Hack Education

[View the story "Maker Faire 2012" on Storify]

Pinterest and Education When Pinterest exploded onto the scene this year, I noticed a lot of teacher-friends following me there (confession: I never use the service but yes I have an account). I noticed too a lot of blog posts about “Top 10 Ways to Use Pinterest in the Classroom”...

Usually when I interview a startup’s founders and prepare to write a story about them and their product, I ask for screenshots. I could grab them myself, I suppose, but the ones that founders share can be pretty telling: it’s an opportunity for them to show me what they think...

What is “Ed-Tech”? What is “ed-tech”? What do we mean when we talk – or at least, what do I mean when I talk – about education technology? I’ve been stewing about this a lot this week, in part thanks to a tweet by Bud Hunt: Hey, y'all - "edtech"...

The Facebook IPO This is one of those news items that you’re welcome to say “Wait, Audrey. This isn’t education technology.” And you’re right. It’s not. But it still matters: Facebook went public today. So what, you ask? Well, certainly this story matters to Silicon Valley and to the new...

The crowdfunding of creative projects has become incredibly popular lately (and at times, incredibly lucrative), most notably this past week when the Pebble E-Paper Watch crossed the $10 million threshold and shattered the record for most money raised via the Kickstarter platform. Most successful Kickstarter projects raise far less than that, of...

Inside NYU art professor David Darts’ black metal lunchbox, painted with a white skull and crossbones, is the PirateBox – a tiny Linux server, a wireless router, and a battery. Turn the PirateBox on and you have a self-contained mobile communications and file-sharing device, whereby those in the vicinity can...

Interactive textbook publisher Inkling announced today that it’s struck a distribution partnership with Follett, the largest college bookstore retailer in the industry. Follett, which operates some 900 college bookstores, says it will make “hundreds of titles” from Inkling available to its customers in the fall. Students will be able to...

One of the cornerstones of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative has been the demand that states improve “teacher effectiveness.” In theory at least it’s hard to argue with such a thing – after all, great teachers have a lasting positive impact on their students, a major...

Why pay to learn to code? With the explosion in the availability of free material online that can help you learn to code – Udacity, Coursera, Codecademy and the like – why pay for a computer science class? Sometimes paying is necessary in order to earn college credits. There’s also...