIs, like those offered by our sponsors Tropo and CloudMine. Because, after all, mashing APIs up is what hackathons are all about.

Throughout the weekend, we’ll be holding a series of “mini-lectures” to provide more in depth information on APIs and other resources that might be of interest to participants. Look for the schedule and listing for these lectures to be posted at Digital Harbor High when the event kicks off this weekend.

Happy hacking!!

One of the things the federal government has always been good at is collecting and compiling statistics and information.

One of the things it has recently started to get much better at is publishing those statistics for developers – most notably through the Data.gov portal.

There is a host of data sets available through the Data.gov portal specifically focusing on education. If you want to build a data-driven app, or want to visualize different data sets as part of your Education Hack day project, head on over to the developer section of Data.gov for education statistics.

In addition, here is list of other useful education statistical resources provided by the Department of Education:

Information courtesy of the Jason Hoekstra, U.S. Department of Education.

The success of Education Hack Day will be driven, in large part, by the data and APIs available for event participants to use when building their apps.

After all, a hackathon is only as good as it’s data and API partners.

That’s where you can help to make Education Hack Day a resounding success – by contributing documentation and code samples for your APIs.

We’ve decided to use GitHub as an easy way for partners to document their APIs and contribute code samples for Hack Day participants to use. If you want to provide information or code samples for participants to use at Education Hack Day, here’s what you need to do.

• From your GitHub account, fork the Education Hack Day code samples and API repo.
• Create a new branch with your contact information or organization name.
• Create a folder to hold your documentation and/or code samples.
• Commit and push your changes back to Github.
• Issue a pull request and we’ll incorproate your materials into the master branch.

This process will make it easy for partners to add and modify materials that they want participants to use.

When Education Hack Day begins, we’ll instruct all participants to clone this repo, so they will have all of your documentation and code samples to use when building their apps.

You can help us make Education Hack Day a smashing success – contribute docs and code samples for your APIs!