EdTech

Barbara (Bobbi) Kurshan, Ed.D., the Executive Director of Academic Innovation and Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education joined me for coffee (play interview below) to discuss entrepreneurship in education. Dr. Kurshan discusses the conundrum of when to seek investors and how the education ecosystem can access the most relevant resources. For additional perspective from Dr. Kurshan check out her blog on Forbes. 

Straight from the latest edition of The R&R Show check out Richard Byrne’s advice on making edtech work for you! Remember to check out weekly editions of The R&R Show for the latest news on edtech from users all over the world. As always, if you have a question please send questions via #AskRichardByrne on

George Dotterer, NetRef CEO and founder, discusses how placing control in a teacher’s hands provides safer and more diverse learning experiences for students. Dotterer touches on hot topics including data usage and privacy practices, how students sometimes prove to be the best beta testers and how parents play a role in the larger discussion of edtech and learning outcomes. He further discusses the digital divide and connected approaches to learning from NetRef’s recent white paper The Digital Divide in the Age of the Connected Classroom.

The sweeping bipartisan education bill signed into law on Thursday contained a nugget of good news for the tech industry: Computer science has been recognized as important an academic subject as math and English, potentially introducing it into more classrooms across the U.S.

Peripheral characters have a funny way of changing our perspective. Once bit players, they invert our understanding of the plot, turn heroes into villains and reframe the issues. Looking at challenge — or stories — from the outside-in brings minor events to the forefront of the narrative to help us figure out what really happened — and why.

By Dian Schaffhauser In a shift away from policies enacted with NCLB, Congress’ latest rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act puts some distance between the federal government and …

The massive disruption of the education industry is well underway, but the biggest tremors are yet to come—disruptions so dramatic that many universities will cease to exist in the next few years.

“I realised the burden of what teachers go through here when I was living in this rural village,” says Toni Maraviglia, co-founder of Eneza Education, a mobile phone based education tool in Kenya.

As always, our NPR Ed inboxes are clogged with press releases about the latest amazeballs app or product. Like the following, edited to protect the guilty:…an unprecedented new DOODLEHICKY app optimized for iPhone® and Android™ smartphones that includes real-time monitoring of a child’s learning progress. DOODLEHICKY is the tutoring program that fuses the most effective elements of personalized teaching with a fun and engaging iPad® and Android tablet-based experience for measurably improving student DOODLE performance.