SmartTech Roundup

Mobile Mojo

In the past year, schools have been buying up wireless technologies like iPads. PC Mag reports that over 1.5 million are in use in educational institutions (bet it’s a lot more than that).  Boston’s NPR station reports that over 600 districts have ditched textbooks and purchased iPads for all students.
Public schools and private schools are scrambling to put acceptable use policies in place as BYOD initiatives proliferate.
Parents and kids 3-8 love Fingerprint.  Instead of a bunch of disparate apps, they’ve figured out how to turn iPad into a real preschool learning platform.  They get games
Skype announced a partnership with DonorsChoose.org and committed to donate up to $250,000 to allow teachers to wire up their classrooms with interactive chat and voice technology. More than 23,000 teachers have already signed up.

Online PD

Teachscape won a big contract for online PD in Illinois.  The state board selected Teachscape and Consortium for Educational Change to provide training and services related to Illinois’ teacher evaluations.
How would online professional development linked to these new evaluations actually work?  Check out this Bloomboard vimeo. Bloomboard won SXSWedu Launch.

Personal & Adaptive

We got a tour of i-Ready from Curriculum Associates last week and were  impressed by what appears to be a best-in-clas K-8 adaptive assessment in reading and math and some pretty cool K-6 instructional units.  Here’s our review.
Sapling makes chemistry homework suck less bad for students and profs and in the process makes textbooks pretty much irrelevant. They’re mostly higher ed science but watch for them in a math class and high school near you in the fall.
Alltuition is  a TurboTax for FAFSA–at least Mom will save some time and money while searching for the best college loans.

Better Post-Sec

Start Making with GeneralAssemb.ly, check out these great startup videos from leading entrepreneurs and sign up for General Assembly’s first online course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship.
More from the you’re-screwed-if-you-run-a-crummy-business-school-category, Enstitute launched an internship-based alternative to no-value add higher ed.  A NYC cohort of 15 will soon go to work at participating startups.  Kane and Shaila have a pretty cool program in mind (more on this soon).

ICYMI

Rob Hutter and Mitch Kapor talk about edtech investing at SXSW.  Edmodo CEO Nic Borg closed the show with a great presentation.