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Innovators in Education

After 15 years of working to improve education by supporting and enabling the ideas and efforts of passionate innovators, instead of looking back, NewSchools Venture Fund is looking 15 years further down the road. We believe that looking toward the future is key to preparing for it. We also believe that the best way to understand the future is to listen to those creating it. Hear from NewSchools entrepreneurs about the challenges facing education, the solutions they are creating and the visions of the future informing and driving their work forward. Read more

Asking the Wrong Question on Ed Tech

How good are restaurants?The question is obviously silly, because the category is too broad to produce a useful answer. Yet the New York Times, in its big Sunday splash on education technology, makes fundamentally the same mistake – but then, fortunately, did much better in its story today about the Apollo reform effort in Houston.Here’s the basic problem: If you were going out to eat tonight, you might be quite interested to […] Read more

NewSchools Summit 2011: Sal Khan and Joel Klein

Technology has opened new ways for information—and lessons—to reach students. In a good-hearted and fast-moving conversation between Joel Klein, who recently left his post as Chancellor of the New York City schools to join News Corporation, and Sal Khan, author of more than 2,000 free, virally popular instructional videos, debate what the future of education will look like. Read more

Nick Ehrmann’s Rethinking Human Capital in Technology–Based Education

In his response to last week’s NewSchools Summit, Nick Ehrmann of Blue Engine gives a warning to those who would believe that ed tech will accelerate student learning in the absence of other fundamental shifts in the way that K-12 schools and classrooms are structured. It’s a terrific piece, although we hasten to add that NewSchools is enthusiastically interested in entrepreneurial work outside the education technology world—and particularly in organizations that integrate […] Read more

Guest Post: The New Normal Summit

This Summit will be different.  It’s the first Summit held under “new normal” conditions.  We went over the cliff.  We are getting ready to live with less and many have more cuts to come.  The hangover of the Great Recession took its toll on education, but for some leaders it forced a new round of learning as a result of asking difficult questions. Did you see Duncan’s November 2010 new normal speech […] Read more

Hybrid and Blended Learning: The Next Sentence in the Conversation

Hybrid schooling, and its close cousin blended learning, come up quickly and often in education reform conversations. The question is, what’s the third or fourth sentence in the conversation? There’s plenty of interest in the idea of blending face-to-face learning—what most of us of voting age know simply as “school”—with online education. (This is more sophisticated than mere online course-taking, which millions of kids are doing—it’s actually integrating online content into a […] 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

Inventing the future: students and technology

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – computer scientist Alan Kay Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were 21 and 22, respectively, when they started coding a new search engine. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was 20 when he launched the service from his Harvard dorm room. But the next generation of technology innovators may well be teenagers or even pre-teens, if you play out the trends teed up […] Read more