As connection speeds increase and the ubiquity of the Web pervades, free education has never been so accessible. An Internet connection gives lifelong learners the tools to become autodidacts, eschewing exorbitant tuition and joining the ranks of other self-taught great thinkers in history such as Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Paul Allen and Ernest Hemingway.

We can be learning all the time now, whenever we want, and wherever we want. And because of that, we’re seeing explosive growth in online education. We’ve featured several companies and organizations in the past year that are disrupting the online education space including Open Yale, Open Culture, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, P2PU, Skillshare, Scitable and Skype in the Classroom. Now that we’ve reached the end of 2011, it’s time to look back at our previous posts and remind ourselves how far we’ve come and catch up on all that’s happened.

Insider

How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education

This was our seminal piece on online education, which includes interviews with UC Berkeley professors and CEOs and Founders of today’s most disruptive education startups. It’s clear that the world is moving faster than it ever has before. As we learn more about ourselves and more about the world around us through massive amounts of data collection and data transfer at ever increasing speeds, surely the foundations of learning must change too. After all, our current education system is broken, from the bottom up. If we’re going to continue to evolve as a species and as a culture, we’re long overdue for an education revolution. Read the full story here.

Stay in or drop out? The entrepreneur’s education fiasco

There’s a lot of debate right now about whether or not paying for a degree is worth it, a particular problem facing entrepreneurs. The average public university (in the US) is going to set you back nearly $80,000 for a 4-year program. Going to private school? Up that cost to in excess of $150,000 depending on the school of choice. Oh sure, you might have a piece of paper that says you have a Bachelor of Science or Art degree but what you actually have is something that has become so ubiquitous that it’s really not worth much more than the lint inside your own navel. Read the full story here. 

How Technology Has Changed Education

The education of a nation’s youth to a full height of academic rigor and standing is a complex process that nearly always spans more than a decade, requires tens of thousands of dollars, dozens of teachers, and of course, technology. Not always the most recent technology, mind you, but even the oldest Pentium One computer was once new. Read the full story here. 

Skillshare lets you learn anything from anyone

Skillshare is a New York based community marketplace that enables users to learn anything from anyone. It aims to democratize learning by tapping into existing communities and networks. Contrary to the common notion that learning has to occur inside a classroom, Skillshare believes otherwise, appropriately quoting Einstein: “Learning is not a product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” This year Skillshare helped raise over $20,000 for Raise Cache and unveiled a new online experience. Read the full story here. 

In NYC, Coursehorse is changing the way you search for classes

CourseHorse, a New York City startup, provides a simple, innovative way to search for classes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Search can be filtered by price and schedule, so you can find a morning meditation class before your 9am sales pitch. To date, 150 schools have posted over 4,000 classes on the site. Read the full story here. 

Education is the next startup Gold Rush, Silicon Valley will be at its heart

There was a time when prospectors from around the world converged on San Francisco with picks and shovels to extract gold from the rolling hills. Today, a similar migration is taking place, though the tools have changed slightly, as servers have taken the place of shovels and a sharp resume will get you deeper into data than blasting caps through solid rock. Education startups will be the new gold rush, and Silicon Valley is sure to be at its heart. Read the full story here.

Could Udemy give a Stanford level of education to anyone with a laptop and wifi connection?

Bill Gates recently said: ‘In 5 years the best education will come from the web’. And if Gates is right then Udemy could be the Stanford of online education institutions. If fact, Udemy could be better than Stanford because instead of being for an elite few that can afford it, Udemy could provide anyone with a laptop and internet connection with a Stanford level of education. Read the full story here.

Hacking education: Is Intel’s Classmate PC program the first step?

Over the past few weeks, my kids and I have been using a convertible laptop/slate, powered by Intel, called a Classmate PC. I did a quick overview of it when it first landed in my house, and I’ve been putting it through its paces ever since, treating it like a kid in a classroom might. Yesterday, I had a chance to talk with Jeff Galinovosky, Regional Manager for Intel and what he had to say about the changing face of ed. tech. was quite interesting. Read the full story here.

An educator’s thoughts on using iOS 5 features in an iPad classroom

A recent post, entitled “Thoughts from the Classroom on WWDC” details how Fraser Speirs, the Head of IT at Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Scotland, thinks that some of the new features of iOS and Lion will fit in in the classroom. We thought that many of them were fantastic and worth mentioning again here to help get the word out about how cool teaching with iPads can be. Read the full story here.

60% of students say they wouldn’t attend a school without free WiFi

A recent study by Online Colleges finds that more US college students prefer a hybrid of online/offline education than a pure experience in either direction. This may be a surprise for those that rave about the pros or perils of online classes, but a hybrid learning environment really helps capture the benefits of each. It’s important to bring technology into the classroom and experiment with new forms of education, because old methods may start to fail on new generations! Read the full story here. 

How to use Twitter in the classroom

The advantage to using a tool like Twitter for education is that it’s instant and it’s to the point. There have been countless articles about whether or not social media makes us lazy, or whether it affects our attention spans. If that really is the case, why not use that to our advantage? Read the full story here.

The future of education lies in technology

Last night, I attended a gathering of some of the smartest technology minds focusing on Education for grades K-12. I didn’t know what to expect, other than Newark Mayor Cory Booker and LinkedIn‘s Founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman being there to listen to seven companies from the ImagineK12 startup incubator in Palo Alto. In a small office within the Palo Alto aol building, teams with big hearts (and sometimes very nervously) discussed their views on the future of Education for children all over the world. Read the full story here. 

Clayton Christensen: Why online education is ready for disruption, now.

At The Future of State Universities conference last month, which was sponsored by Academic Partnerships, Dr. Clayton Christensen spoke in front of 250 of the nation’s state university deans, provosts, presidents and faculty about the challenges universities face scaling their education models and how online education can serve students potentially better than brick and mortar classrooms. Christensen is well-known for his academic work on disruptive innovations. And recently, he’s become a key figure in the online learning community with his new book: Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns that he co-authored with Michael Horn. Read the full story here.

News

The Open University is number one on iTunes U, surpasses 40m downloads

iTunes U is Apple’s iTunes Store for education, distributing information such as audio and video from lectures to learners around the world, meaning that universities and colleges have a single home for all its digital content. The Open University in the UK is leading the university pack, notching over 40m downloads. Read the full story here.

iTunes U secures 600m downloads…300m in the last year alone

iTunes U has secured more than 600m downloads since it launched in 2007. That’s impressive enough in itself, but more than half that figure has happened in the past year, and with more than 1,000 universities currently with active accounts, things could get even bigger for it. So who are the biggest downloaders? Read the full story here.

The Next Education: A $49, web-based textbook is coming

We might be one step closer to a fully digital classroom if California State Universityand The Nature Publishing Group have their way about things. The two have paired up to bring us a step closer to the reality by agreeing to a three-year partnership in support of a Principles of Biology textbook. Read the full story here.

Oja.la hopes to bring online learning to Latin American aspiring entrepreneurs

Although Oja.la doesn’t use the word “crowdsourcing,” that’s exactly what it does. This new IT learning platform in Spanish makes sure enough people are interested in an online class before organizing it. “Ojalá” is a Spanish word that could translate to “let’s hope that”; what many ignore is that it actually derivates from the Arabic expression law sha’Allah, “if God wished it.” Beyond etymology, hope is a central component in Oja.la’s identity – as students will place hopes in the platform. In many places across Latin America, it is difficult if not impossible to find good offline classes about new technologies, especially from experienced speakers. Read the full story here.

Wikipedia co-founder launches Reading Bear, an online phonics tutorial for kids

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left the crowdsourced encyclopedia project shortly after it was launched, announced a neat new online tool called Reading Bear, which is a “systematic phonics tutorial.” Reading Bear is a project from WatchKnowLearn, a non-profit, K-12 (ages 4-7) repository of educational videos created by Sanger and Tom Pittman, and it’s supported by an anonymous benefactor who has “a long-standing goal to use technology to better the education of poor children.” Read the full story here.

Apple’s plan to get its products in schools? Educate the educators.

Apple products have penetrated multiple markets, shaking up the way people work, create, design and learn by using the company’s range of desktop computers, notebooks and handheld devices. The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, recently told media at its iPhone 4S launch event that the iPad was now being deployed or tested by 92 percent of the Fortune 500 within their enterprises, rising from 75 percent last quarter. Just under half of the Global 500 have adopted the tablet – using it in medical establishments, in construction and a whole range of different environments. Read the full story here. 

Thailand’s $130 million junior school tablet initiative set for trial

Thailand’s Ministry of Education is preparing the first pilot of its $130 million (400 billion baht) initiative to give primary school children in the country a tablet computer. The pilot is focused on analysing the educational benefit of the tablet devices for young students with 500 devices given to children in 5 selected junior schools across the capital Bangkok. Read the full story here. 

Apps

Play Ludwig teaches students physics in a brilliant, interactive game

Ludwig is an educational based game that teaches students physics. Ludwig’s story revolves around a lovable research robot of the same name who has crashed landed on Earth and needs materials to return to his home planet. “The whole game, the entire story is focused on energy. From the minute you start the game, it’s very clear to you what the game is all about, and what you need to do,” says conceptional design and production lead Jochen Kranzer, “it’s a problem based learning approach.” Read the full story here. 

MySchoolHelp focuses on social note taking for high school students

18-year-old Ben Lang’s latest project is MySchoolHelp, a site focused on helping high school students share notes to prepare for tests and quizzes. This is a type of entrepreneurial focus that excites me, because it’s a service that fits a very specific need. Technology is much-needed in Education, and Ben Lang is taking full advantage of the opportunity. Read the full story here.

Interactive music lessons for children on the iPad and iPhone

Kiboomu is a Montreal-based startup that is bringing children interactive musical experiences through the use of iPad and iPhone applications. The educational apps aimed at preschoolers, teaches children how to make music while introducing them to new instruments and music notes. And from what Kiboomu tells us, the demand for these types of apps has been overwhelming. Read the full story here.

Stickery is reinventing mobile gaming and education for kids

Stickery, a company that is building a mobile learning platform focused on games for kids, generates progress reports for teachers and parents, using curriculums that are approved by educators. The company has announced its seed funding led by Google Ventures and 500 Startups, so it’s clear that education is ripe for innovation, and these two titans believe in Stickery’s vision. Read the full story here.

Coding

Trouble learning Ruby? Bloc teaches you how to code

Bloc, a new educational startup, makes it easy for you to start writing in Ruby. It allows anyone to build and deploy web applications in their browser with zero setup, showing results instantly. This is great for many reasons, but speaking from personal experience, getting started with Ruby can be an absolute, jaw-dropping nightmare for beginners. Bloc’s goal, to reduce worldwide unemployment through large-scale education, is becoming more feasible as they continue to grow. The company has already seen 7,000 lessons completed in two weeks, with 3,000 applications deployed to the web. Many new courses should be arriving soon, as well. Read the full story here.

Codecademy: Learning to code just became fun, easy and slightly addictive

Codecademy bills itself as “the easiest way to learn how to code”. The Y-Combinator bred, New York City based company teaches people to code through free interactive instruction. Founders Zachary Sims and Ryan Bubinski started in Y-Combinator with a business idea that matched programmers with jobs based on tests and basic programming challenges. Over the course of the program, the idea for Code Academy evolved. Why not teach people to code first and help them with the job prospects after? Read the full story here.

Squad: a collaborative code editor that can be used in the classroom

Squad is a real-time, web-based collaborative code editor built by the folks at Code Together, which is based out of SproutBox, a startup incubator located in Bloomington, Indiana. Squad is built on the idea that working together produces better code and better products. Have you ever collaborated on a Google Document? It’s a similar concept. Squad’s tools are for both experts and those learning to code that supports more than 15 common programming languages including HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, XML, Python, Lua, C, C++. Read the full story here.

CodeNow to train the youth of America to be the world’s next Mark Zuckerberg

One non-profit called CodeNow has decided to take on bridging the gap between technology and underrepresented youth.CodeNow was featured on the White House blog, with Director of the Office of Public Engagement Jon Carson saying he was immediately impressed with the organization and was thinking about ways that to engage non-profits around the country to act similarly. Read the full story here.

“Learning is not a product of schooling but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” -Albert Einstein

Are you disrupting online education? Did we miss your news? Let us know so we can keep up with you in 2012!

Imagine the horror of giving this toy to your child, and coming to find out that they don’t know who the first person to step on the moon was.

Let’s be frank; 99% of the education games out there suck. Either the graphics are sub-par, the game play is lackluster, or it’s simply a matter of multiple choice pointlessness. With grade school students heading home to the multi-pixel wonderment that is all things Xbox, PS3, or PC gaming, it’s no wonder why they’d rather scrape lead based paint off the walls than play another education focused video game in the classroom. But who says it has to be this way? It’s exactly this line of thinking that’s got some very bright minds working on a tough question, and coming up with the first educational game that I’ve ever wanted to play.

The road to Ludwig

While ovos is a development firm building multi-media experiences for clients including Sony, Siemens, and NASA, founder Joerg Hofstaetter says that his organization always has experimental side projects running, including the current Ludwig project. The firm was awarded a government grant to pursue and develop a new form of interactive TV, and building upon a long-standing tradition of physics education within this context, they sought to bring the method to a new level.

“Instead of the traditional route of the user being shown an experiment, and the results explained, we wanted to put the experiment, and experience, directly in the user’s hands,” says ovos founder Joerg Hofstaetter.

After a drawn out series of discussions with various television networks, Hofstaetter and his team realized that perhaps they were just a bit too ahead of their time for the television market, and focused their full efforts on building a top notch physics education product, regardless of the platform. While the development of the product we see today took 2-3 years, once the team dropped the TV angle, the educational aspects began to include a curriculum based approach, with physics teaching doctors from the University of Graz becoming involved, providing crucial knowledge of both physics and physics learning.

Once the decision was made to transform Ludwig into an educational based game the ovos team sought out to answer a simple question, “Why can’t we make a game which is both of value when it comes to design and gameplay, and of value to educators?” With this in mind, the ovos team began charting concept maps that outlined how various physical principles interplay with noted physicist Dr. Leopold Mathelitsch commenting,

“We’re moving from a content based learning approach to a competence based approach.”

These concept maps grew in size and scope, and now include a full curriculum for physics concepts that students in grades 5-8 should be familiar with.

Through this marriage of game makers, physicists, and scientists of learning, Ludwig the game came to fruition.

Play Ludwig

Building upon these concept maps, ovos decided to break Ludwig down into 4 main theme worlds; Combustion, Water, Wind and Solar. Any of these ringing any bells from your own physics education?

Using a historical context, combustion is the first unit of gameplay as it represents how humans have created energy from the Industrial Period through today. Likewise, sticking to real world circumstances and outcomes, students who play Ludwig will quickly realize that whenever they use fossil fuels to create energy, these supply materials are exhausted and must be replaced.

Ludwig’s story revolves around a lovable research robot of the same name who has crashed landed on Earth and needs materials to return to his home planet.

“The whole game, the entire story is focused on energy. From the minute you start the game, it’s very clear to you what the game is all about, and what you need to do,” says conceptional design and production lead Jochen Kranzer, “it’s a problem based learning approach.”

The further a player progresses within Ludwig, the more options and higher level of physics learning comes into play. Ranging from scanning to building tools, students have showed increasing levels of engagement the further they delve into the game. And as any good robot will store its knowledge, Ludwig does the same, offering students a quasi-self-made roadmap of physical principles, as well as how they relate to the current and past state of play.

In addition to teaching students physical properties through interactive gameplay, the title also tests students before they can progress further. If they don’t apply what they’ve learned (or were meant to learn), gameplay halts and users must repeat the mission (ok, it’s a lesson…but don’t tell students that).

Teacher and Student Feedback

Ovos might have plenty of experience and know-how when it comes to building games and interactive digital media, but for the Ludwig project they wanted to involve and develop the title for and with educators. The team has been vigorously testing the title with 5 schools across Austria, spread out over approximately 300 classrooms and 10,000 student licenses. In addition to the human component, the team also sampled the levels of IT facilities at the various schools, identifying the lowest specifications model, and purchasing a matching model to be used in-house to ensure that there would be no degradation of game quality even when played on he most minimal of machines.

From a teacher’s standpoint, Kranzer admits that teachers within this initial 5 school test were those that showed an affinity for technology in the classroom, and are quite often gamers at home. The Ludwig team knew that these teachers would be biased towards the game, however these teachers provided a number of feedback items that had more to do with the playing of the game rather than the game itself.

“We were afraid that girls wouldn’t like the character because it’s a robot and has lots of toolsets, and ‘tech stuff’. We were thrilled when the first feedback came in and girls loved the game too, but for different reasons,” comments Kranzer. “We didn’t plan it this way, but as luck would have it, our lead designer Vivien Schreiber really struck a chord with girls.”

The second item that teachers regularly commented on was the level of gamer. Meaning, in every classroom there’s bound to be three unique levels of gamers; hardcore, casual and non. The trick here was to create an experience that isn’t boring to your World of Warcraft fanatic, while still being comprehensible to non-gamers.

The team found that the division between hardcore and non ran in close parallel to the gender divisions.

“We found that boys tend to have a goal orientated, performance driven way of playing the game, whereas girls tend to sit together and talk about what they should do within the game,” says Hofstaetter.

While focusing on a balanced game for all, teachers reported that the hardcore gamers were naturally a bit more critical of specific game mechanics and actions, but that once they had completed their missions, they often moved off their machine to help others within the classroom. Students teaching students. What’s a teacher not to love?

To be certain, Kranzer says that Ludwig is in no way designed to replace the teacher in the classroom, but only further add another dimension to a teacher’s curriculum and engage students on a platform that they’re familiar with, but possibly haven’t used for learning and discussion. The Ludwig team has also found that a number of the evaluation teachers have been using the game as a homework mechanism. If students spent their classroom time learning about various physical properties of wind, their homework assignment is to complete the wind module of the game.

Currently, the game content has been designed by the above mentioned science and learning departments at the University of Graz, but Hofstaetter informs me that plans are already in the works to allow teachers to eventually upload and incorporate their own customized learning materials (lesson plans, experiment guidelines, worksheets, etc.) within the game. Online user profiles are also planned, allowing teachers to pinpoint exactly which students are excelling in which area, and which are having troubles grasping certain concepts. Hofstaetter points to the Khan Academy as a main source of inspiration for this real-time feedback mechanism.

Revenues and Funding

Ludwig received financial support three ways; grants, license sponsoring, and private investments.

Both the City of Vienna and the Austrian Ministry of Science are the primary grant supporters of the Ludwig project.

Under the licensing column, the Ludwig team quickly ran into a common problem; school boards are cash strapped and often can’t afford licenses for students. To remedy this all-too-common scenario, Hofstaetter and Co. found a number of business sponsors that were willing to pay for and provide licenses for students.

The one caveat that ovos stuck to was that these supporters could in no way have their product or message incorporated into the game in any way. Hofstaetter admits that this wasn’t the easiest challenge. Students do not see any corporate messaging within the game, save for a mention in the credits, and a logo on the load screen. There’s no direct push from these sponsors, but they’d obviously be happy to arrange a class visit to one of their facilities to further enhance students’ real-world experience with a matching Ludwig themeworld.

Hofstaetter and company have also donated their time and experience, as the team has poured hours and hours of unpaid work into the project.

Ludwig’s online shop has recently been launched to the public and is available as both single and classroom licensing fees.

Future plans

Ludwig is a single player game, and the company plans on keeping it that way.

“One of the questions we get all the time concerns multi-player and collaborative learning,” says Hofstaetter. “Yes, this would certainly scale the game a few hundred percent, but it needs to remain a title where students can learn at their own pace. Every other point-and-click adventure is a single player game where you can advance at your own pace.”

There are no immediate plans to convert Ludwig to a mobile version, but Hofstaetter says that there are a number of labs (mini-games) within the main title that could easily be ported for mobile use.

“Since Unity is really good at cross platform publishing, this should be easily do-able. Theoretically”.

Kranzer agrees, but I detected a heavy dose of sarcasm, particularly when the world “easily” left Hofstaetter’s mouth.

Impressions

Having played Ludwig a few times through at home, I can honestly say it’s quite impressive. While I was reviewing the game post-conversation with Hofstaetter and Kranzer, and certainly knew what I was looking at and what the end goal is, I was pleasantly surprised on how well developed the storyline is and how detailed the graphics are. Ludwig is currently available only to Windows gamers students, but I had no problem playing Ludwig via Parallels on my iMac.

The Unity engine ensures that game physics are held in check in this physics learning game, and delivers rock solid graphics that non-gamers will be blown away by, and that hardcore gamers have come to expect as daily fair.

One themeworld took me approximately 8 hours of play time to finish, so when combined with the other 3, there’s quite a lot of material to be consumed, and should keep both students and teachers happy and engaged.

Overall in the general landscape of PC games, Ludwig has enough modern features, actions, and challenges to stand shoulder to should with a number of games on the market today. When viewed in the light of an educational game, Ludwig is the best one I’ve seen to date.

Ludwig is now available from PlayLudwig.com for an introductory price of €19.90 and includes the Combustion and Water themeworlds. For the same price, users will receive Wind and Solar updates for free when they become available (2012). Teachers can license Ludwig per 30 user classroom for €349. If you’re looking to do a bit of tire kicking before you buy, Ludwig also offers a playable demo that can easily be upgraded to a full license at any time.

➤  PlayLudwig.com

For more on this topic, read about how The Internet is Revolutionizing Education here and Clayton Christensen on Why online education is ready for disruption, now.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be visiting three colleges during an East coast speaking tour starting November 8th. He will be visiting Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, and MIT.

Zuckerberg started Facebook in a dorm room at Harvard University and then left the school in 2004 to move offices to Palo Alto.

Carnegie Mellon University says that while at its school, Zuckerberg will join Facebook vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer to talk to a select crowd of computer science and electrical and computer engineering students.

Facebook spends a lot of time recruiting employees from Carnegie Mellon, which has one of the top-ranked computer science programs in the country.

Dean of the School of Computer Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University said this about Zuckerberg’s upcoming visit:

We are very excited by the prospect of hosting a visit by Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has profoundly changed the nature of social interactions worldwide. Supporting these interactions requires massive information processing capabilities, for which Facebook has become a leader in advanced computing technology.

Zuckerberg was recently quoted as saying that you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to be successful, suggesting that the next tech whiz kids could be scattered all over the world.

In one of the most interesting scenes of the movie “The Social Network”, Zuckerberg watches a talk by then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates while attending Harvard. Will the next Mark Zuckerberg be watching during the CEO’s East coast tour? More than likely, they will be. The earlier we bring technology into schools, the smarter minds in tech we’ll have.

Entrepeneurs are getting younger, but their ideas are getting more focused.

Take 18-year-old Ben Lang, for example. When you talk to him about his projects, he speaks about some of them in the past tense. Meaning, he has already moved on to bigger and better things.

His latest project is MySchoolHelp, a site focused on helping high school students share notes to prepare for tests and quizzes. This is a type of entrepreneurial focus that excites me, because it’s a service that fits a very specific need. Technology is much-needed in Education, and Ben Lang is taking full advantage of the opportunity.

Here’s a video explaining the note sharing site MySchoolHelp, which will host PDF’s and let people favorite and rate content from those who attend the same school as they do.

I had a chance to talk to Founder Ben Lang about MySchoolHelp and his participation in the Teens in Tech incubator.

TNW: Where did you get the idea for MySchoolHelp, and how long did it take to develop?

Ben Lang: The idea stemmed from RamazHelp.com, a note sharing site I cofounded two years ago just for my high school, Ramaz. Over the past few years the site has gained wild popularity in my high school with over 70% of the student body using it regularly. In its first year over 100 notes were uploaded and in the second year over 200. Also in the yearbooks they joke about it and when they bring in new potential students they mention it.

Based off that success I decided to create a note sharing site for all high schools to use. With a team I brought on, we finished building the site in about 3 months.

TNW: What was it specifically about note taking at school that told you it needed its own service?

Ben Lang: Before each test and final every student would dash to the library to photocopy other student’s notes. It was a madhouse, trees were killed in the process. I decided to make it a more efficient process by allowing students to simply upload all of their notes from their computer onto a central site. They shared notes that they took on their laptops and scanned in handwritten notes.

Even with the growth of learning platforms online the best way to study still is by reading class notes. No teacher teaches the exact same class around the globe which is why it’s crucial to have notes specifically taken in that class.

TNW: How many notes does MySchoolHelp host right now?

Ben Lang: After launching two months ago we’ve had 165 notes uploaded so far. Right now our focus is encouraging more students to share their notes. Even though at my school students uploaded out of their good will we’re trying to make it more “incentivized” to upload. First off, we have a leaderboard with the top note takers from your school: http://prntscr.com/3s1eo, increasing the gameification aspect of submitting notes. We also have some amazing sponsors who contributed prizes to give away to note takers, such as Fandango tickets, premium Evernote accounts, Livescribe pens and Starbucks gift cards.

TNW: Can you share any success stories from students that you’ve heard about how the site helped them with a test?

Ben Lang: Sure, for RamazHelp, the predecessor to MySchoolHelp we’ve gotten amazing feedback such as:

“RamazHelp was the epicenter of all my studying, an absolute academic life saver for me and every other student at my school.” – Zachary Weiner
“I’m going off to college in a few weeks, and I can truthfully say I would have never gotten through school without RamazHelp.” – Shalti Serels

So far in the two months that MySchoolHelp has been in the air there haven’t been enough tests to hear about success stories, but as the school year goes on we’re looking forward to hearing similar stories to that of above.

TNW: Do you want to expand the service into Colleges, if so, when and how?

Ben Lang: Right now we’re testing the service at a few colleges. Some of my classmates from Ramaz who graduated and went to college kept asking for us to expand the service to colleges which is why we’re testing it now. Our focus is still high schools but we’re open to seeing how this model will work in colleges. There are plenty of note sharing platforms for colleges but our “differentiator” is that we’re 100% free, signup isn’t required and it’s more about the positive aspect of sharing and collaborating.

TNW: Tell us about your experiences in the Teens in Tech Incubator

Ben Lang: Attending the Teens In Tech Incubator was certainly an incredible experience. We were all provided with incredible mentors, a wonderful office and helpful workshops. At the end Mozilla was kind enough to extend its hand to a few of the teams for the WebFWD accelerator which we’re now a part of.

The type of service that a site like MySchoolHelp provides could make the difference between a student falling behind in class, and getting a leg up. The way Ben Lang has started the service, by getting over 100 schools to adopt it, is reminiscent of Facebook’s slow infiltration in the 90′s. Schools need technology, and it’s nice to see focus there. Can Lang see it all the way through before getting drawn into the Valley like Zuckerberg did?

While listening to some of the companies presenting at ImagineK12 last week, I had a few questions about privacy. I was wondering how teachers and parents were feeling about information about students being stored on the cloud. Some of those answers will come during my interviews with each company in the coming weeks.

One service not at ImagineK12, ClassParrot, takes communications and privacy seriously. Its web app will let teachers set up a group to text to and a dashboard to track activity with their class.

It’s a very smart application of SMS features and social communication. Students are texting more and more, and what better way to interact with kids than by using the tools they’re more accustomed to.

The company says that since it launched two weeks ago, its seen over 1,200 teachers sign up for its services. For the education market, that’s a sizable number, and shows that teachers everywhere are looking for cutting edge ways to reach and speak to their students. Teachers are always looking for ways to be “cool” and ClassParrot could be a tool to facilitate that.

Setting up a class

ClassParrot lets you create as many classes as you want, and once you give your class a name, you’re given a unique 10 digit US number to give to your students. They can text the number with a code that ClassParrot gives you.

It’s as simple as that, really. And completely secure since the teacher isn’t giving out their cell number, and neither are the students.

Interacting with your class

The web app lets you send a message to students, and even has a polling system where students can reply with a simple reply via SMS to have their response counted. This could be great for real-time classroom polling on a variety of topics.

The other nice feature of ClassParrot is that you can schedule texts to go out at any given time. For example, if an assignment is due on a Wednesday, you could set up a text to go out Tuesday night as a reminder.

Group texting apps like GroupMe were all the rage last year, allowing you to text within small groups as if they were a virtual chatroom. That didn’t necessarily stick or become a major business avenue, especially since Apple introduced iMessages with built-in group chatting. However, things like privacy are very important to teachers and schools, so creating a service specifically for the education niche is often overlooked. It’s good to see that ClassParrot went ahead and did it.

When you sign up for ClassParrot, you are given 500 credits. Each credit is worth one text message out or in, but you can upgrade to an unlimited plan for $9 a month, or $90 a year. Depending on the size of the class you have, or your amount of usage, you should be able to give the app a good try-out with the free 500 credits. Students and teachers don’t need to download an app or have any specific type of phone, as ClassParrot works completely through SMS and its web interface.

Last night, I attended a gathering of some of the smartest technology minds focusing on Education for grades K-12. I didn’t know what to expect, other than Newark Mayor Cory Booker and LinkedIn‘s Founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman being there to listen to seven companies from the ImagineK12 startup incubator in Palo Alto.

In a small office within the Palo Alto aol building, teams with big hearts (and sometimes very nervously) discussed their views on the future of Education for children all over the world.

I’m going to be doing a few interviews with some of the companies in the near future, which include Goalbook, educreations, and Eduvant. This is a space that I’m very passionate about.

Each team had one thing in common, their belief in the importance of technology to make change happen in a system that hasn’t changed in decades.

That change could very well come out of the ImagineK12 incubator, which says this about itself:

We believe technology is transforming K-12 education. The infrastructure, hardware, software, and platforms are either available or being developed that will change the nature of how we teach our children in profound and far-reaching ways. A high-tech wave is beginning to sweep through the educational world largely driven by technology entrepreneurship. But the impact of those entrepreneurs will depend on the quality of their ideas, their ability to execute, and their ability to get funded.

Imagine K12 is a for-profit enterprise looking to invest time, experience, energy and resources in entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and the technical know-how to create their vision. Over a three-month period, we will draw on our extensive entrepreneurial experience, understanding of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and knowledge of the education industry to help bring your idea to life, get your company funded, and to get your company on the road to success.

Last night wasn’t a pitch session for funding, although I’m sure most of the startups hoped that Reid Hoffman would take interest, as he is an extremely prolific VC now. Most of the nearly three hours were spent on presentation of the products, and Q&A by Mayor Booker on the nuts and bolts of education, and business advice and guidance from Reid Hoffman. For these companies, this type of audience is nearly unheard of, and each one took notes and paid full attention. And of course, vice versa.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker shared that he can no longer watch the way school systems have worked, there has to be change. Technology, he believes, can bring that change.

The theme of the night appeared to be data. Educational institutions have a huge flow of data, some not even digitized, and have no way to pour through it to make smart decisions for their schools or more importantly for their students. Some of the companies have come up with ways to use data to incentive students with behavioral issues, make better use of a Principal’s time by giving them a dashboard of student and financial data in real-time, as well as share lesson plans all over the world.

A few of these companies seemed to intrigue both Booker and Hoffman, causing Booker to set up meetings between the companies and schools in Newark immediately.

Why isn’t there more of a focus on technology in education? Lack of money. Schools are notorious for having financial issues, even though technology can help with that, and there isn’t a steady flow of VC funds for those who want to focus their efforts on the education space. It seems as if ImagineK12 is set to change all of that, and having Booker and Hoffman involved certainly doesn’t hurt its cause.

Let’s also not forget that if we put more technology in schools, we’ll have more technologists like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for years to come.

You can view more photos from last night below:

Stickery, a company that is building a mobile learning platform focused on games for kids, generates progress reports for teachers and parents, using curriculums that are approved by educators.

The company has announced its seed funding led by Google Ventures and 500 Startups, so it’s clear that education is ripe for innovation, and these two titans believe in Stickery’s vision.

With games such as “Mermaid Waters: Adventures of Hana and Cory” for iOS on its platform, the company is taking the education field by storm with its serialized adventure and learning platform. The app is currently Free to celebrate its launch and is featured by Apple in the “What’s Hot” section of the app store under Education.

This particular game has missions like this one that let kids pick which fish tank has more fish in it. With the amazing graphics and animations, we can see why both kids and parents could get a lot out of this platform.

As we know, kids of all ages play with iPhones, iPods, and iPads, and in some cases, are shocked when the things they touch don’t interact with them. The company thinks that games like “Angry Birds” aren’t enough to educate our kids, as well as bring kids and parents together on their progress.

We talked to Stickery CEO and co-founder Bjorn Lee about the idea behind Stickery and the future of the education gaming platform.

TNW: Please tell us about the Stickery team and why the focus on Kids’ games

Bjorn Lee: Jarrold and I were classmates at Stanford and Stickery is our 2nd tech startup together. Our third member, Fadly, is an award-winning media producer and used to work in TV and the education industry. We are stoked by how kids grok touchscreen devices like ducks to water. This new generation has no legacy knowledge of media or software on traditional devices like TV or computer. We are focused on the preschool segment for now and are really excited to be one of the pioneers and rethink how entertainment and education could be for the society of tomorrow.

TNW: What is it about Kids’ games that is ready to be disrupted

Bjorn Lee: It is the relationship of parents with kids’ games. We think the mobile phone is under-utilized today for parents. It is more than just a container of games to distract kids. We want to start by making parents understand their kids better through the games through data and context. Our goal is to eventually make the smartphone an on-demand “teaching assistant” for parents.

TNW: What are your goals to change the way kids interact with games?

Bjorn Lee: Young kids do not control their access to games. Parents do. We are looking at a dual-user model here which is very fascinating because of the value of games for learning. Learning means very very different things to kids and parents but yet is the bridge to why children’s gaming is such a big market.

TNW: What are your business goals to keep Stickery around for years to come?

Bjorn Lee: Our vision for Stickery is to change the model of children’s gaming – for modern parents on mobile devices. We will be focused on the preschool sector for the first few years before looking at the K-12 market.

With Xbox Live-like incentives and interactions built into the platform, Stickery is in a prime position to draw great game developers to build the best education games around for devices that some kids have been using since birth. With a backer like Google Ventures, we’re sure that the company won’t run out of money anytime soon, either.

The growth is amazing, and shows that despite other companies getting into the tablet game, the iPad has a secure foothold on the market.

92% of the Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying iPad

Other people are getting into the market including Samsung and Microsoft, but that is not stopping Apple. At all, and not even close. The ability to capture a market other than regular computer consumers, have helped Apple quite a bit. The younger and older demographics have enjoyed the iPad experience.

And despite everybody and their brother trying to compete with iPad, 3 out of the 4 tablets sold in the US are iPads.

iPad is the undisputed, top selling tablet in the world.

When it comes to business, a market that Microsoft has owned for years, Apple shares numbers showing that the biggest companies in the world are turning to the iPad:

At this point, and this is a stunning number, 92% of the Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying iPad. It is unheard of.

Tim Cook says that it’s important that Apple customers are happy, which of course brings people back to buy more and more Apple products. They shared a customer satisfaction score to back these claims of happiness up:

The customer satisfaction ratings show a 95% score in a recent survey. They’re showing up everywhere. In schools they’re helping kids learn in amazing new ways. … every state in the US now has an iPad deployment or pilot in place today.

Again, to show how many markets the iPad has touched, Apple points out the surging adoption of the device in schools as well as hospitals:

It’s not just in the classroom. Pilots are replacing 40 pound flight bags with iPads — making pilots more efficient, and planes more fuel efficient. Yes, that’s true!

80% of the top hospitals in the US are now testing or piloting the iPad.

Read our full Apple roundup here, and read all of the Apple announcements here.

First let me just say that no, robots will not replace journalists. Robots will likely only replace jobs with particularly low cognitive loads. So, maybe press release re-writing bloggers, but not thinking, analyzing, interviewing, friendly journalists.

In an on-going experiment called “My Boss is a Robot,” an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aim to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon’s small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a robot boss pre-programmed to absorb a myriad of discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person. Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction and freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell are heading up the experiment.

We’ve seen automated “robotic journalism” before. The NYTimes uses the semantic web to automate wedding announcements. Business Week used software to replace sports journalists. Infonic’s Sentiment software analyzes thousands of news stories to determine how a particular company is faring. And TV journalism could be replaced by a prototype of software that uses voice-over narration of a rapid-fire series of pre-taped stories, vidclips and images to present television news.

The Mechanical Turk has even written a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City. Based on this success, the scientists behind My Boss is a Robot believe Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) could transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism.

Are we confident that our experiment will work? Absolutely not. In fact, we’d be surprised if it did. But we think it will be interesting to try. Equally importantly, we hope that chronicling our progress here will trigger debate about the future of journalism and of crowdsourcing. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our plans and, later, our progress.

Where does the robot boss come in to it? The crowdsourced workers will be coordinated by an algorithm. If the process works, we will hand the algorithm a research paper and, perhaps a couple of days later, it will spit out a polished news article.

The deeper question Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell hope to answer is whether or not the process of journalism or any other kind of knowledge-based work can be deconstructed and then restructured algorithmically.

If it works, the result will likely be something similar to AOL‘s Demand Media-style content generation efforts, also known as “The AOL Way.” But this “Bionic Journalism” will not be the future of media so long as human beings avoid falling into a meatspace existence and still enjoy reading thoughtful, creative and educated news stories on their iPads.

Non-mechanical fingers crossed.