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Three long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, veterans from Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, and Google, started funding education start-ups last Spring. Their incubator, Imagine K12, has now "graduated" its first group of startups. If accepted, Imagine K12 give $15k to $20k to startups and empower them with "dazzling network of connections."

Some quick "look fors" for schools when assessing what type of edtech venture to partner with.

Great post! We definitely need more discussion about how edtech ventures can partner with schools, districts, and CMO's. This post is right to the point- helpful to both the schools and the edtech companies.

Schools describe what is needed to build a strong relationship between startups and schools. 

Schools throughout the country are experiencing the same teacher-driven adoption of technology tools. Internet-savvy teachers are increasingly finding tools to use in the classroom on their own, and lower business-startup costs mean the tools are more readily available. In response, many education companies are changing how they market and sell their products. Nationwide sales teams and central-office visits are giving way to word-of-mouth and sophisticated business-intelligence software as preferred methods for pushing adoption. Companies offer free products to teachers with the goal of influencing districtwide purchases of more-robust versions-known as the "freemium" pricing model. But in most sectors of the existing K-12 system-with its various stakeholders, budgetary restrictions, and procurement regulations- the so-called "consumerization" of education faces many barriers, experts say, making it difficult to find the right balance between selling directly to teachers and addressing the needs of central-office administrators.

Opinion article from Reynol Junco at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society on why most educational technology startups aren't that great...they don't base their products on research, proven pedagogy, or work with educators.

It does seem like there is a shift going on right now- more educators on start up teams and more interest in developing innovations from the educators themselves. That being said, the market continues to get flooded. I think in the long run this will be very good for teaching and learning, but I would not want to be an investor in this space.

I think that is great that more educators are getting on the teams...but yeah, there are a lot of very fragmented / disperse initiatives that make it hard to tell what will succeed or catch on.

Someone in one of my classes was talking about the overflow of various apps to use in the classroom and here is one startup looking to address some of these issues.

Noodle, 2tor, Skillshare and Essay Safe share a bit about their products

The Univ of Pittsburg is becoming an ed tech incubator.  They're starting with two products:  SWord a cloud-based peer review program and CE Agent a smart phone app that manages nurses' continuing ed credits.

Helpful list for getting to know the edtech space (and possible future employers!) 

thanks for posting....amazing how many of these I do not know!

This startup, Clever, has a platform to enable the easy integration of other ed tech into the classroom--it stores student data in a single location. Maybe this will also help track student information as they move up grade levels and enable things like mastery-based learning instead of seat-based? They already have 2000 schools and a waiting list!

Here's an individual analysis of each company and how it rated according to Technology, Business Model and Utility

A look at 10 upcoming education-related startups!

Article about Learning Catalytics  with Eric Mazur and Brian Lukoff

"I think education is probably the largest, most important, and most screwed up part of the American society and economy,"

Another article about the bubble in edtech: "Most of today's education technology startups are doomed to fail. "But wait!" you say. "It's 2012 and edtech startups are sprouting up everywhere, pushing real innovation into a slow-moving yet vitally important market, gaining traction, getting funded!" True. Yet they are still doomed to fail."

They define success in edtech as building a sustainable company that improves student outcomes, empower teachers, and increases the reach and efficiency of educational institutions.

An interesting article on how resistant to change different types of organizations are. Educational institutions rank pretty highly resistant. Though it is interesting to note that businesses rank the most adaptive (non resistant)--so the education technology and startup trend may be a good sign!

Interesting. from where I am from (=Japan), business organizations with long history with the majority of employees committed until retirement age of 60 (slowly this is changing though), maybe NPO and even government (with so much shuffling going on) would rank higher...

The author makes a good point that heightened market competition seems to contribute to reduced resistance. I noticed that the more-resistant organizations operate in more highly regulated markets, which would seem to create internal cultures more oriented to compliance and, thus, resistance.