Magic Studio, which has a web based application to suck in content from museums, archives and publishing houses for better presentation in a school classroom, has secured £750,000 in venture investment from the newly launched media-tech fund Andromeda Capital and its existing investors the South East Growth Fund (SEGF), a £30m public-sector backed venture capital fund aimed at SMEs in South East England. The investment will be used to develop product and sell into the local authorities which run schools across the UK.
Magic Studio is an online platform that lets teachers create educational resources from content online. It has tools for content owners and is designed to work in the classroom with a whiteboard. It can also pull in content from Flickr, YouTube, Picasa and others and present it in a classroom friendly manner. Magic Studio costs 50p per pupil per year to implement. Content partners so far include English Heritage and Nottinghamshire Local Authority.
So for instance,teachers can create digital timelines, where historical events can be placed into a clickable timeline, ‘drag and drop’ exercises, where students are encouraged to place objects in the right place on an image. There’s also a high security aspect this given that it’s designed to present content inside a school – teacher doesn’t want any surprises…