Personalized Learning
More money for more innovation
This week I met with a private equity firm and talked to a new venture fund both interested in education. That makes a couple dozen of each that at least look at learning deals. Most of the VCs fall into the ‘hacking education’ category and only…
Personalized Learning
iSchool in the middle
I spent a day with the NYC iSchool co-principals thinking about a middle school design. Not surprisingly, we decided it should look at lot like iSchool: engaging integrated projects with individualized online learning. Other design elements we discussed included: · A month long ‘welcome to middle school’…
Personalized Learning
The NYC Small Schools Experiment
New York City has an extraordinary base of talented educators, education support groups, and community based organizations. Debbie Meier’s Central Park East was among the first breakout small schools (co-founder Julian Cohen now leads new school efforts for NYC DOE). Dick Beattie’s leadership and Irine Diamond’s funding lead…
Personalized Learning
Updated Grant Opportunities
I made the ultimate board member mistake of leaving off two exciting organizations off my great grant opportunities list. So here’s my updated list leading off with two groups that I support as a board member. (The list also includes friends, clients, and portfolio companies)…
Personalized Learning
Adaptive content: potential to change the curve
Adaptive content will be a game changer—the first real chance to change the learning productivity curve. By ‘adaptive content’ I mean: · Engaging: 2 & 3D animation, video, source documents · Personalized: a ‘play list’ targeted at learning level, by interest and modality · Networked:…
Personalized Learning
How to close the gap?
The National Journal’s question of the week was ‘How can we close the achievement gap?’ The most important thing we can do to narrow the persistent gaps in achievement and attainment is make good on the good school promise: every American family deserves access to at least…
Personalized Learning
10 edu-entrepreneurial opportunities
With the Race to the Top language out, it’s time to refine the list of opportunities for education entrepreneurs (both .org & .com). From largest to niche size they include: 1. School improvement: between RTT, Inovation, and School Improvement, there will be a couple billion…
Personalized Learning
Stealth Education Reform Beats the Health Debacle
Watching the Sunday morning arguments about health reform, I was struck by how fortunate we are that Obama’s team snuck education reform into the stimulus bill. While most of the $100 billion for education just partially backfills cuts, it forced states to acknowledge the Department of Education’s priorities…
Personalized Learning
5 big questions in American education
I led a Q&A session this morning in NOLA around the big questions in American education. Here’s a summary: 1. Are national standards a good idea? They are the best way to end the race-to-the-bottom and speed development of next gen content and assessment. However, we run…
Personalized Learning
How new should a new school be?
During a recent AdvanceIE.org school design session, I was struck by the challenge of designing a high school right now. If it opens in 2010, what should it look like in 2014 when the first class graduates? Here’s just a couple of the new design questions: 1. Time to…