Building on Maria's link from GeekWire, here is another article about a bubble forming in ed tech...and building on Jason's comment about not wanting to investmenting in ed tech, it seems like a lot of wealthy people aren't worried about it! This article goes into the numbers a little more on trying to show the bubble effect, such as the number of investment rounds and startups. It also talks a bit about Christensen's "innovator" profile and how a lot of the ed tech folks now are mission-driven people who are innovating like Christensen describes. Not sure if what they are doing will work, but trying because they are passionate about it

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.

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.

The U.A.E. has gone completely digital at the university level! All first year students got an iPad this year (14,000), and they plan on doing this until every university student has one.

This plays off of the Disrupting Higher Ed discussion we had in class this week--talks about how college programs / classes are changing to be more "idea" based and how colleges are adapting to students who have been immersed in technology.

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!

This Forbes article mentions the Horizon report that we read earlier for class, plus some emerging trends in ed tech. Talks about games, mobile, and adaptive learning (we have touched on some of these topics in class).

Pretty relevant to what we've discussed in class so far--Verizon is launching a couple of initiatives to encourage mobile ed tech development. One is to encourage students to create educational apps relevant to their communities, while the other is to train teachers on how to use technology and mobile tech in their classrooms. Third part is an online portal for sharing knowledge and materials between teachers.

"Technology in education is one of the "prominent technology trends expected to influence the consumer electronics (CE) industry in the years ahead," according to the 2013 edition of "Five Technology Trends to Watch," a report released this week by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). The other four tech trends identified were the future of 3D printing, next-generation TVs and displays, the evolution of the audio market, and the mobile revolution in Africa." Basically goes on to state that parents and students support more ed tech (which I think has come up in a couple other articles, too).

For those interested in what individual states are doing, a database was just released that shows info on all fifty states for the following: broadband Internet access online assessment digital content

The University of Texas system just decided to join the edX movement, with a $5 million dollar contribution. Gov. Rick Perry is trying to cap costs for a college education in Texas, so he approves of the measure...UT also seems closer than other schools to allowing students to get actual credit for the courses, as the article mentions they are considering tiered payments for classes.

Adrian Sannier is VP of Product at Pearson, and gives a talk at Stanford's "Education's Digital Future" conference about "Rock Star Teachers" who use social media and online platforms to cater to hundreds of thousands of students.

A financial / investment perspective of the Education industry is offered in this report. I think the interesting thing is this section: "With the implementation of the Common Core standardized curriculum, the focus on content is becoming less about differentiation and more about delivery through emerging technology platforms," stated Mary Jo Zandy, Managing Director at Berkery Noyes. "Interactive assessment tools that measure student progress, particularly in the quantitative disciplines, will thus become even more important in K-12 education as schools aim to meet specific testing benchmarks."

This new paper talks about the need for a "learner profile" that can help teachers adjust at the beginning of the year for each student. This would save them time and effort in personalizing to the needs of each student

A recent study found that undergraduate students actually want more technology-use in classes, such as e-textbooks, game-based learning, videos, etc.

Building off of Jason's earlier post, here is more detail about the huge Education Open Data event at the White House today.

A couple of youth-oriented websites settled with the government recently because of COPPA (law that protects children's private information online, if they are under 13yo). Now legislatures want to expand COPPA, so it may significantly impact learning games developers, too.

JumpStart will now sell educational games aligned with Dreamworks themes...is this the start of large-scaled commercialization of educational games? Is this one way that ed tech companies can become profitable, via advertising tie-ins?

Talks about different groups that are trying to help classify and rate the various ed tech products out there--more and more are released every day!! So how do teachers know what is useful and what is not? Discusses initiatives and some possible con's--so many are released and so many are updated that it may be impossible to keep up the evaluation pace.

Good discussion on how distance education and other ed-tech are tools for educators, but don't really replace the in-person education experience.

Kind of a slightly different perspective from Europe, but some commentary from Microsoft Europe on how they think technology will change higher education and job preparedness. Towards the end he talks about things like personalization, digital resources for all schools, and some MS initiatives in schools (Partners in Learning).