Education Archives - Page 3 of 4

DC Startup Quad 2 Quad Offering Halloween Treat To College Bound Teens

Last month we brought you the story of two DC area women who are old enough to be Mark Zuckerberg’s mom, and have launched a startup based on the pains they faced as parents during the college bound process. If you’ve been to college, or have a student planning on attending college than you know how rigorous planning a bunch of college visits can be.

You’re probably already juggling soccer practice, drama club, glee club, the student newspaper, karate and 16 other extra curricular activities. Add to that needing to go out of town to a strange city full of college students and you’ve got a recipe for a huge headache. Pushing through the visit process, you know that the ultimate goal is for your kid to make you proud at whatever college they select.

Well Susan Jones (68) and Elizabeth Van Sant, feel your pain. That’s why they’ve created Quad 2 Quad a mobile app for parents and students taking college visits. The app serves as your own virtual tour guide in your pocket with a directory of services, hours of operation, local food spots and other things you need to know, but don’t often think about ahead of time.

When you think of entrepreneurs launching startups you don’t typically of women Van Sant and Jones’ age, you think of their fresh out of college age children (and for the record we joke about their age all the time via email in fact Jones is typically the one who starts the joking).

Between the two of them they’ve got some serious college visit experience. Their two families have visited over 30 different campuses as they put their kids through high school and then college.

Quad 2 Quad is now available for sale and if you’ve been down this road before you know all too well that Halloween is almost a time marker for when the visits start. With that and mind, and to spread some halloween loving, Quad 2 Quad is on sale in the iTunes store for just $2.99 from October 30th-31st (next Tuesday and Wednesday)

Linkage:

Check out Quad 2 Quad here

Download it from the app store here

Come see Jones and Van Sant at “everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference” click here

Move Over Rosetta Stone, Prague Startup: SpaceTeacher Has A New Way To Teach Languages

When it comes to language learning Rosetta Stone has one of the best reputations and best success rates in town. Well in Prague, David Brhel, Milan Mahovsky and Kamil Mahovsky are three entrepreneurs who hope their startup SpaceTeacher becomes the easiest to use language learning platform in the world.

One of the easiest ways to describe SpaceTeacher is to say that they are crowdsourcing for language. They hope to become the ultimate platform for language learning by crowdsourcing both the content and the teachers.

Co-founder Brhel says that the company is still bootstrapping it but that angels in the area are starting to show interest. The startup is also growing at area accelerator StartupYard.

The core reason for developing SpaceTeacher is that in the CzechRepublic they offer a “one size fits all” type of learning. The shocking statistic is that 79% of the population is not fluent in a foreign language.

We got a chance to talk with Brhel in the interview below.

Swedish Startup: Studemia Is A Collaboration Platform For Students INTERVIEW

We are finding more and more great educational, student facing startups, are coming from overseas. Take Prague startup MySchoolNotebook for instance. Their platform allows students to easily take notes, share notes, sync notes and reference notes on and offline, digitally, in a super easy to use platform and a graphically appealing UI.

Today, we’ve got an interview with Swedish Startup Studemia which allows students to collaborate in a Google Wave/Asana type fashion with the focus being on students in either college or high school.

Now you can collaborate with friends and schoolmates in the same class or across the ocean. As they explain in the interview below it’s a seamless sharing platform for students to share resources and keep projects organized.

Studemia allows students to organize projects by project or by course. Also, just about any kind of media can be uploaded to the platform.

They’ve built the platform for students by students. Studemia’s co-founders; Vilhelm Josander, Per Almhorn and Markus Sackemark are all students themselves and realized the need for a platform like this, specifically geared towards students, quickly and have been working on it ever since.

Check out our interview below:

Syracuse Startup: Coursespree, An Online Marketplace For Students INTERVIEW

A clever new EdTech startup in Syracuse New York is providing access for students to tutors, help, class notes, study buddies and more. Coursespree.

Coursespree is hoping to provide college students a more practical way to succeed academically and earn a little income on the side. In effect Coursespree has two different EdTech avenues for college students on one site.

First, students can virtually connect to tutors anywhere in the world using the Coursespree platform. Whether they need help in math, engineering, English, biology or any other college subject, Coursespree can connect them to help for an assignment or on-going tutoring.

Students can actually make money by selling their class notes (read class notes, NOT homework). On Coursespree.com students can take the notes from their class, set a price and sell them to another student at the same school or hundreds of miles away.

The very young startup was founded in May 2012 and is currently incubating in the Sandbox in Syracuse.

We got a chance to talk with Danish Nadeem the founder and CEO of Coursespree, in the interview below:

Prague Startup: mySchoolNotebook.com Expands To US INTERVIEW HERE

Two Czech entrepreneurs have developed a note taking app for students that has become very popular in Prague and surrounding areas.

There are a few apps out there for students to take school notes however none are as easy to use or as feature packed as mySchoolNotebook.com. With their app students can take notes, organize them into notebooks and even add audio to the notes. They stay organized in the same way that you would keep a traditional three ring binder.

mySchoolNotebook.com uses Facebook authorization, so to use the app you need to have a Facebook account. The upside to the Facebook integration is that it adds a conduit for sharing notes with fellow students that may be collaborating on an assignment together.

mySchoolNotebook.com also has a pdf export function that allows the student to export their notes as a pdf if you need to have an actual paper version of the notes.

More and more schools across the country (and apparently the world) are allowing students to use smartphones and iPads in class to take notes. This is good for the environment and great for the student as it gives them a way to quickly move their notes back and forth from their computers and makes them easier for reference when writing long papers or studying for exams.

We got a chance to catch up with mySchoolNotebooks.com who were actually in Chicago for TechWeek two weeks ago. Check out our interview after the break

Boston Startup: Abroad101 Moves Out Of The Nest INTERVIEW

Back in April we reported on an innovative EdTech startup in Boston called Abroad101. Abroad101 is like a travelocity of sorts for those students looking to study abroad.

Abroad 101 allows users to review just about every aspect of a study abroad program. With the real feedback from students who’ve been through the study abroad programs, you can find out how the teaching staff and curriculum are, how the shopping in the city is, how the nightlife is and even if it’s safe to walk from the car to the classroom by yourself at night. The idea behind Abroad101 was an untapped space and the Boston company and MassChallenge graduate are doing a great job of filling it.

So great in fact, it’s time to leave the safety and security of the MassChallenge nest and branch out on their own.

We got to talk with the guys from Abroad101 about just that, see the quick interview below the break

Minneapolis Startup: Brain Hive To Offer E-Book Rentals For K-12

A Minneapolis startup called Brain Hive is looking to solve a problem for school libraries across the country. That problem, is access to books. With such a diverse taste in content in American public schools, school libraries often fall short in fulfilling student requests for books.

With the wide adoption of tablets and e-books Brain Hive has come up with a solution. Brain Hive has developed a platform that allows students to rent books from their digital library as a supplement to their schools actual library.

The Brain Hive service will offer traditional e-books, non fiction books, graphic novels and books curated by school librarians and administrators. Through the schools portal into the Brain Hive system, librarians and administrators can determine which content is age appropriate, set limitations on numbers of rentals at a time per student, and decide to offer titles around the current curriculum.

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DC Startup: Naaya Great For Kids, Great For Parents VIDEO

Washington DC area serial entrepreneur Amir Hudda is at it again. This time though, he’s created a new startup for his kids. Hudda has had several successful exits bringing tens of millions of dollars in profit to his investors.

The story goes a bit like this. As busy as Hudda is, he and his wife still noticed that his children spend a great deal of time on the computer. Furthermore they spend even more time on iPods,iPads,iPhones and as Hudda puts it “i-everything”. With his background in technology he wanted to do something about this problem but he didn’t want to strip his children of technology.

That’s we he founded Naaya. Naaya is a web and mobile based learning platform that provides a lot more than simple coloring games and match the picture games. The World Of Naaya takes kids through a fully immersive experience where they explore worlds, while learning robust curriculum targeting reading, social studies and 21st century skills.

While there are a lot of companies offering e-learning through the web and mobile Naaya is the first that isn’t targeting just kids and students. Hudda wants parents, teachers and schools to get involved as well.

Naaya features an entire parent portal that will offer reporting to the parent on what the child has been learning, messages they have been sending and receiving, and target areas where the child may need help.

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NY Startup: We Talk With Three Ring The Winners Of Best Education Startup At New York Tech Day

At the recent New York tech day a startup called Three Ring walked away with the best education startup award. In short three ring provides a platform that makes it incredibly easy to digitize students work. The backbone of the Three Ring system functions as a portfolio or digital filing cabinet.

Teachers can use an iPhone or Android phone and take a photo or video of a student assignment. From there they can organize the entries by tags including student name, class, assignment and other core parts of the assignment which makes it incredibly easy to recall for later use.

Teachers can use the assignments stored in Three Ring to provide assessments of the students work, go over the assignment more in depth with students and easily recall assignments for things like parent teacher conferences. Three Ring is currently in beta and only for teachers however Three Ring plans to incorporate a parent, student and administrator component.

In the future a parent module or student module could easily be the remedy for “the dog ate my homework”. The possibilities with all four components are endless. Later on, Three Ring could be a way for students to submit an assignment to a teacher once completed. Imagine uploading the assignment to Three Ring and even if the student couldn’t make it to school, got sick before class, or had to leave early for a football game an assignment could be turned in to a teachers Three Ring account and the student could still get credited on time.

There are several tools out there in the digital world for teachers. Three Ring makes is an extremely easy to use tool that can be adapted to several scenarios.

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Boston Startup: Abroad101 Poised To Become The TripAdvisor For Studying Abroad

Here’s another great startup idea coming out of Boston Massachusetts, in fact it’s hard to believe that no one else has done anything like this. Abroad101 was actually founded in 2007. In 2010 they won $50,000 as part of the inaugural session of MassChallenge.

So what is Abroad101. The web based service is the brain child of childhood friends Mike Stone and Mark Lurie. They’ve developed a web tool that pulls data from participating colleges on programs to study abroad. There was obviously a need for students who study abroad to find the best programs that meet their educational needs. As Xconomy reports Stone and Lurie knew all too well the “archaic” process of sifting through folders and brochures to match study abroad programs.

Abroad101 allows users (students) to search their growing database of official school sanctioned programs for studying abroad. They can learn everything from course curriculum, to attractions in the city, safety information and find reviews from students who have been through the same program. If this sounds a lot like TripAdvisor for students studying abroad that’s no coincidence, as executives from TripAdvisor are part of Abroad101’s advisory board.

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Chicago Startup: MentorMob Teams Up With Girl Scouts & Motorola For Online Badge System

Chicago Startup MentorMob Is Taking Girlscout Badges Online (photo Jose M. Osario/Chicago Tribune)

One things for sure, these aren’t your momma’s brownies.

The Girl Scouts of America are going high tech with the help of Chicago startup MentorMob and technology/financial partner Motorola Mobility Foundation.

Last month MentorMob was the recipient of a $150,000 prize as part of the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a contest sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation and others. MentorMob aggregates web based learning content into playlists. Mentor Mob CEO Kris Chinosorn describes what they do at MentorMob as crowd sourced learning.

MentorMob was originally set up to do learning content and that infrastructure is already in place. With the grant money from the Digital Media and Learning Competition they are building the framework for a certification and badge system. While the badge system is being designed for the Girl Scouts, Chinosorn is going to scale the technology to fit in any kind of setting. The certification system they are building will also be able to implement tests and quizzes to assess the level at which someone has learned the content.

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Boca Raton Book Swapping Startup Wins FAU Business Plan Competition

A Boca Raton software entrepreneur putting two kids through college just won $15,000 in the Florida Atlantic University business plan competition. Mark Fredericks and his son David, a junior at FAU, pitched SwitchMyBooks which won the competition and the money to go along with it. They also won $80,000 in business services for the startup.

The contest was open to South Florida entrepreneurs and not just students at FAU.

SwitchMyBooks was born out of necessity. Fredericks quickly realized that spending $1000 or more per year on textbooks for college was a reality.

“The average student spends well over $1,000 a year for books,” Fredericks told the palmbeachpost. “That’s a huge burden.”

Sure there are other ways to get used textbooks online, however SwitchMyBooks has a more innovative approach on a local level. Students who want to sell their books using SwitchMyBooks simply list the book on the site. When they have a buyer the buyer pays a $.99 fee to SwitchMyBooksand then negotiates the actual sale of the book with the seller individually. They can then meet up, presumably on the same campus or nearby to actually do the exchange. The reservation fee lets the seller know they have a serious buyer and the buyer know they have the book.

FAU is the first campus to use SwitchMyBooks they implemented the site on campus last month. Fredericks has his sites on a nationwide rollout though. If he can get one million students using the site he could easily generate $5M in revenue.

Unlike other used book sites SwitchMyBooks users deal locally and don’t have to worry about shipping heavy books through the mail. They can also of course use cash versus Paypal or another form of online payment.

source: Palmbeachpost

Washington DC Ed-Tech Startup Learn Zillion Get’s $50,000 From U of M As Part of $2.4M Series A Round

Eric Westerndorf Co-Founder of Learn Zillion (photo: e. westerndorf via edtechdigest)

Washington DC based Ed-Tech startup LearnZillion has recently scored a $2.4 million dollar series A round. Participating in the round is the University of Michigan. Through U of M’s Social Venture Fund, $50,000 was contributed to this round.

So what does LearnZillion do?

They are creating a video library of some of the best lessons taught by “Super Teachers”, teachers who really cut through and engage students in learning at the middle and high school level. Teachers can create a playlist of these video lessons which come complete with a quiz at the end of the video session. This allows teachers and parents to immediately gauge the comprehension of the lesson.

Learn Zillion was founded by educator Eric Westerndorf who left has position as principal at the E.L Haynes Public Charter School in Washington DC to co-found LearnZillion with Alix Guerrier. While principal at Haynes Westerndorf implemented six-week improvement cycles. The frequent assessments helped the teachers gain insight and drive achievement however they also caused teacher anxiety. That’s when Westerndorf started implementing new resources like video lessons. Teacher’s would collaborate and share the lessons that worked best. That’s where LearnZillion was born.

Memphis Startup KnoCo Reviving Edutainment

A new EdTech startup in Memphis Tennessee is hoping to revive the stigma, fun, and “accidental learning” that came from software titles back in the day like “Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego”.

The company, called KnoCo is based in Memphis Tennessee. CEO and lead developer Ken Gibbs met co-founder Elliott Boyette while the two were working for a company that develops iOS games. They decided go out on their own and fill a void in The edutainment space. They added James Youngblood as composer, game designer and product manager.

Gibbs admits that thre are a lot of educational games out there but most of them are flash card type games. In those games kids see one card, identify something and then are rewarded with the next card.

More after the break