Hack Education

Based on a tip from a reader who happened to notice that the company's Terms of Service had changed to mention the Walt Disney Internet Group, Techcrunch's Leena Rao broke the story yesterday that the children's social network Togetherville has been acquired by Disney. Both businesses confirm the deal. PaidContent.org's...

The wiki is a wonderful thing. I mean, a wiki is collaborative knowledge-building and sharing. How can you not love that?! But I won't wax too philosophical here about wikis -- that's not the point of this story. The point is that Wikispaces has announced that it will begin offering...

When the news broke yesterday that student tablet maker Kno is reportedly abandoning its hardware manufacturing efforts and pivoting to build student software, I don't think anyone was surprised. No-one I talked to was, at least. And considering the amount of time I spend engaging with educators and ed-technologists, I'd...

I'd say I have a fairly good grasp over what education technology resources are available out there -- what's new, what's free, what's interesting. But as I haven't been in the classroom in four years, I try to turn to teachers to find out what's useful. There's a wealth of...

President Obama is visiting Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon today to discuss education and technology. And I flashed my education technology blogger badge and landed a media pass to his press conference. Education has been the key theme as the President has travelled the country this week, following the release of...

Cross-posted on The Huffington Post As an education technology journalist, I see a lot of mobile phone apps. A lot of mobile phone apps. I receive a daily flood of email pitches from developers who've just had theirs submitted or accepted to the Apple or Android stores. It's exciting to...

The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the FCC launched Broadbandmap.gov, the National Broadband Map. The map is a searchable website with over 25 million records, allowing users to view the availability and speed of broadband across the country -- something that according to the...

The Library of Congress is redesigning its Chronicling America website, its online archive of 3.3 million newspaper pages. The archives include newspapers from 1860 to 1922 from the following states: Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon,...

The free online gradebook LearnBoost has added parent and student accounts to its platform, giving teachers the ability to share grades, assignments, and calendars and to bridge the classroom and home. Teachers generate a unique access code for each additional user, which ensures that the data is safe and secure....

Back in October, Google launched Google Code-in, a contest that would operate in a similar fashion to its university program Summer of Code, but in this case, encourage those 13 to 18 year-olds to work on open source projects. The contest has just announced its grand prize winners -- 14...