EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University

Skip College, Work for Startups

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:55:32 -0500

Enstitute proposes a solution to monstrous student debt, wasted time in libraries, and unemployment for young students. The founders have rounded up 30 entrepreneurs from the NYC tech scene and asked them to take apprentices for two years. The minimum requirement to apply is a high school diploma and between the ages of 18-24. They just started accepting applications yesterday. (Mashable)

They still encourage high school students to only defer their acceptances to college and not completely throw the option out - "just in case".

I'm curious to see how many of these Enstitute graduates will be able to sustain a career afterward without a college degree. Most likely, the first year of applicants will probably be people who already have college degrees.

Too Cool for Codeacademy?

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:47:06 -0500

Why not make your own? Codeacademy, e-learning niche oft covered in EdLab and marketing genius behind Codeyear, recently debuted a DIY feature that allows for peer-to-peer code schooling. Users can supplement Codeacademy’s scanty offerings with tutorials of their own. Codeacademy seems to be accepting applications and presenting approvals based on information supplied by hopeful creators:

No word yet on how the completed courses will be evaluated, though creators must submit their lessons for review before they are unleashed on the public. The easiest route may be to accept all or most applications and let the crowd evaluate. Crowd is something Codeacademy has in scads. Nearly 400,000 people have signed up for Codeyear so far (It’s yet unknown how many of these folks are letting the weekly emails sit around their inboxes collecting guilt.) In a good example of leveraging crowd power, Codeacademy also recently debuted a Q&A feature that connects confused wannabe coders with a community of fellow students.

Startup Spotlight: Contactually

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:18:47 -0500

The Details and Back-story
Zvi Band, Contactually's DC-based founder (#dctech) hopes to help companies improve their CRM process through fully optimizing email interactions. The startup describes the benefits of their service as follows, "Contactually synchronizes with your GMail account and contacts, and will help you connect with new contacts you email. Track how you met them, remind you to follow up, follow on Twitter, and more." Band was inspired to create Contactually after realizing that he was all but ignoring his classic CRM options and instead focusing all his customer relations and management on email.

Smartphone Wars: Who is leading and what's their market share

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:05:56 -0500

Operating systems breakdown

Mobile manufacturers share

Tablet Wars

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:00:52 -0500

Although most of us know that the iPad is still by far the best seller in the tablet market, I am intrigued by how Amazon has envisioned that I wanted to find out how the Kindle Fire entry changed the Android segment of tablets. I found the graphic below to be really helpful.

Kindle Fire almost toppled the earlier leader, Samsung, since its launch at the end of 2011 :

For more information click here. It would be interesting to see how the smartphone market is segmented.

The 'Do Not Track Kids Act' takes the Goals of COPPA Even Further

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:21:31 -0500

H.R. 1895, or the Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011(1), if passed, will stop marketers and companies from tracking the behavior of children and young adults both online and on their mobile devices. The European Union recently introduced a "Right to be Forgotten" and "Right to Data Portability" law aimed at protecting adults, and this new US legislature is one of the first, along with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in the late 90's, to be aimed specifically at children and teens. COPPA was sufficient for the pre-social-networks online world, but with the advent of Facebook and Twitter the rules of the online playground have changed.

The Campaign for a Commercial-free Childhood (CCFC) outlines the following goals for H.R. 1895:

A Venture Firm's First Engineering Fellows

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:34:55 -0500

Kleiner Perkins, a venture firm debuted its first class of their summer 2012 engineering fellows program. Undergraduate and graduate students studying computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics, or fields related to software development are eligible for this paid fellowship. 25 fellows were chosen from nearly a thousand applicants for this first year. The goal of the program is to give engineering students the experience of working in a startup environment and provide smaller startups access to young engineering talent.

It's likely that more venture firms will launch similar fellowships at their portfolio companies to get their hands on talented minds before anybody else.

EdLab Review: StoryBuddy

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:58:38 -0500

StoryBuddy is an iPad application that allows children to design, write, read, and share their own story books. Students can easily fill in the pages with their own drawings, texts and digital photos. From the book cover to the end, students have to use their creativity and take care of every step of producing a good story and making it look inviting. Once the book is finished, they can be shared with others via email, iTunes file sharing, or save to iBooks.

Pros:
The app is very user friendly. It allows students to optimize their creativity by every means. The various sharing platforms also make the students more engaged and interactive in their story-producing process.

Cons:
The app only allows a maximum of 5 books to be created. One feature missing from this application was the ability for speech bubbles to denote conversation between characters.

Research Digest: The Science Standards of the States

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:53:58 -0500

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has released a report on the “State of State Science Standards” in primary and secondary education. They evaluated each state’s standards for content and clarity, concluding that the majority of states have fairly poor expectations for their schools’ ability to teach science.

Sporting Physics

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:52:07 -0500

sySTEMic Point of View: When teaching physics, sometimes it’s hard for students to grasp the basic concepts without looking at some real-life applications. Educators can use this resource, called the Science of Football, to show how basic concepts of physics like speed and acceleration, is used in a real-life settings like a football game. The real-life setting will most likely draw in more students than the traditional textbook. The Science of Football videos can be good introductions to concepts like kinematics, torque, Newton’s Laws of Motion, and more. Another similar resource is Sports Science, which is a television series that explains the scientific concepts used in many sports. Check out this cool infographic below that displays the amount of energy used throughout sports, another resource connecting physics to sports. Sports can be a great way to interest students into learning more about some basic concepts of physics, and it’s up to the educator to make the connections and come up with a rich and interesting curriculum that will keep students engaged. Let’s keep accelerating, everyone.

Rebecca MacKinnon talks about her book "Consent of the Networked"

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:25:58 -0500

Above find an interview with the author Rebecca MacKinnon on her new book about information/data privacy online and the complexities of this new issue. I for one, can't wait to read this book.

More here.

EdLab Review: Quipol

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:09:48 -0500

Quipol hopes to make polling more social. Through small, self-contained and embeddable polling widgets Quipol allows users to vote, comment-on, track and share via Twitter and Facebook the results of their peer's thoughts on issues ranging from the upcoming presidential election to last-night's Super Bowl show-down.

Pros:
Quipol is easy-to-use and self-contained, with all your results, comments and social media connectivity displayed in one tidy little box. Quipol's are easily embeddable, making the tool a viable option across many different sites and applications. Users can either include an image, video or simple text in the main body of their poll and this option to include multimedia is a nice point-of-difference from other polling options. In addition, the graphic display of polling results and easy "discovery" of featured Quipols compels both creation and repeated interaction with the site.

Pledge to Teach for Free

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:22:55 -0500

Teachers in Chester, Pennsylvania found out last month that they weren't going to be paid due to a $19 million budget cut. However, 200 teachers and 65 employees in the school district pledged to still come in everyday and work for free for the sake of the students as long as they are individually able to do so. The union has appealed to the Pennsylvania governor, but he refused the teachers' requests.

Here is a video of one of those teachers on the Ellen show.

Want push notifications in a web app?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:58:39 -0500

Mozilla is building a push notification system that will allow websites to alert users about new content on their desktops or mobile devices. The list of reasons to build native apps for publishing continues to shrink.

Startup Spotlight: Verbling

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:19:45 -0500

The Details and Backstory
For anyone who has every tried to learn a language, you know that the biggest turning point is in carrying out a verbal conversation. Once you do that, you’re on your way to fluency. It is this level of competency that Verbling seeks to provide with its unique service.

The founders of Verbling, Jake Jolis, Fred Wulff, and Mikael Bernstein, each have personal experiences with second (and in some cases fourth) language acquisition that colored their perception of the learning process. All agreed that grammar lessons could only take you so far; immersion is the true key to fluency. Short of actually traveling to your country of choice, Verbling offers budding linguists another, more cost-effective, option: video chat!

Unique Point of Difference
Verbling’s video chat premise is reminiscent of the notorious site, ChatRoulette. In this case, though, instead of having pre-chat anxiety about what your partner might be doing when you show up, you’ll be more concerned about keeping up with what they are saying.