During his visit to Saudi Arabia on Saturday, Intel Chairman Craig Barrett pressed the button that took www.skoool.com.sa live. Intel and Obeikan, a Saudi education development company, have worked together to make Intel’s “skoool” Learning and Teaching Technology available to enrich the educational experience for Saudi students. The interactive learning website will provide math and science lessons tailored for local needs by Obeikan. The “skoool” program is part of a global Intel initiative, specially designed to integrate into any standards based learning environment.
Intel’s skoool resources allow students and teachers to explore key math and science concepts such as numbers, decimals, fractions, geometry and algebra. The www.skoool.com.sa site hosts a set of interactive educational tools to aid students in improving their understanding of the lessons taught at school, with the goal of helping youngsters reduce the stress often associated with learning new math and science concepts. There are also tools to assist teachers in explaining difficult topics in the math and science curricula.
According to Obeikan, www.skoool.com.sa has been developed to work from anyplace at anytime, whether class or home or even when traveling. Once the software application “myskoool” is loaded into a PC, the educational material can be loaded lesson by lesson into the computer for later review. This allows the student to disconnect from the Internet, but still use the curriculum material. Once the material is downloaded to the PC, it can be transferred to a smart phone or PDA. There is no need to register or subscribe. The resource is free for everyone.
In the future, the site will be further enhanced with the creation of a service integrating mobile phones to the www.skoool.com.sa service. This will allow students to receive SMS messages about exams, reviews and multimedia lessons. It will also enable students to interact with each other and enter competitions.