Online studying solution BenchPrep has announced a new feature called OpenPrep that adds the vast reach of the open Web to its suite of paid courses from major publishers. BenchPrep sells interactive courses for standardized tests like the LSAT, GMAT, GRE, MCAT, Bar Exam and more, and they sync your work across all your digital devices.
OpenPrep supplements those courses with open Web resources like Wikipedia articles, Khan Academy tutorials, YouTube videos and more, all pulled in by algorithms tuned to find the most relevant content for your course of study.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will be giving $10,000 grants to Newark teachers who come up with innovative programs as a part of the $100 million fund he set up with the City of Newark last year.
Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced the grants on his Facebook page this morning, signaling what the city hopes is beginning of a long-running process to build a Web tech presence, and improve teaching into the city's school system.
Pearson, the world's largest education publisher, acquired Connections Education, one of the country's largest online learning providers, last night for $400 million in cash.
The bid for Connections, which has been growing at 30% year-over-year, shows that online learning is being driven by the private sector.
Knewton, the maker of test prep app that also provides analytics data about student performance, has released a thought-provoking infographic contending that the time is ripe for Web technologies to disrupt the education space. The graphic cites rapidly rising dropout rates in the U.S. as an indication that the status quo in education is failing, and it uses signs of growing adoption of Web technology to argue for that as the basis of a new approach.
The infographic mixes analyst projections about future digital content trends with current usage data, as well as opinions from educators. Its point is that the old one-size-fits-all education model is not as well suited to growing up in the Web age as the custom fit that new technology allows. Yesterday, we wrote about new tools for enhancing lifelong education with Web technologies. This infographic describes the trends behind these developments.
BenchPrep has just released an update to the iOS version of its social learning app to enable seamless syncing across devices. BenchPrep, formerly known as Watermelon Express, sells prep courses from educational publishers for undergraduate, graduate and professional-level standardized tests like the LSAT, GMAT, GRE, MCAT, Bar Exam and more.
The app is also available on Android and the Web, but the previous iOS version required students to work on the device for which a course was purchased. Today's update will sync work across all devices, including test answers and performance as well as notes and other student-created content. Work done offline will sync as soon as the device is connected again.
The research consultancy Latitude recently completed a multi-phase innovation study, Children's Future Requests for Computers and the Internet, which was published in collaboration with ReadWriteWeb.
The study asked more than 200 kid-innovators across the world, ages 12 and under, to draw the answer to this question: "What would you like your computer or the Internet to do that it can't do right now?"
Can a government build an effective Facebook for education?
The government of Rajasthan, one of the largest states in India, is building out extensive infrastructure for Information and Communication Technology resources and training, with the collaboration of multiple international agencies including the World Economic Forum.
Next month, the state's information technology department plans on launching its own education social network: like Facebook, for learning. According to coverage in The Economic Times of India and elsewhere, the site will include all the standard features of social networking (photos, games) but will be focused primarily on educational collaboration and will include topic experts jumping in to answer questions raised by users.
Lectures made sense before the invention of the printing press, argues Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur, but at this point in history they are far from the best way to transmit large amounts of information or to make use of face-to-face time in the classroom.
Over nearly 20 years, Mazur has developed an innovative teaching methodology and is now testing software to support its application in any classroom. The basic idea is that the bulk of information consumption should be done outside the classroom and in-class time should be spent doing guided, measured, optimized peer-to-peer discussion in order to maximize retention of knowledge. Mazur's National Science Foundation-backed startup Learning Catalytics looks like a very cool way to facilitate that class time using web and mobile devices.
At their annual conference this week in St. Louis, an international group of botanists are working on two efforts to integrate the Web into their efforts. Called the US Virtual Herbarium and the Open Science Network for Ethnobiology, both are trying to make education and use of plant materials easier for scientists around the globe.
It's been over a decade since the beloved brick-building toy company Lego introduced Mindstorms, its robotics system designed to help kids learn programming, along with other science, technology, engineering and math concepts. We've featured Lego Mindstorms previously in our series on tools for teaching kids to code, and Mindstorms is part of Lego's broader educational efforts.
Although Mindstorms kits are available commercially, there are a series of specifically educational tools that the company has developed in conjunction with other organizations, including MIT, Pitsco, and National Instruments. These help expand robotics education beyond what was, arguably, the initial target audience: middle-school age boys.
