Learning a language is never easy. One thing that’s usually missing in the way students learn a new language is the ability to use their new skills while talking to a native speaker. LanguageTwin, a startup I met at the Willamette Angel Conference in Corvallis, Ore., last week, aims to do just that. The service brings together language learners for peer-to-peer interactions to give students the… → Read More
Top Hat Monocle, the Toronto-based provider of mobile-based classroom response systems, has decided to get Lasik and has dropped the ‘monocle’ from its name and logo. Top Hat, as the company will now be known, is celebrating this move with the launch of a redesigned corporate site at TopHat.com and, more importantly, it also switching to a freemium model where classes with fewer than 30… → Read More
Over the last year or so, we’ve seen an auspicious rise in the number of startups looking to tackle those seemingly intractable problems in both K-12 and higher education. One of these startups, the New York City-based ShowMe, found some early financial validation from an impressive set of investors, raising $800K last August from the likes of Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, betaworks, Learn Capital… → Read More
A college textbook can cost a staggering $200. Over four years of study, students can easily spend thousands of dollars on books on top of a hefty tuition.
The situation is not much better in public elementary, middle and high schools, where taxpayers pick up the bill. California spends around $100 on every math and science book for its 2 million high school students, for example.
But… → Read More
Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, among the banking, shipping, steel and transport magnates of the global economy, there are a number of technology entrepreneurs floating around. As they rub shoulders with the likes of Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble, it’s possible to peel them off from the crowd. I managed to catch Jose Ferreira, CEO and Founder of Knewton a… → Read More
In my last post, I argued that software will take over many of the tasks doctors do today. And what of education? We find a very similar story of what the popular – and incredibly funny! – TED speaker Sir Ken Robinson calls “a crisis of human resources.” At the TED 2010 conference, he stated that “we make poor use of our talents.” In the same way that we misuse the talents and… → Read More
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