Hack Education

As I mentioned just the other day, education, technology, and policy are inextricable, despite my utmost efforts to make this an ed-tech blog. From Gotham Schools, here's great example of just that: SchoolFisher merges data about housing costs with information about neighborhood schools' quality -- an effort to help parents...

The online education company 2tor has just closed another round of funding, Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld reported this morning. The $32.5 million investment brings the total raised by 2tor to $65 million. Schonfeld's story opens with a fairly bold statement from 2tor CEO John Katzman (who was also the founder of...

Teachers' Clout I worry about who has (political) clout in education. I hear all the talk of improving and reforming and disrupting education, but on the national stage, I hear only certain voices -- and very few, if any, belong to teachers. I hear politicians, present and former tech CEOs,...

Yesterday a number of technology and media companies announced new anti-bullying efforts, in conjunction with the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention. Most notable among these were the social networking giant Facebook and the popular Q&A site Formspring. Anti-Bullying Efforts at Facebook Facebook announced two improvements intended to make the...

Salman Khan's recent TED Talk is now available online. I urge you to watch it. I imagine that if you're a reader of this blog, you're already familiar with Khan Academy and its vast library of online educational videos. Perhaps you've watched some of them and sat through a lesson...

I'm taking on a new writing assignment starting this week. In addition to my usual beats (here, there), you'll find me contributing regularly to KQED's MindShift blog. This week, I wrote about the new e-book/app from Moving Tales: Unwanted Guest. Broadcastr is a location-based storytelling site. Hot on the heels...

Whenever I hear someone recommend Rosetta Stone for learning a foreign language, I gotta admit, I cringe. There are a lot of reasons, but the least of which is that Rosetta Stone still seems very stuck in that 1990s version of software -- you know the kind that comes in...

Textbooks are a multi-billion dollar industry, but I'd say it's one where the primary consumers -- students and teachers -- are fairly dissatisfied with price, content, and availability. So it's no surprise that there's plenty of activity in the textbook industry with startups taking aim at the more established companies...

I heard the story in passing on NPR this morning: teachers are finding more examples of "texting lingo" in students. I can't find a link to the news item and admittedly I was only half-listening. Here's a version of the story on a local radio station -- yet another look...

I hear a lot about the importance of "social learning" - the recognition that students' collaboration on projects is something to praise, not a form of cheating to punish. But I hear little about "social teaching," and the idea that that collaborative process of knowledge sharing and building involves both...