Hack Education

As a child, I was a huge fan of a collaborative story writing game that I later learned was also a favorite of the Surrealists. The gist of the "exquisite corpse" game: write a sentence on a piece of paper. Fold the paper so that only the last word or...

Inkling, the makers of a textbook app for iPad, announced this week that the company has raised a round of funding that includes a minority investment from the two largest publishers of educational content in the world: Pearson and McGraw-Hill. Inkling's app re-envisions how textbook content should appear on tablets,...

Getting a Story Wrong I had one of those awful experiences as a journalist last week where I got a story totally wrong. A mobile analytics company released findings from a study it had done on mobile browser speed, saying that it found Android to be 50% faster than iOS....

The Virginia Board of Education has changed its mind about passing policy recommendations that would have severely limited any sort of electronic communication between teachers and students. The proposal before the Board earlier this year would have advised teachers to avoid text-messaging students and to avoid interacting with them on...

When the FCC launched its National Broadband Map last month, one of the uses I immediately saw for it -- and wrote about here -- was as a way for communities to assess the speed and availability of Internet in their schools and libraries. Indeed, a recent FCC survey among...

It's a question I get a lot as an education writer: who's the best teacher you ever had? I suppose I should be more politic, say they were all pretty good, say I have no favorites. But I do: Mr. Callahan was the best. Much more difficult is the task...

Applications will open soon for Google Summer of Code, a global program that gives college CS students an opportunity (with a stipend) to do real-work development on open source projects. On Friday, Google announced the 175 mentoring organizations for this summer's program. You can see the full list here, which...

A version of this story is posted on MindShift, where I now contribute regularly. The Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released its study on children's media usage. Among its findings, television is still the most popular media for kids, but children are now engaging in a variety...

"It will be a great day when schools get all the money they need and the Air Force will have to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." -- bumper sticker I received my notice the other day that the Kickstarter pledge I'd made to fund Smarthistory was being...

Augmented Reality (AR) has been listed as an up-and-coming education technology by the Horizon Report for the past two years. Poised to be a game-changer, augmented reality has often been pretty gimmicky instead. Augmented reality layers additional information onto the world through digital technologies that present real-time data, photos, or...