Hack Education

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. We recorded this podcast yesterday -- Labor Day here in the U.S., but hey, no rest for...

For the last couple of years, I’ve been asking teachers to tell me the one new tool that they’re most looking forwarding to taking back into the classroom with them this fall. With Labor Day now behind us and with most schools back in session, I’m happy to share the...

As a Teach for America teacher in New York City, Tess Brustein felt she needed more feedback on what she was doing in her classroom. And while I suppose it’s easy to dismiss that as an indictment on the very brief training that TFA participants receive, I think it’s actually...

Politics and Policies The Chicago Teachers Union announced this week that they’re set to strike, beginning September 10. The union is at an impasse with Chicago Public Schools over pay, length of the work day, and class size, among other issues. The CPS says that if there is a strike...

In May, I decided to re-institute a new monthly feature here, something that I used to write for MindShift: a post highlighting some of the new and updated educational apps that have been released over the past 30 days or so. Clearly this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the...

I’m a PhD dropout, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. It’s on my Twitter bio and stuff. When people ask me why I quit grad school — particularly two chapters into my dissertation — I usually give them a fairly boilerplate response, one that fits well with some of...

Part 4 of my research into the availability and accessibility of open educational resources. (See: parts 1, 2, and 3.) There’s no shortage of openly-licensed educational content online. Trickier, however, is finding the right resource — whether you’re a teacher or learner. And in some way, the challenges of that...

Cross-posted at E-Literate With all the talk about the “unbundling” of education, it’s interesting to see several universities start to experiment with a re-bundling of sorts — that is, bundling textbook expenses along with students’ course fees and tuition, and as such requiring students purchase the course materials (often in...

Cross-posted at Inside Higher Ed When I wrote about the launch of online education startup Coursera back in April, one of the things that most intrigued me most was the description that founders Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng gave of their plans for a peer-to-peer grading system. I’ve been a...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. In this week's episode, we discuss ed-tech startups and the Common Core State Standards, open educational resources,...