R:ED June 5th to June 18th 2011

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

“Twenty years ago we had challenges helping kids find enough information. Now we have the opposite problem. There’s plenty of information out there. Now it’s a matter of training students to think critically about what they find. Because 90 percent of what they find on the Internet is garbage.” New York Times

Tablet Computing Is Here To Stay, And Will Force Changes In Laptops And Phones

“Without us realizing it, our needs have evolved beyond the smartphone + laptop ecosystem.” FastCo Design

Industry Puts Heat on Schools to Teach Skills Employers Need

“Big U.S. employers, worried about replacing retiring baby boomers, are wading deeper into education and growing bolder about telling educators how to run their business.” Wall Street Journal

Ning And Ustream Launch In-Depth Integration To Allow Creators To Stream Live Video

“Ning and live stream video company Ustream are announcing an integrated partnership today that allows Ning network creators to broadcast live video and audio on their website at anytime, complete with live chat capabilities and more.” TechCrunch

The Future Of The Campus Isn’t The Classroom

“The most holistic educational experiences happen outside of the classroom. To make the biggest impact, target student-life facilities.” FastCo Design

DIY U: The Future Of Learning [Video]

“From Khan Academy and TED Talks to instructional YouTube videos, the future of learning is open and free.” Fast Company

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is Making Big Moves in the Education Business

“Joel Klein, head of News Corp.‘s new education division, has plans to make new acquisitions in the next few months, though he hasn’t specified any companies or even sectors of interest. However, he has ruled out the acquisition of a traditional publisher.” Wall Street Cheat Sheet

Smarterer Raises $1.25M To Prove You’re Good At Anything In 60 Seconds Or Less

“Smarterer’s product revolves around a fairly straightforward theory: it doesn’t take a lot of time to gauge if someone is competent in a given subject. In fact, Smarterer thinks it can determine your proficiency in just about anything in 60 seconds and 10 multiple choice questions.” TechCrunch

The 20 Best- and Worst-Paid College Majors

“A new report shows some undergraduate degrees pay off more than others — literally.” Time

Why “Brain Gyms” May Be The Next Big Business

“Four years ago, investors gingerly handed over seed money to Lumosity, a startup creating brain games. Today they’re happily tossing the same company $32 million. What changed?” Fast Company

India’s oft delayed $35 tablet ready to ship, unicorns shed tears of joy

“India’s unfortunately-named Sakshat tablet began life as a $10 laptop way back in early 2009 and, in the years since, has had more than its fair share of delays and difficulties. But, after repeatedly dashing hopes and destroying dreams it appears the $35 tablet is just about ready for take off.” Engadget

R:ED May 15th to June 4th 2011

Posted on June 5, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

6 Reasons Tablets Are Ready for the Classroom – “By looking at all that tablets offer in the context of student behavior and some of the recent trends in education, it’s clear that tablets are ready for the classroom.” Mashable

Crowdsourcing Education Innovation, For Cash – “One of the largest educational publishers in the world is offering cash prizes to the winners of a crowdsourced learning product innovation competition.” FastCompany

Entourage shuts down Edge content store, devices reportedly discontinued – “It seems natural selection has finally caught up with the Entourage Edge.” Engadget

World’s Smartest Pens Get Social – “LiveScribe makes pens that record audio in sync with a writer’s notes and allow him to play it back at a specific moment by tapping the desired place in his notebook.” Mashable

Amazon Looks To Build Full-Fledged Publishing House – “Laurence Kirshbaum, the former CEO of Time Warner’s book division and most recently the founder of a well-respected, 40-client literary agency, has been named publisher of Amazon’s New York publishing office.” Mashable

NPG, CSU partner for $49 dynamic digital textbooks – “CSU has announced a three-year deal with Nature Publishing Group for low-cost, interactive, web-based textbooks with access options for disabled students.” Engadget

How Social Media & Game Mechanics Can Motivate Students – “Social media and online games have the potential to convey 21st century skills that aren’t necessarily part of school curricula — things like time management, leadership, teamwork and creative problem solving that will prepare teens for success in college and beyond.” Mashable

Organize An Offline Class With Skillshare – “Skillshare, which launched in April, is a marketplace for offline classes. Anyone can sell tickets for a class.” Mashable

What College Degrees Are Really Worth – “A new study from Georgetown University breaks down which majors of study result in the highest career earnings. Art majors, ask a friend if you can borrow his computer to read this.” FastCompany

Microsoft manager teams up with teens to build a fusion reactor in his garage (video) – “The science fanatic recruited a team of teens, as young as 13, and worked with them to build a Farnsworth–Hirsch Fusor — a (comparatively) simple nuclear reactor that smashes together atoms and produces neutrons.” Engadget

Watermelon Express Rebrands As BenchPrep; Launches App Store For Test Prep Content – “BenchPrep develops cross-platform apps to help students prepare for a number of standardized tests including the GRE, SAT, GMAT, LSAT and MCAT.” TechCrunch

The Kno Textbook App Hits The iPad – “Last night, Kno quietly released its first digital textbook app for the iPad. It includes its own store of “over 70,000 titles at 30% to 50% off list” price. And the app is a full textbook reader.” TechCrunch

R:ED May 1st to May 7th 2011

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

Bill Gates Takes On Education’s Biggest Bureaucratic Beast With Video Games – “As states scramble to understand new educational standards, Gates eyes an opening for video games.” Fast Company

YouTube To Go Beyond Cat Videos By Training a New Class of Vloggers – “YouTube has just announced which members will be inducted into YouTube NextUp and the YouTube Creator Institute, efforts by the video-sharing site to add even more polish to its content.” Mashable

Why College Is Not A Bubble (Except For The University Of Phoenix) – “[...] in reality, demand for an American-style college education, and the long-term value of said degree, is unlikely to decline any time soon.” Fast Company

Openmargin Lets The World See Your Book-Margin Scribbles – “A public digital forum in every book is the Dutch startup Openmargin’s aim. It even thinks it can make money at it.” Fast Company

Study: Kindles Aren’t Quite All That With The Kids On Campus – “Researchers at the University of Washington have found that, while useful, Kindles (specifically that larger Kindles DX) aren’t all that popular with students – yet.” CrunchGear

Grovo: Video Training Platform Grabs Funding To Help Startups Educate Their Users – “Grovo positioned itself as an online education and training platform to enable Web users to find and learn how to use the Web’s most-frequented sites (and vice versa) — beginning with sites like Twitter, Mint, and Amazon.” TechCrunch

Responsibly Matches Your Gifting With A Donation To Education – “responsibly allows you to choose the specific education project you’d like to donate to, and 50% of the original proceeds of every gift purchased will go to the school, matched by another 50% of corporate sponsorship via Donor’s Choose.” TechCrunch

TV Ownership Drops for the First Time Since 1992 [REPORT] – “In a report released Tuesday, Nielsen estimated the number of U.S. households with TVs to be 114.7 million, down from 115.9 million in 2010 — a decline to 96.7% from 98.9%.” Mashable

Mapping the New Age of Augmented Travel – “Ever wanted to travel back in time to your favorite city and imagine how it actually existed hundreds of years ago? Or hear the stories of a city’s residents in their own words while going for a stroll through historical neighborhoods?” Big Think

P2P Learning Startup Skillshare Gets $550,000 From Founder Collective and SV Angel – “Skillshare is a community where people can offer classes to other members. People sign up online, and meet in person for real classes for everything from how to bake cupcakes to how to get startup funding.” TechCrunch

The University Has No Clothes – “The notion that a college degree is essentially worthless has become one of the year’s most fashionable ideas, with two prominent venture capitalists (Cornell ’89 and Stanford ’89, by the way) leading the charge.” New York Magazine

R:ED April 24th to April 30th 2011

Posted on May 1, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

Fidelis College Raises Money to Actually Support Our Troops – “At a basic level, it will help active duty soldiers get a headstart on college educations.” TechCrunch

Facebook Launches ‘Send’ Button For More Selective Sharing, Announces 50 Million ‘Groups’ – “Click on a webpage that has the Send button integrated, and you’ll be prompted to share it with any of your Facebook Groups, your Facebook friends, or any standard email address.” TechCrunch

Pearson buys education tech firm Schoolnet for £140m – “Schoolnet’s online learning systems are used by five million students, who attend schools in a third of the largest cities in the US. The company also provides assessment and curriculum systems.” Computer World UK

CampusLive Raises $3.1 Million To Help Brands Connect With College Students – “CampusLive is all about showcasing special offers to students to help brands increase awareness and engagement.” TechCrunch

How Schools Can Use Facebook to Build an Online Community – “Here are some ways that schools can benefit from establishing an effective Facebook presence.” Mashable

Talk to Your Computer: Chrome Listens and Translates (Through HTML) – “[...] you can talk into your computer’s microphone, and your recorded audio will be translated to text and typed out for you.” ReadWriteWeb

Gates Invests in Online Classrooms, Educational Video Games – “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said Wednesday said that it had invested $20 million into online learning, with about a third of it going toward educational video games and game tools.” PCMAG.COM

Teachers’ social network BetterLesson lands $1M – “The company is focused on developing a web-based application intended to help educators network and share resources and ideas.” Mass High Tech

Chandler University gets OK to award certificates, degrees – “The school offers certificates in areas such as digital marketing, bachelor’s degrees in construction management and technology and business administration and master’s degrees in business administration in construction management, as well as construction technology.” msnbc.com

R:ED April 17th to April 23rd 2011

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

Square’s Disruptive Payment Service About To Get A Huge Retail Boost From Apple – “Mobile payments company Square has landed a big coup—sales placement on Apple’s online store. [...] Apple will start selling Square devices in all of its U.S. retail stores starting this week.” TechCrunch

Touchscreens For All? – “New technology could make smartphones the norm in the developing world, and might have a host of other applications yet to be imagined.” Fast Company

Babel or babble? – “Languages all have their roots in the same part of the world. But they are not as similar to each other as was once thought.” The Economist

What The Telephone’s Unbeatable Functionality Teaches Us About Innovation – “Single-mindedness is a virtue, both in products and in people.” Fast Co Design

MIT Creates The One Video Game You’ll Be Thrilled To See Your Kid Get Hooked On – “Over many years, after conducting many surveys, the NSF made an intriguing conclusion: A good deal of the public’s understanding of science derives from outside of the classroom.” Fast Company

Social Media Abstinence Education Is Not Working For Pre-Teens – “Banning kids from Facebook isn’t realistic. Is education the answer?” Fast Company

Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage – “Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers.” TechCrunch

Weebly Launches Support For Multiple Editor Accounts – “[...] you’ll now be able to let other users edit your website (or portions of it), without handing over your main Weebly account credentials.” TechCrunch

Amazon Partnering With OverDrive To Bring Kindle Library Lending To 11,000 Libraries Across The US – “The company’s latest venture brings the power of the Kindle to public and educational libraries through a partnership with OverDrive.” CrunchGear

Google To Offer Chrome Notebook Subscriptions [REPORT] – “Google will be offering Chrome OS-based notebooks this summer on a subscription basis, charging between $10 and $20 per month per user.” Mashable

R:ED April 3rd to April 16th 2011

Posted on April 17, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

The ShowMe Teaching Technology Behind The New Princeton Review SAT iPad App (TCTV) – “[...] whiteboard video tutorial with a voiceover from an instructor explaining the solution. [...] a corresponding ShowMe website where tutors and teachers of all stripes can show off their teaching skills, share lessons with students, and get rated by the community.”
MyVoice, a Great App for the Speech-Disabled, Is Foursquare Meets Text-to-Speech – “The MyVoice app offers up location-based searchable phrases and helps users easily navigate social situations.”
Hacking Education: DonorsChoose.org Wants to See if Teachers Know Best – “It’s the fashion these days to blame teachers for everything that is wrong with American education. But teachers are still the people in our schools every day, and they know what our schools are lacking.”
Direct Thought Control of a Computer’s Cursor: Say Hello to Your Mind-Reading PC – “A science team has, for the first time, engaged a brain-reading electrode setup to allow a computer’s cursor instructions to come from a living, thinking human brain.”
Online Education Startup Instructure Raises $8M From Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, Tim Draper – “Instructure, a startup that develops and open-source online learning management system, has raised $8 million in Series B funding [...]. This investment brings Instructure’s total funding $9.2 million.”
How Mint Exec’s New Company Will Teach All Employees To Teach Others – “Training has traditionally been part of centralized departments—and the bane of everyone else. MindFlash is about to change that.”
Steelcase’s Brilliant Workstation For Staging Virtual Meetings – “Steelcase’s award-winning teleconferencing solution makes long-distance video collaboration as easy as plunking down your laptop at a Starbucks.”
E-Books See Triple Digit Growth As Paper Book Sales Dive – “A report from the Association of American Publishers reveals that e-books sales experienced “powerful continuing growth” as they colorfully put it, and paper books of all types dipped, compared to the same period (January-February) from last year.”

R:ED March 20th to April 2nd 2011

Posted on April 10, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

Thinking Cap: “Mynd” Is the First Dry, iPhone-Compatible, Portable Brain Scanner – Fascinating device that is build for people in wheelchairs, enabling them to control those wheelchairs with thoughts.

How the Web Has Changed Our Perception of Copyright Law – Thoughts on outdated copyright laws that don’t match the realities of an open Internet anymore.

Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who’s Right—Bill or Steve? – What subjects should students major in to become successful tech entrepreneurs?

What Bill Gates Could Learn from Chris Rock – “… while investment in STEM is critical, it alone neglects the development of the types of skills that actually lead to discovery, creativity, and innovation.”

PrepMe’s Coursification Offers A Personalized Online Learning Platform – “What differentiates Coursification from other course management and online learning platforms is that it helps teachers offer a tailored, personalized curriculum to each student based on their performance and learning schedule.”

Skype In The Classroom: An International Social Network For Teachers – “Skype launched a free international community site dubbed Skype in the Classroom, an online platform designed to help teachers find each other and relevant projects according to search criteria such as the age groups they teach, location and subjects of interest.”

Disrupt Winner Qwiki Raises, Like, $1 Million From Groupon Co-Founders – “What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics.”

Green Goose Tracks Whether Your Kids Are Doing Their Chores – “Green Goose’s sensor kit will let kids and parents add location-aware data sensors to frisbees, toothbrushes, the family dog… pretty much anything.”

R:ED March 13th to March 19th 2011

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Kirsten Winkler

Ask a VC: Mike Maples Defends Digg’s Honor and the Kno (TCTV) – Some interesting insights on the Kno technology at the end of this interview.
What Starbucks Taught Us About Redesigning College Campuses – What can we learn from Starbucks changing the way people drink coffee today and can it be applied to higher education?
Communication: Students appreciate polyglot approach – How business students learn multiple languages to boost their chances of getting hired or to choose better jobs in foreign countries.
Could an Apple Magazine Template in iOS Change the Industry? – Will a template for iPad magazines help publishers help to build better experiences and therefore increase sales?
The Future of Reading Online Is Customization & Sharing, Not Tablets (Yet) – Interview on the future of reading on the web with Khoi Vinh, former design director for NYTimes.com at SXSW.
2tor Raises $32.5 Million Series C To Make Online Education Great – “One reason online education isn’t that good is I don’t think it is trying to be that good.” John Katzman, CEO 2tor
What’s the point of learning a foreign language? – Interesting data on foreign language acquisition.
Goodbye Wheelie Backpacks: Digital Textbooks Will Dominate Over Paper Ones Soon – The U.S. the education publishing market has is reaching a tipping point: Within seven years, digital textbooks will dominate over print.
The 10 Most Innovative Companies in Education – from FastCompany
Mint Founder Invests in Semantic Text Startup – TopicMarks extracts the most important information from any text which can help students to learn faster.
College Students Aim to Build a Better Way to Manage Courses – Coursekit is a Facebook-like Learning Management System.
Now Coming to Market: Sifteo Cubes Reinvent How We Play – Amazing technology, mix of building blocks meet the iPhone.