This Week with EdSurge

We're bringing you the latest in edtech from the week of January 23-30: Pearson and Scholastic's dark and stormy night on the stock market, Coursera's new fees, your weekly Ka'Chings and more.

What’s math got to do with it? Everything, says Dan Meyer, creator of the the popular blog dy/dan. Meyer is one of America’s most popular math educators—he has 43,400 followers on Twitter who are ready at any moment to talk about math—and he’s been through many transformations: Math teacher, math education researcher, now chief academic officer at Desmos.

What's changed? What's stayed the same? Are math students in America always doomed? We spoke with him about the stories math can tell, types of instruction and the state of math education today. Tune in for that and the news on this week’s EdSurge On Air.

We interviewed Dan about a lot of concepts, and we want your help filling in the details. We didn't have time to ask him about all the granular details of what makes a great math classroom—the tools, the tech, the pedagogy, etc—that make a great math classroom. Tweet us ​@EdSurge and Dan ​@ddmeyer to get the conversation started!

Last week, we interviewed Beth Box, who wanted to reinvigorate waning student interest and boost her students' scores on state tests. This week, we wanted to continue the conversation about educational gams with another maker: An 8-year-old student.

Samaira Mehta lives in Mountain View, California, where she goes to school and teaches workshops in coding. She's the creator of the board game Coderbunnyz, which teaches young kids about algorithms as they guide a rabbit down a path and around obstacles.

Samaira made the game after spending a great night playing board games with her parents. They didn't want to play any more because she kept winning (or so she says), so she went to do some coding. She got to do her two favorite things in one night, and she wanted to share that excitement with other kids, especially her younger brother. He's four.

Beth Box is a lifelong resident of Okeechobee, Florida. She's also a 7th grade civics teacher at Yearling Middle School. She describes herself as "always in love with the Okeechobee school system." That's not common, nor is it still the case. Standardized testing has limited the freedom Beth used to feel in the classroom. She didn't feel like students could learn at their own pace, and they stopped caring because of it. Some students didn't even care when they got an F.

Beth, facing a daunting civics test, took a big risk: She switched her instruction to mastery-based learning and made the whole class into a game. She named it Give Me Liberty, and her students have to find 35 documents—she teaches to 35 test standards—that were essential to the founding of the United States or else risk the whole country falling into a dystopian dictatorship. Tune in to see if they can save their country and improve their scores.

This week on the podcast, we've got the news and the story of Beth Box. Check it out.

Salman Khan’s Lab School in Mountain View, CA, has slowly been gaining recognition—but is it really as innovative as people might imagine? EdSurge asked that very question last week.

Khan had the idea to open a school long before he started his online platform Khan Academy, and after visiting the Lab School, we at EdSurge were curious about whether he wants to expand to other cities—but before engaging in a Q&A with the man himself, we took to Twitter to get an idea of what our podcast listeners would want to know. Questions came rolling in: Are students actually learning? Is this just an easy way for Khan Academy employees to try out new products on children? After all, the Lab School and Khan Academy are in the same building; the school’s on the first floor, and the nonprofit’s on the second.

Check out EdSurge's podcast interview with Khan to see what we found out.

(rerun) What's the biggest edtech deal of 2015? That would, be LinkedIn's acquisition of Lynda.com. On April 9th, the two companies announced that Lynda.com and its 250,000 learning videos would be purchased for $1.5B.

The week after the deal was announced, Lynda.com co-founders (and husband and wife) Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin stopped by EdSurge to chat with CEO Betsy Corcoran about their company's history.

EdSurge had a pleasant surprise last night, so we wrote a poem about it. Merry Christmas!

The Maker movement. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, this phrase refers to a recent trend towards, well… making things. AdWeek has a pretty solid definition, saying that the maker movement is an umbrella term for independent inventors, designers and tinkerers. It’s a convergence of computer hackers and traditional artisans, and taps into American admiration for self-reliance and building.

With the growth of makerspaces in school systems, the Maker movement has also been making its way into K-12 and other educational spaces across the world. Maker Faires across the country attracted an audience of 1.1 million people this year, and at the heart of the Maker movement, there are a few key players driving its growth.

Dale Dougherty, Founder of MAKE Magazine and the creator of Maker Faires, is one of those people. And this week, we got some time to sit down with him and hear about what he predicts is next for making in education.

This week on the podcast, we hear pitches from three brave companies, BloomBoard, edWeb and LessonCast. And when the pitches are done, it's time for our four educators sharks to attack, asking the tough questions of the entrepreneurs.

If you'd like to come to our next event in January, you can sign up for information here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1gUdEm_HokqpvSe0erYPrPYimI4q-XZ1sury0KaNRO2s/viewform

Being a superintendent is anything but easy. Bureaucratic politics, having to work with multiple stakeholders, communicating a 1:1 plan to tens of thousands of students and teachers… heck, that’s not a job that just anyone can do. In fact, that might be why the average district superintendent in America doesn’t last longer than three years in the position.

But when it comes to tenure, there’s one notable exception--and that’s Dallas Dance, the current superintendent of Baltimore County Public Schools. Dance is a relatively young superintendent in comparison to others--he’s currently in his 30s--and he’s been in the role for four years. But that’s not all--in September, Dance told board members that he wanted another four-year contract when his current contract ends June 30.

Right now, the Baltimore community is wondering if the board will let him stick around--”Will Dallas Dance get a new deal?” reads one newspaper entry. Lucky for us, we got a chance to sit down with Dallas back at the iNACOL conference in early November to learn about what can go wrong when communicating a rollout of technology, Dallas' favorite tools, how to sell to superintendents, and how Dallas gets professional development. Yes, that’s right. Superintendents need PD, too.