We are inspiring students’ curiosity, connecting them to the wider world, and giving them a sense of what’s possible!
Ever Widening Circles for Education (EWCed, for short) is the educational initiative of the Goodness Exchange (formerly Ever Widening Circles); a website dedicated to proving “It’s still an amazing world!” There, we are celebrating the innovations and insights happening around the globe without a political, religious, or advertising agenda.
Since Ever Widening Circles was founded in 2014, educators have been asking if they could use our content in the classroom. Of course, we said yes, but we wanted to do more for those teachers and their students and so we started developing EWCed.
Providing inspiration, not just explanation…
In the Spring of 2016, we started looking at other educational websites and talking with educators. As we had these discussions, we realized that while there were a lot of great educational websites out there, they were focused on providing explanation and not inspiration to students. These tools are great for students who already know what they are interested in, but we wanted to create a unique place where educators and students could turn to inspire curiosity!
A grassroots experience…
Our process, from the start, has been to see EWCed as a community. Our founder, Liesl Ulrich-Verderber, has a trained ear for listening to the ideas of others because of her background in design. So, listening to our users and incorporating their feedback is a central part of the way we work.
From our design to our Touchstones, we want our students and educators to feel ownership of EWCed. We want your experience with EWCed to be different from other educational websites. Our team is here to serve you; improving our content and the user experience as we hear from our community.
If you want to share your favorite videos or submit your own touchstones, YOU CAN! If we use your touchstone or video we will make sure everybody knows by thanking you!
You are the ones who know what works and what doesn’t, and we want to hear from you!
Looking ahead!
Liesl pitching EWCed in the North Country Regional Business Plan Competition, Friday, April 6, 2018. (CU Photo by Steve Jacobs)
EWCed has already seen some success. In 2017 and 2018, EWCed won the New York North Country Regional Business Plan competition in IT and Social Entrepreneurship. With early support from the Shipley Center at Clarkson University and the Academic Development Institute of Central Illinois, EWCed was able to launch in August of 2018.
Over the course of 2018 and 2019, we will be gathering feedback from our users to keep evolving. In the future, we will be creating ways for teachers to develop their own dashboards and controls. As well as developing student profiles that allow kids to dive even deeper into our content, and rolling out new ways to explore our content with even more questions and projects for students and educators to enjoy!
If you’d like to give us some feedback, please contact us, or join our mailing list!