Our Blog: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Education

Blog Feed

Posts by NewSchools

Kaya Henderson, Reed Hastings announced as keynote speakers at Summit 2011

Reed Hastings got the idea that became Netflix on the way to the gym. It was 1998, and Hastings owed the video store $40 in late fees on an overdue VHS cassette of Apollo 13. The problem, he realized, was that he was paying by the rental — whereas at the gym, he paid the same amount no matter how much he used it. His epiphany became Netflix, a household synonym for […] Read more

A new website!

To say that your website is your calling card in the digital age is to use a metaphor that’s either archaic or very deeply retro. But it’s true. Whether it’s the people who do business with you every day or the ones who are just trying to figure out if they’d like to get to know you, the world learns who you are, more often than not, by the way you present […] Read more

The cover of…Failure Magazine?

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all-in which case, you fail by default.” — JK Rowling, in a speech to Harvard graduates A whole lot of years ago, when I was a junior in college studying sociology, I took a course that was cheerfully titled Organizational Disasters. Taught by business school icon Charles Perrow, the […] Read more

Rich Crandall Wants to Help You Discover Your Inner Innovator

It’s not often that you’re told to embrace mistakes, but that’s one message that Rich Crandall likes to give everyone he meets. Rich is the K-12 Lab Director at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school), where courses and classes are based on a process called “design thinking.” According to fans of this process, design thinking can transform the way organizations and individuals see the world and their work within […] Read more

Early Bird Catches the Worm

With Summit 2011 two months away, we’d like to remind all invited guests to register before this early-bird (seagull!) special flies away on March 25th!  This year’s Summit offers participants  more opportunities to connect one-on-one and in small groups. That’s just one of the ways Summit 2011 will look different from past events.  Here are a few of the new formats on tap for May 18: Inside the Entrepreneur’s Studio. Entrepreneurs are […] Read more

Saying good-bye to the scribe of our movement

By and large, we at NewSchools like to use this blog space to announce news, or to ruminate on ideas, trends, and policy matters that are core to the work of education entrepreneurs. It’s rarely for individual matters. This will be an exception. For the last eight years, Julie Landry Petersen has served as the scribe to our movement, as well as our supporter, muse, and conscience. She joined NewSchools in its […] Read more

Educational inequity? There must be an app for that.

Fired up by the challenges you see facing public education? Excited about the potential of technology to change the way we learn and work? Ready to do something about it? Bring your passion, ideas and entrepreneurial spirit to the EdTech Entrepreneurs Lab, a brand new program that Teach for America and NewSchools Venture Fund are launching in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011. Applications are now being accepted for this new program, […] Read more

More video: supercharging student achievement

In this final set of videos from the NewSchools Summit 2010, speakers at the Community of Practice event — held the day before the Summit with a smaller set of about 200 entrepreneurs and other practitioners — talked about the power of technology to help close the achievement gap. In the morning, participants heard about entrepreneurial efforts like School of One (a NewSchools grantee) and the Quest to Learn “school for digital […] Read more

NewSchools Community of Practice 2010 Session Overview and Video: Making Innovation Happen

Session Description: “Innovation generally does not emerge from a visionary individual holed up in a laboratory,” argues NewSchools co-founder Kim Smith in a recent paper. “A wide variety of stakeholders need to play a role and be effectively interconnected in an innovation ecosystem or cycle.” Discussants engaged in a lively conversation focused on putting innovation into practice. What innovations at the classroom, school site, and school system levels are game-changers–and which others […] Read more

NewSchools Community of Practice 2010 Session Overview and Video: Lunchtime Discussion: Teaching As Leadership Meets Teach Like a Champion

Session Description: Regardless of how advanced the technology innovation, the demand for high-quality teachers remains strong. Great teaching doesn’t happen by chance, nor does it happen at scale without a strong strategy and structure underlying it. Audience members joined this lunchtime session for a dialogue about this important topic with the authors of two new books about effective teaching — both of which are being talked about across the country and influencing […] Read more