Just read an interesting article by Greg Kumparak on MobileCrunch. Apparently another forecast by Kirstradamus became reality, this time it is the Teacher Cloud.
Today Castle Rock Research Corporation, a publisher of educational resources based in Canada launched its newest product called Motuto. It is an application for iPhone and iPad that enables students to connect with a tutor when they are stuck with their homework.
The language learning community busuu turned three today. Time really flies, so happy birthday to Bernhard, Adrian and the team at busuu!
As a side note to the event busuu shared that over 2.5 million people now have signed up to learn a language with the service. All in all, busuu seems to be on a role at the moment, getting some nice coverage in the press, for example yesterday on the Washington Post blog.
Today, I received a pretty interesting email from Udemy, advertising the new “Course of the Week” deal on the platform. It’s the same one Udemy is currently promoting via TeachStreet’s weekly deal called “Social Marketing for Startups”.
With now TeachStreet and Udemy offering weekly deals in various educational topics, good times for learners are to come upon us.
As there have been a couple of smaller updates and news around the three language learning communities recently, I thought I might as well combine them in one blog post to give you a quick overview on the current state of affairs.
So, here we go.
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About a year ago TeachStreet took a quite radical step and switched the freemium model into premium only for teachers. I amongst others saluted Dave Schappell and the team for this move.
Today Dave posted an update on the TeachStreet blog, announcing that the basic listing on the platform will be switched to free again. On the other hand the “Teacher Request” feature will become part of the paid services on TeachStreet.
Are you a language teacher in Europe and do you happen to use social media tools in your curriculum?
If this is the case, you can join a competition hosted by the European network “Language Learning and Social Media – 6 Key Dialogues” and use your skills to win 1000 € to spend on technical equipment for your classroom!
Easter time has been officially extended this year. Yesterday, you had the chance to get one of 30 private beta invites for Blueteach PRO, today you can grab one of three free tickets for LearnBoost’s party at this year’s ISTE in Philadelphia, June 26-29.
Almost exactly one year ago I visited Blueteach during one of my trips to Paris. Back then the project was still in the early stages and was basically a pretty well equipped virtual classroom offering an interactive whiteboard with math and annotation tools, video embeds etc.
Since then Blueteach added various features to its service like recording of video classes / screen casts which can also be searched by students via the portal. The startup also launched badges to award milestones on the platform like giving 25 lessons etc.
Yes, two Pearson related news in one day. This second article deals with the “online remediation and enrichment solution” Perspective which will feature the more than 1.200 instructional math videos by TenMarks.
Perspective is an integrated assessment and instruction solution that provides students with a roadmap leading them to specific online resources based on their scores.
Just a few weeks after they announced the closing of their $1 million funding round, the team at Languagelab shares more interesting news. In collaboration with Pearson, Business English students are now able to bring the case studies of the popular textbook series “Market Leader” into life. Second Life that is.
Based on Languagelab’s virtual world English City, students from around the globe will be able to interact live with other students and teachers in a 3D environment.
I already had a hunch that this would be coming. In a survey TeachStreet did a couple of months ago amongst their teachers, there was a question if they were interested in participating in group buying offers.
Today TeachStreet officially launches its weekly deals and joins one of the hottest markets, e.g. group buying. But rather than the giants Groupon and Living Social, TeachStreet will only offer education related deals.
Yesterday YongoPal introduced a new landing page with a giant iPhone, showing some kind of a message stream similar to Twitter direct messages on the screen. The header reads
Penpals? Lame. YongoPals? Sweet.
If I count correctly this is the third iteration of the YongoPal platform in less than twelve months.
It seems as if the latest study from Xplana in which they predict that the tipping point for digital textbooks is as near as 2015 has opened up the wallets of two major publishers for an undisclosed “multi million Dollar” investment.
Inkling, the maker of the iPad application and platform which delivers enhanced and engaging textbooks, leaving the “flat, PDF-based digital textbooks” behind is the beneficiary and it could give the startup a competitive edge over the well funded competitor the Kno.
This weekend it’s time for the 4th Virtual Round Table Conference. From Friday March 25th to Sunday March 27th Heike Philp and her team Shelly Terrell and Berni Wall will host the marathon event on Second Life and several Adobe Connect Rooms.
The price for coffee usually peaks at those times across the globe.
There are a ton of interesting sessions, workshops and presentations to attend and if you have the time and you’re a stayer, yours truly will also give a presentation on “Trends in education 2.0 for 2011” on Friday, March 25th at 5:30pm GMT.
I am going to talk about the major trends we can see at the moment, back them up with some data and give you reasons why the vertical might work or not. As I don’t want this to turn too much into a lecture, I am also planning a Q&A with the audience, so feel free to come and ask me anything. Hopefully, I’ll be able to give you an answer 
You can register for the presentation at the Virtual Round Table Conference portal and of course take a look at the other sessions.
Hope to see you on Friday!
By taking just a quick look at my schedule for the coming weeks and all the talks with startups in education 2.0, I can feel in an almost palpable sense that there is something happening in education from language learning over math and science to K12, colleges and universities.
But that’s not only from the startup side, investors ranging from Seed over angels to VCs are also getting more and more interested in the space and therefore it absolutely makes sense to launch an incubator like Imagine K12.
Shiv Rajendran, Director at Languagelab and a regular on my webcast review:ed shared some exciting news with me today. The London based startup behind the virtual town of English City on Second Life has closed a $1 million funding round.
In their approach of bringing English learning and teaching into the virtual world of Second Life Languagelab is one of the most innovative startups in education 2.0 .
Today Learnable one of the new breed of education startups from down under officially launched its platform with more than 60 courses ranging from Yoga to PHP.
In fact, the platform gave visitors access for one or two weeks already but as the team writes on the official Learnable blog, today is the day the doors are bolted in and the sign “open for business” hangs in the window.
Great news reached me today as MindSnacks, one of my favorite startups in education 2.0, announced its $1.2 million funding round.
Not surprisingly, one of the investors is Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund which already put money in education startups like Udemy, YongoPal and InternMatch. He is building up a nice portfolio of education 2.0 startups.
Lingueo, the Paris based marketplace for online language lessons launched a new website although the actual format is around for quite some time already.
PolyglotParty.com is the new home of the very successful offline event with the same name that takes place once a month at a changing location in Paris and is hosted by the Lingueo team.
Quoting the tagline of that classic movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito “Only their mother can tell them apart” and for me it was quite a shocker last week.
I got followed by doMore on Twitter early last week and when I had a look at the website I almost spit out my morning coffee. It looked exactly like TeachStreet! After getting over the initial shock and a quick email to Dave Schappell I learned that the Seattle startup actually joined forces with doMore, sharing its technology and experiences.
