Hack Education

I thought that ed-tech news would be sparse now that school's out, but there was a lot happening this week. You wouldn't guess it, of course, by the frequency with which I updated Hack Education this week. My excuse: travel (of course). I was in New York for ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY...

I finally did it. After months of reading the reviews and lusting after the product, I broke down and bought a Livescribe pen. Livescribe builds smartpens that let you both take written notes and record audio, all with the same device. And in doing so, your handwriting can actually be...

The most important educational news of the week: here's a how-to guide on how to play the marvelous guitar logo Google created in honor of Les Paul's birthday. Note-taking app Evernote introduced a new app this week, Evernote Peek. It's the first app of its kind, taking advantage of the...

Only two-thirds of students in the state of Oregon get their high school diplomas in 4 years. Congratulations, Isaiah, for being one of them today. A lot of people -- teachers, family -- said you couldn't do it, and you proved them wrong. Most of the time, we talk about...

The Creative Commons and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) announced a new metadata initiative today, aiming to provide a framework for tagging and organizing educational content online -- a framework that will work with the newly proposed Schema.org semantic markup. Metadata. The Semantic Web. I can sense yours eyes...

I like Sal Khan. It's hard not to. I've only met him once, okay, granted, but he's a pretty affable fellow. In fact, he's extremely charismatic. And charisma is one of those characteristics that makes for the best -- or at least, the most memorable -- teachers... and lecturers and...

It's Startup Weekend here in San Francisco, and last night, a hundred or so people gathered in the offices of adaptive learning startup Grockit to kick off a weekend of building startups. I love Startup Weekend. Although some people often ask "What can you possibly build in a weekend?" the...

After abandoning its plans to build a student-focused tablet earlier this year, Kno is back, unveiling its new iPad app, Textbooks. Kno claims that the new app offers the "world's largest catalog of digital textbooks," with over 70,000 titles, many of which are for sale at 30 to 50% off...

A quiet news week. It must be the end of the school year. Despite living in a world of of online dictionaries and spellcheck, the interest in the Scripps National Spelling Bee is as high as ever. Congratulations to 14-year-old Sukanya Roy who won the competition by correctly spelling the...

I'm headed to ISTE at the end of June, and as happens with any event I register to attend as press, the flood of briefing requests from exhibitors has started. I don't want to respond snarkily. Mostly, I don't respond, period. I'm sorry, I really don't mean to be rude....