Guest Post: The NewSchools Summit: Ringing in change

By Elizabeth Corcoran, Co-founder, EdSurge Telltale signs of an industry starting to gel seemed everywhere at the NewSchools Venture Fund’s annual meeting this past week in Burlingame: Young—and over-caffeinated—entrepreneurs sporting “edupreneur” tee-shirts faced off in an “American Idol” like recital of business plans. Potential investors with expensive shoes and iPads lingered in receptions, swapping business […]

Summit 2011: Innovation, honesty, and muffins

Yes, there were some marquee names. Mark Zuckerberg. John Doerr. Joel Klein. Sal Khan. Kaya Henderson. Reed Hastings.  As Tom Vander Ark noted, “We don’t have many rock stars in education, but most of them were on the stage at the Summit.” But it was more than just star power that people were talking about […]

Guest Post: Transforming education faster bottom-up instead of top-down

By Tory Gattis, Social Systems Architect and Founder of OpenTeams This post is an attempt to introduce some controversial buzz into the conversations at the summit: Is it possible our whole approach to reforming education is wrong? And by wrong, I don’t mean failing – great things are definitely happening – but wrong in the sense […]

See you at the Summit!

Our 12th annual Summit and Community of Practice take place this week—and it promises to be a tremendous couple of days. From the moment you step onto the Astroturf (just trust us), you’ll see that this is going to be more engaging and more fun than any other event we’ve ever hosted. We’re working with […]

Guest Post: The New Normal Summit

This Summit will be different.  It’s the first Summit held under “new normal” conditions.  We went over the cliff.  We are getting ready to live with less and many have more cuts to come.  The hangover of the Great Recession took its toll on education, but for some leaders it forced a new round of […]

Bing Gordon on videogame design thinking

Only in one universe do the world’s farms produce more strawberries than corn, rice, sugar beets or soybeans. That universe is Farmville, the Facebook app whose other major product seems to be astonishing statistics. Statistics like that there are 30 times more people farming imaginary fields on Facebook than working on real farms in the […]

Roxanna Elden: “What kind of jerk wants to leave children behind?”

Participants at this year’s NewSchools Summit will have the opportunity to hear from a young teacher named Roxanna Elden, who has gained a sudden cult following through observations like, “If you sit through one of the new district-mandated trainings on the importance of rigor–and I don’t recommend it–you may notice that the concept would be […]