FreshGrade Raises $4.3M to Connect Teachers, Students and Parents
Club Penguin founder Lane Merrifeld sold his kid-safe, massively multiplayer online gaming community to Walt Disney Co.DIS -0.88% in 2007 in what amounted to a $350 million deal. But he never gave up on the idea that kids should be able to safely use the best of today’s technologies in their daily lives. In 2012, he left Disney to co-found an […]
How Foundations Can Engage the Startup Community to Accelerate Impact
Foundations and startups are two words you don’t often see together. Typically, foundations fund established nonprofits in order to further foundations’ missions. Yet, foundations could increase their impact by finding innovative ways to work with startups. “Why would a foundation consider partnering with a startup?” This was one of the questions posed to me during […]
Accelerated: Inside Pixowl’s Decision to Focus on Parents Rather than Schools
A lot can change in two months. When we talked with Pixowl in late May, they had just finished their first test of their educational game Sandbox EDU in a Bay area classroom. Now, they are a few weeks away from launching their app, but their target market is no longer teachers but parents and kids. Read the […]
Ellevation Education adds $2 million in funding to help teachers working with English language learners
Boston-based Ellevation Education, which offers teachers tools to help plan, report, and track the instruction of English language learners, announced earlier this month that it has raised $2 million in funding from a group of angel investors. Read the full story on BetaBoston.com
Adding Things Up: Behind the Success of Motion Math’s Suite of Apps
Building a brand, especially in a Wild West world like the App Store, is no small feat. But there are a number of companies that have managed to rise to the top of the charts in the app stores without established brand power behind them. Motion Math, born from a couple of guys who met […]
It’s Time: Connecting What Students Need & What Entrepreneurs Create
I recently participated on a Digital Promise panel about whether what economists call“pull mechanisms” can create more incentives for innovation in education technology. Pull mechanism refers to things like challenges, prizes, and advanced market commitments – ways of paying for innovations based on their actual performance. This in contrast to government agencies and philanthropists making upfront investments in […]
K-12 District Leaders Evolving Into Smarter Ed-Tech Consumers
School leaders debating whether to buy educational technology often find themselves weighing the promised benefits against their worst fears—soaring costs, disruptive breakdowns, and befuddled teachers and students—not knowing whether they’re about to make a purchase their districts will come to regret.
Investors Debate Possible Bubble in the Ed-Tech Marketplace
A sharp rise in investment flowing into K-12 educational technology and a flood of new startups entering the market have longtime players cheering the attention to what they call a previously undervalued sector, but have also spurred concerns that this surge could foreshadow a boom-to-bust phenomenon.
Co.lab Game Accelerator Opens Applications for Next Round
One of the primary ways in which firms are getting products to market or ready to seek larger VC funding is by entering incubators and accelerators. One of the only out there that focus on learning and games is Co.lab, a partnership between the New Schools Venture Fund and the non-profit wing of mobile game […]
Strong standards, political air cover, and talent: Exporting the success of Boston’s charter school sector
Here follows the third entry in Fordham’s “Charter School Policy Wonk-a-Thon,” in which Mike Petrilli challenged a number of prominent scholars, practitioners, and policy analysts to take a stab at explaining why some charter sectors outpace their local district schools while others are falling behind.