Education
With Backing From Resolute, Mafia Wars, Tapjoy Founders & More, OKpanda Wants To Bring Better English Language Learning To Asia
That’s how a new startup called OKPanda hopes to stand out from the noise. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur and app developer Adam Gries and Nir Markus, the former co-founder and…
LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman On Two Realistic Outcomes Of Teaching Everyone To Code
On a regular basis, we get pitched with major tech industry initiatives to broaden computer science education. A day after Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates signed on to a new…
Catching Up With Quick Key, The App That Helps Teachers Grade Faster And Better
Back in February, we wrote about a smartphone app for school teachers called Quick Key, the low-fi demo video that had just gone viral. The app’s optical scanner quickly grades…
Academic Startup Publons Gives Peer Reviewers Credit For Their Work
The traditional anonymous peer review process used in academic publishing is meant to ensure objectivity, but it means reviewers give up their time for very little reward. The lack of…
Student Tablet Hardware Melts, District Suspends $30 Million Amplify Program On Safety Concerns
A North Carolina school district has suspended the use of 15,000 tablets after reports of multiple hardware issues, including the device’s charger melting at home. Guilford County Superintendent Maurice “Mo”…
littleBits’ Exploration Kits Will Make You Think Differently About Building Hardware
Whole worlds have been built out of LEGO and K’Nex and Meccano and a seemingly endless supply of childhood wonder, but the world is changing and so too are our…
Study: Children Reading Fewer Books, Down 8% From 2012
The Harry Potter series is wildly entertaining, but so is Angry Birds, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube Justin Bieber re-enactments, texting, Halo, The Disney Channel, Transformers 3, and a consumer flying drone.…
Hopster, The Netflix For Pre-Schoolers, Hits UK App Store In November With Babar, Madeline, SuperWhy And More
London-based startup and Netflix for small children Hopster is on the verge of launching its unlimited TV content app, the company announced today, with a UK iOS App Store debut…
Elance, SkilledUp & Smarterer Launch New Learning Platform To Let You Learn, Validate & Find Work In One Place
Everyone knows that the educational system in the U.S. hasn’t changed much in, oh, the last 100 years. And that there’s a lot of inertia within the system, gumming the…
With 1M Users Now On Board, Learnist Brings Its “Pinterest For Learning” To Android
When Grockit first emerged back in 2008, it had set its sights on building a full-service, social learning service that would give students a better way to study for standardized…
Now At 30K Schools And Growing Fast, Remind101 Is On A Mission To Modernize Classroom Communication
While many industries in the U.S. have undergone massive changes in the last 10 years — such that some almost seem unrecognizable — the educational system appears much the same…
Free Massive Online Education Provider, Coursera, Begins To Find A Path To Profits
Online education providers may very well disrupt the higher-education establishment, but first, these for-profit companies need to find a way to finance the mammoth technical infrastructure needed to support millions of…
Google Expands Role In Digital Education, Teams Up With edX To Build A YouTube For Free Online Courses
It’s turning into a busy week for Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) providers, and the tech companies that love them — particularly Google. On Monday, Udacity co-founder and CEO Sebastian…
Skaffl Launches To Help Teachers Get More Out Of Mobile Technology In The Classroom
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a young, teacher-led education technology startup called Skaffl announced the impending launch of an iPad app that aims to help teachers make better use of…
Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom On New Online Education Initiatives: “If This Doesn’t Wake Them Up, I Don’t Know What Will”
This morning, former San Francisco Mayor and current Lieutenant Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Udacity co-founder and CEO Sebastian Thrun took the stage to talk to TechCrunch co-editor Alexia…
Desire2Learn Acquires Adaptive Learning And Analytics Startup Knowillage
Desire2Learn, the Ontario-based makers of one of the largest Learning Management Systems (LMS) that raised $80 million last year, has been going after M&A of late. Today, after buying student…
AppoLearning For iPad Helps Parents & Teachers Find The Educational Apps Worth Buying
With an ever-expanding selection of apps on the market making educational claims, parents today have a tough time deciding which apps are worth their investment. Earlier this year, app search…
With Funding From Top Flight Investors, Fast-Growing NoRedInk Is On A Mission To Rid The World Of Bad Grammar
The declining quality of humanities education (and student performance) in the U.S. has become a big problem. Last year, the College Board reported that SAT scores in reading and writing…
Curious Brings Its “Learn Anything” Marketplace And Video Lesson Library To The iPad
Thanks to the steady march of technology into the world of education, it’s a great time to be a lifelong learner. Today, there are a growing number of platforms that…
WebDev Video Tutorials Startup Learnable.com Gives Australian High School Students Free Classes To Address Looming Crisis
Hoping to address the software developer skills crisis choking Australia’s startup ecosystem, Learnable.com is giving away $10 million in credits to high school students to access its library of web development…
Classroom Behavior Platform ClassDojo Adds Full Website Functionality To Its Mobile App
ClassDojo, software for tracking classroom behavior and incentivizing students, has updated its mobile app to allow teachers to access all the desktop features from a mobile device. Now teachers can…
Educational App Store For Parents, KinderTown, Acquired By Demme Learning
KinderTown, a startup whose app store for parents points users to the top educational apps for children, has been acquired by Demme Learning, an independent publisher of educational materials, including…
Pinterest Targets Casual Visitors With New “Pinterest For Teachers” Site, May Add More Content Hubs In Future
Pinterest has launched what may be the first of several official “hubs” featuring content targeting a particular segment of its user base, with today’s debut of a new “Pinterest for…
Grades.io Launches To Simplify And Beautify College Classroom Management
When Arkansas-based entrepreneur and designer Arlton Lowry finally got the opportunity to teach a college class (one of his life-long goals), he found that the options for managing said class…
Mountain View-based Tynker, a startup focused on teaching children of all ages the basics of learning how to code, is now expanding its service beyond schools with today’s debut of Tynker…
Developed By Literacy Experts, Learn With Homer Launches On The iPad To Change How Kids Learn To Read
Stephanie Dua spent the last ten years pushing for educational reform, first as the CEO of the Fund for Public Schools under former Chancellor of New York’s Department of Education,…
Andreessen-Backed Tutor Matching Service Is Working With Colleges To Upend The Tutoring Industry, Starting With Cost
Of the many ways that technology is disrupting education, one area that’s changing a lot, is rife with potential, but doesn’t get as much play as it should is tutoring.…
Socrative Gets $750K From True Ventures, NewSchools To Bring Realtime Student Response System To K-12 Education
TechCrunch has learned today that Socrative, an intelligent student response system aimed for K-12 classrooms, has quietly raised $750K in seed financing from True Ventures, NewSchools Ventures and a handful…
Grockit Sells Social Learning Platform To Kaplan, Goes All-In On Learnist, Its “Pinterest For Education”
If you haven’t heard, some of the former giants of the education world haven’t been doing too well, particularly academic publishers, as evidenced by McGraw-Hill’s recent sale and Cengage’s filing…
John Doerr On Zynga Investment: “We Own 60M Shares, So I Want That Stock Back Above $10 … Where God Intended It”
Investors tend not to be cool, sexy or “famous” in the traditional sense. After all, anyone can invest in one great company, but reproducing those victories habitually over decades is…
