Hack Education

I posted my most anticipated back-to-school tech tool list today on ReadWriteWeb. According to those who took my survey, teachers are most looking forward to bringing the following into the classroom this fall: iPads, Twitter, Google Apps for Education, and blogs. I thought the results of the survey were interesting....

One of the leaders in the "smart people making smart tools" category, Wolfram Research are the makers of the computational software Mathematica, as well as the computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha. While the whole math thing makes me shudder, the idea of structured data is fascinating. The computational power of...

At the Second Life Community Conference in Boston today, Linden Labs CEO Philip Linden delivered a keynote today announcing numerous upcoming changes to Second Life. While Linden made promises about various tech upgrades, the most contentious news was confirmation that Teen Second Life would be closing. Linden said that the...

The Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation, a Kauffman Foundation initiatve, is joining with Startup Weekend to sponsor "Startup Weekend-Education" from August 27-29 in San Francisco. The event will bring together entrepreneurs, developers, designers to spend three days brainstorming new products and companies aimed at making an impact in education. At...

CourseSmart, an e-textbook provider that claims to have 90% of all core higher ed textbooks in its catalog, has released its iPad app. The app itself is free, and is similar to the company's offerings that are already available on your iPhone or your laptop. New features include stickies for...

Stanford University's School of Medicine announced last week that it would be distributing iPads to the incoming class of first year medical students. And today iAnnotate PDF announced that its PDF-reader and annotation app would be part of the required course materials for those students. According to today's press release,...

Offering monetary incentives for good grades is somewhat controversial. Neither researchers, parents, teachers, nor students can agree on whether it improves student achievement or whether it sends "the wrong message" about what knowledge is "worth." But Ultrinsic is a new company that's betting -- quite literally -- that money and...

The Pew Research Center released its "Home Broadband 2010" report today, detailing the adoption of and attitudes towards broadband in the US. 66% of American adults now have a high-speed Internet connection at home, up only slightly from 63% last year. What's striking about the report, I think, are the...

File this under News that Makes Me Want Back in the Classroom: MakerBot, the open source robot that helps people make robots that make things (which, you gotta admit, is pretty much the coolest thing ever), is giving away 10 of its Cupcake CNC kits to the 10 teachers who...

LearnBoost launched its free gradebook and lesson plan software today. See my ReadWriteWeb coverage. And Xplana, an online social learning platform, launched yesterday. Interestingly, both of these companies have been on my radar for quite some time prior to their launch due their blogs. Granted, I may be partial to...