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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."

This imaginative film, which eloquently illustrates "innovation" in its most inncent form, was shot solely on a cell phone... Enjoy!

PresenceLearning allows students to receive speech therapy services online. Willows is a tiny farming town in Northern California about 20 miles from where I grew up. Imagine my surprise as I read this article and realized that the superintendent they were quoting, Vicki Shadd, was actually my Jr. High School volleyball coach. The real benefit of distance therapeutic services in this instance is the ability to provide services to rural students who would would otherwise be neglected due to the school's location and budget. 

Raspberry Pi may sound like the name of a math-based dessert. But it is actually one of the hottest and cheapest little computers in the world right now. Almost one million of these $35 machines have shipped since last February, capturing the imaginations of educators, hobbyists and tinkerers around the world. One Pi owner, Dave Akerman, of Brightwalton, England, even sent a Raspberry Pi to the upper atmosphere, floating it 40,000 meters up using a weather balloon. There he was able to take live video, photos and measurements. "Now every primary school in the world can take pictures from near space," Mr. Upton said. "You give people access to this tool and they do great things."

Coverage for the next generation of young edtech companies

A look at the Innovator's Dilemma in the Tech Space. Interesting corollaries to what we could imagine happening in the Education space.

A potentially transformative tool for the narrative of WHO educates and continuing the re-imagination of what constitues valuable knowledge.

Wow, I think that looks amazingly powerful....they've kind of beat edX to the punch of releasing an open source course platform!

"The ability to tilt along multiple axes distinguishes our display from previous actuatable displays. Such screen versatility opens a range of opportunities for providing an additional integrated information channel to the user. "These opportunities include collaboration, terrain modeling, 3D video that is beyond auto-stereoscopic 3D and tangible gaming. We can imagine many scenarios that would benefit from the physicality offered by Tilt Displays. However, we need to establish whether users can relate to the new experiences and advantages of using such a device."

Articles gets into the details of how the tech is designed. I'm more interested in the implication of touch screens that are flexible and thus potentially made more ubiquitous than we can currently imagine. Like in the Microsoft video, what if every surface we interact with is a digital portal? What implications not only for technology, but all forms of human action and interaction?

Great video showing Corning's vision for flexible, durable glass applications that can hide electronic components for high quality display on any surface you can imagine.

Background on Augmented Reality. Reading for 9/14.

Check out this site which is like getting the info of a facebook profile and more. Imagine what kind of info search engines like this could generate for a teacher about an entire class. Or what students can find out about each other and their teachers. . .

Can an emerging technology be 'disruptive' and 'emerging' at the same time? Pre-disruption perhaps? Either way, I don't see this hack replacing the bulky, expensive and single use mode of the standard cardiovascular systems, but then again, is't that how these things develop? Imagine a game that actually got your heart moving (ala Nintendo Wii Fitness) while also running a diagnostic analysis on the back end... Still, Donkey Kong has a terrible bedside manner.

The further along I go, the more I am realizing that we have fully arrived in the information age. For our nation to compete globally - we must get out of the trap of growing media consumers, technology consumers, and information consumers. We must grow a generation of students who not only use technology, but understand technology so that they can become active technology producers, so that they can create, innovate, imagine, and disrupt. Possibly, understanding computer science will be as important as learning to read and write - the new literacy.

How does this affect education? Imagine no age limit on using a car. No school buses. Kids are more mobile. The need for standardised school times disappears...

Please read through the comments for perspectives. And try to site back and imagine their perspective. We're going to be inherently biased about this one

Interesting article and comments. The comments from Tshavo and chendrix are especially entertaining.

Thanks for this article. The comments are hilarious and demonstrates that some people are always looking for a shortcut to success.

A look at 10 upcoming education-related startups!

Personally, I cannot imagine dissecting a body on my iPhone. But, obviously 3,000 customers see this as a must-have. Def. a step towards mobile/distance learning.

Neato! Personally I will leave the dissecting to the MDs. A lot of these iPhone apps (maybe all of them) would better impact education on a larger screen. I bet the oompa loompas inside Steve Job's secret Technology Factory are up to a tablet mac. Such a device would best serve doctors trying to educate their patients.

So much potential to bring books alive to learners & enhance content.  However, we can't forget that developing the imagination by creating your own pictures from what you read is also important. 

It isn't so much the fact that this camera can do what it can. It's how its inventor conceptualized the possibilities of firing packets of photons many times and capturing it to form an image. There were ripples of light! Amazing possibilities in store for the imaginative educator...