Hack Education

A recent survey by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that 7 out of 10 college students have skipped buying a college textbook because of its price. The students said they recognize there are consequences for not doing so -- 78% said they expected to perform worse in a...

College presidents are a lot more optimistic about online learning than the general public is. That's one of the findings from the Pew Research Center latest report, based on surveys of both U.S. adults and U.S. college presidents. According to Pew, only 29% of the public feel as though online...

It has been a bitter pill for me to swallow as a parent and as a bibliophile: my son does not love to read. Sure, I read to him daily when he was a toddler, and even once he learned to read to himself, we still spent many evenings reading...

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan held his first Twitter Town Hall on Wednesday. People were asked to use the #askarne hashtag in order to direct questions to Duncan, which were asked in turn by journalist John Merrow. The Department of Education has posted a selection of the Q&A on...

A Missouri circuit court judge has issued a preliminary injunction today, blocking the enforcement of a new law that that would have prohibited Missouri teachers from having "exclusive access" to students via social media. Many educators feared that the law, as written, would have greatly curbed their ability to communicate...

Cellphones in the Classroom As I recently noted it's the time of year for publications to put out their lists of recommended back-to-school apps. These are all well and good if you have a smartphone, but the lists tend to overlook what is one of the most common, and in...

Today was the first day of school for Grace Lutheran School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Among the various tasks that the students had to accomplish today were establishing their Google accounts and setting up their new Chromebooks. There's already a certain excitement that comes with a new school year, but according...

Michael Staton, the CEO of the "Facebook for Higher Ed" startup Inigral, unleashed a fiery blog post this morning on Higher Ed Live, demanding to know why are we giving up on software for education. "That's it, I've had it," he writes. "The information market is broken. Education Media and...

One of the most innovative e-book apps available today, Inkling, has just updated its iPad app, adding new features to make its already-interactive textbooks even more interactive and more social. As I've argued recently, that social element is crucial, particularly in education, as it means that readers no longer need...

It's that time of year again -- time for the various and sundry blog posts listing out the best back-to-school tips, tracks, apps, hardware, and so on. I've written one already for MindShift: "The Most Anticipated Tech Tools of Back-to-School 2011," based on a survey -- as the title suggests...