Hack Education

There's a pretty nifty new tool making the rounds: ifttt. "If this, then that." It lets you hook up various Web 2.0 services, automating all sorts of tasks -- sending your Instagram photos to Dropbox, for example. Sending starred items from your Google Reader to Instapaper. Sending Tweets to Evernote....

You can find anything, learn anything you want on the Web, so the adage goes. But the vast resources that are at our disposal now don't necessarily make it all that easy for teachers to be able to build their lesson plans. It's hard to wade through websites and find...

A new gaming site aimed at helping build teens' programming and STEM skills has its official launch today. NoNameSite.com is a project run by the coding contest community TopCoder with the support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA sees NoNameSite.com as part of its larger mission to...

 There is widespread alarm in the United States about the state of our math education, wrote Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford in an op-ed in The New York Times last month. It led me to remember the opening salvo in a pitch for re-thinking math education � that of Dan...

When Consumer Tech Becomes Educational Tech One of the things I like most about the recent wave of consumer-focused Internet technologies is that tools needn't be created or labelled specifically as "educational" to find themselves utilized by educators and students. The note-taking platform Evernote is a great example, as is...

Labor Day has long been the traditional week for back-to-school, although it seems like most schools started weeks ago. And for many folks -- teachers, parents, principals, students -- the big school-related news this week was, well, school. So regardless when you start or started: I wish you all the...

There's plenty of hyperbole when it comes to Apple's impact on education and specifically on mobile learning. Cue claims of "revolution." But most often when we do so, it's to talk about Apple hardware or the thriving app ecosystem that's grown up around it. iTunes U never gets as much...

It's now official: after a successful Startup Weekend EDU earlier this summer and with increasing interest in the sector, the non-profit behind the intensive, 54-hour-long startup-building events is launching a dedicated education vertical. This means more Startup Weekend EDUs -- ideally, one a month. This means a lot more innovative...

I can't really write an obituary for Michael Hart. I'll point you to the words of those who knew him in describing the man and his life. I can tell you this: as the inventor of the e-book and the founder of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart had a profoundly important...

A win for open access: JSTOR, an online database of academic journals, announced this morning that it was making all its early journal content freely available. This includes all JSTOR articles published prior to 1923 in the U.S. and prior to 1870 elsewhere in the world. JSTOR's database includes articles...