The RHoK Austin reception is on June 1st on HomeAway's roof. The hackathon is happening on June 2nd–3rd at Cospace. Sign up and hack for humanity!

Projects are still coming in, but the following are ones we have details on so far:

• Empowering Teachers with Technology : Phase One - The Key

  Creating lesson plans and manually linking them to standards or creating a lesson plan around a required standard is a time consuming and tedious process which needs to be stream-lined and automated, so that teachers can focus on creating quality lesson plans.

  What is the solution?

  The Key will include a standards look-up and tracker. The look-up feature will assist teachers in linking standards to their lessons or creating lessons around a standard. The look-up will be simple to use and intuitive because is searched by key words which are essentially the subject of the lesson. We already possess a database that matches key words to standards (the necessary "smart data set"). The standards tracker will also keep track of any standards that teachers use so that teachers can easily provide evidence and documentation that they have utilized all the required standards for their grade level and subject course. The time saved by this function alone will justify The Desk because teachers will have a way to easily maintain their accountability to administrators, something teachers must do already.

  Categories:

  Education

• Empowering Teachers with Technology : Phase Two - The Cabinet

  Newly-hired teachers can easily become isolated from the professional learning community they desperately need and disillusioned by the amount of additional work required to create high-quality lessons and stay accountable to state and federal standards. One of the most common reasons given for teacher attrition is the lack of a professional community to compare and share ideas. Many small- and medium-sized schools only have one teacher for a given class, which means that many teachers are left without peers to review, bolster, and share their lessons with.

  What is the solution?

  The “Cabinet” will include a space for teachers to create, modify, store and organize lesson plans. If a teacher finds a standard in the “Key” that they would like to build a lesson around, they can build that lesson in the “Cabinet”. If a teacher finds a lesson from another teacher that they want to teach in the “Lounge”, they can add that lesson to their “Cabinet” and modify it. Teachers can modify their default lesson plan template to suit the requirements of their district.

  Categories:

  Education

• Empowering Teachers with Technology : Phase Three - The Lounge

  Teachers are required to create and submit multiple lesson plans daily. These lessons must fit a rigid format that is often determined at a district level and may be changed from year to year. This is a tedious task that often causes frustration that contributes to high teacher attrition rates. Teachers often turn to pre packaged (“canned”) curriculum or conduct online searches for lessons. While this can ease the workload for teachers, online searches for lesson plans and curriculum are unfocused, costly, time-consuming, and unfriendly to the modifications that have to be made based on specific classroom needs. Teachers must also keep all of their lessons organized and keep track of the order in which they are being taught (“scope and sequence”).

  What is the solution?

  The Lounge is a place where teachers can connect, form communities, and share lesson plans and best practices with other teachers. Essentially, The Lounge is a social networking space for educators. In The Lounge, teachers will be able to find other teachers’ lessons in their subject, download, rate, and comment on those lessons. Through the process of exchanging, modifying, and commenting on lesson plans, teachers will begin to develop bottom up solutions to their classroom needs, augmenting educators’ experience in real-time. In The Lounge, teachers ARE the solution to the problems facing education.

  Categories:

  Education

• Sheltr Project in Austin

  Sheltr uses your current location to help people help the needy find the closest available food, shelter, medical care or a primary need. Sheltr was built to be very simple to use because when one encounters someone in need, it should be easy and quick to give them vital information that will serve their need.

  What is the solution?

  TAs keeping true to our goal of being a search engine for basic human needs, we ask cities to have some datasets of addresses and availability ready.

  For Austin, ideally, we would need: A list of Shelters, A list of food resources, A list of medical resources
  We could start off with any of these, and then source the rest. We would also need to discuss whether austin.sheltr.org would be the best destination for hosting

  Categories:

  Urban

• Pledge for Hope

  A Glimmer of Hope helps lift women and children out of extreme poverty in rural Ethiopia. Our model focuses on four areas of development: water, health, education, and microfinance.

  Part I: Webpage

  Platform for Fundraiser to explain the challenge they are undertaking; "check-in" function for each day the task has or has not been completed; portal for Endorsers to pledge dollar amounts and leave comments; and upon completion of challenge, the webpage should have functionality to deduct the total funds pledged from endorsers' bank account or other form of payment. Link to social media and "share" progress on appropriate social media pages.

  Part II: Mobile App

  Enables fundraisers to access their challenge home page, "check-in" to say whether they have or have not completed the given task on that day, track pledges and respond to comments, link to social media and "share" progress on appropriate social media pages.

  Categories:

  Agriculture

  Disaster Resiliency

  Education

  Gender Equality

  Health

  Water

• Improving Security at Dell Children’s Medical Center - Controlled access to patient units

  As Dell Children’s Medical Center grows both in acuity and in size (with the addition of our new third bed tower) protecting the safety of our patients and the families who live here while their loved one is receiving treatment becomes a more complex task. We have the ability to lock and unlock all of our units electronically (our three critical care units currently have 24/7 controlled access), but in our acute care units, we do so only at night when our families and patients are least likely to need to move around the hospital.

  What is the solution?

  We would like to explore the development of a system that could recognize our patients and families and allow them to move freely in and out of the locked units but require that visitors and guests request access to all units.

  Categories:

  Health

• Improving Communication at Dell Children’s Medical Center

  Dell Children’s Medical Center is growing. Our new bed tower is under construction and set to open in May 2013. It will house three 24-bed patient units including an inpatient physical rehabilitation unit, the first in central TX. During the design and planning for the new bed tower, we realized that the patients and families in the far south tower would benefit from an additional family resource center including several desktop computer workstations on which they can have email and internet access. However, the new family resource area will not be staffed – so access to the medical librarians and DVDs and books to borrow will require a trip to the main Family Resource Center near the front entrance of the hospital.

  What is the solution?

  We would like to explore development of an interface or app that would allow patients, families and visitors to connect with the main family resource center and medical library from anywhere in the hospital from desktops or laptops and potentially from ipads and smartphones as well – as long as the user is connected to the the Seton family wireless access network. This would allow families to request assistance from the medical librarians as well as to check if DVDs and books were available.

  Categories:

  Health

• Improving Navigation at Dell Children’s Medical Center

  Dell Children’s Medical Center is a beautiful and inherently confusing building. With the addition of a new bed tower, we expect our families and visitors to experience some growing pains in their way-finding.

  What is the solution?

  We would like to explore the development of an interface or app that could operate from either a stationary PC or on a smart phone that would assist families, guests and visitors in finding their family member or the location of their appointment or meeting. Potentially, an app for smart phones could recognize that someone has entered the hospital and could then help them navigate through the building using their phone

  Categories:

  Health

• Bazaarvoice
• Cospace
• Rackspace
• HomeAway
• Man Bites Dog
• Peached Tortilla