2014 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award recipient Ted Turner with the Tech Awards Laureates
Last night Silicon Valley dressed to the nines for the 2014 Tech Awards Gala, a yearly program presented by The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. The evening’s awards were presented to ten exceptional technologists, educators, scientists, and entrepreneurs from around the world, who are using technology to benefit humanity.
This year the James C. Morgan Global Human
itarian Award was presented to Ted Turner, founder of CNN, the United Nations Foundation and Chairman of the Turner Foundation. The crowd also celebrated 2009 Laureate Sal Khan of Khan Academy who joined the festivities as well.
This year’s gala marks the eleventh year Microsoft has sponsored the Tech Awards’ Education category. We believe that education is essential to empower young people around the world to imagine and realize their full potential. Our YouthSpark initiative focuses on this goal to equip 300 million young people with opportunities for education, employment and entrepreneurship.
We’re proud to partner with the Tech Awards to celebrate the impact of last night’s incredible innovators. The 2014 Microsoft Education Award Laureates, Gooru and Worldreader, are non-profits that are tackling the global issue of education through providing critical access to literacy and personalized learning for hundreds of thousands of young people around the world. While the awards are global in scope, it’s inspiring to see Bay Area-based change makers acknowledged for such important work:
Gooru (category winner) is a free open-source online platform that connects a global community of over 600,000 te
achers, students and schools to more than 16 million free teaching resources. The platform empowers its users to build, iterate, and share instructional content so that each student’s individual learning needs are met with customized teaching materials. Consisting of a catalog of teacher-created learning collections, an active online community of educators and learners, and detailed analytics, Gooru’s solution is designed to scale and evolve, keeping pace with developments in technology and digital teaching practices.
Worldreader, a literacy non-profit based in San Francisco, is on a mission to create a literate planet by generating the world’s largest central repository of digital books for the developing world. It has made its extensive digital library accessible on a range of battery efficient wireless devices, such as e-readers and mobile phones, via the cloud. By partnering with more than 140 publishers, Worldreader now reaches 250,000 would-be bookworms in over 39 countries, providing them with more than 11,000 e-book titles in 44 languages. Since 2010, more than 2 million books have been read by people in the developing world. Access to e-books has allowed millions to read, to imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities, and ultimately to rise out of poverty.
On behalf of everyone at Microsoft, we offer our congratulations to this year’s Education Laureates and wish them much success as they continue their noble work.
View all the Laureates videos below:
