NY Startup: Slate Science Launches SlateMath, Closes $1.1M Angel Roud

SlateScience,EdTech,NY startup,startups,startup newsWith a fresh $1.1 million dollars in the bank, New York EdTech startup Slate Science has announced the launch of their newest STEM educational product, SlateMath.

SlateMath can be downloaded in multiple languages and is available now in Apple’s App Store.

The SlateMath series was conceived to address a global frustration with math learning. The company’s breakthrough learning methodologies tap into children’s natural and intuitive learning processes, and help them acquire knowledge and competence constructively, using self-guided as well as teacher-guided exploration. “SlateMath has two purposes,” said Prof. Shimon Schocken, one of the company’s co-founders, “to teach math proper through self-paced and engaging discovery, and to expose children to the ways mathematicians think and reason about the world. We see a tremendous opportunity to use tablet technology and constructive pedagogy to endear math to children, and to help them develop into confident and competent thinkers.”

The SlateMath series was designed from the ground up for an environment consisting of tablets, cloud computing, and standardized curricula. The series is based on a huge portfolio of modular, richly-indexed, and recombinant educational apps that Slate Science is now developing. Subsets of the SlateMath portfolio can be assembled to support existing textbooks and learning programs as well as the new wave of emerging digital textbooks. The software also adapts the contents dynamically, to address the learner’s revealed strengths and weaknesses in real time.

“SlateMath is a game changer because it offers a new and innovative approach to teach math. The product is based on an experiential context, hands-on learning, and self-discovery, making the best utilization of the tablet’s touch interface I’ve seen thus far in educational apps. This approach allows children to acquire and understand math ‘in their bones’. The Slate Science technology and learning methodologies are applicable not only to math, but to many other STEM subjects as well,” said Robert Scoble.

In conjunction with the launch, Slate Science announced the closing of a $1.1 Million angel round of funding led by private investors. The funds will be used for continued product innovation, marketing and operational costs.

Slate Science was founded by an A-team of educators and engineers with more than 100 years of combined experience in science education, instructional software development, and mobile platforms. The company developed a proprietary technology and a field-proven methodology for teaching STEM fields. Rather than oferring frontal videos and drill and skill practice, the company is focusing on crafting constructive learning environments that guide children through a rewarding process of self-discovery and intuitive exploration. The company’s proprietary authoring technology enables it to develop and deploy its learning apps in a remarkably efficient and timely manner.

Slate Science builds portfolios of educational apps designed to support standard STEM curricula while allowing students to develop, deeply understand, and experience hands-on conceptual learning. The company’s first series of products is SlateMath, intended for the consumer market and aimed to support math instruction according to the Common Core Standards. A school version of SlateMath, intended for classroom use and equipped with a suite of teaching aids, will be released soon.

For more information visit: slatescience.com

Check out the LAUNCHedu Higher Ed Startup Finalists at SXSWedu

LAUNCHedu,SXSWedu,startups,EdTechEarlier this morning we told you about LAUNCHedu a new startup initiative going on now at SXSWedu. The educational festival as part of SXSW continues to grow and now offers four full days of programming, panels, keynotes and startups. The biggest startup portion for SXSWedu is the LAUNCHedu event.

LAUNCHedu celebrates the convergence of “today’s dynamic educators, and entrepreneurs transforming classrooms and revolutionizing schooling.” Four great educators and entrepreneurs will emcee the LAUNCHedu festivities. They are: EdSurge co-founder Betsy Corcoran, Trinity Education Group partner and CIO Clyde Boyer , GSV founder and managing partner Deborah Quazzo, and Trinity Education Group founder and CEO Hugh Norwood.

The criteria the LAUNCHedu startup finalists were judged on was:

  1. Creativity (Originality of Idea)
  2. Potential (Longevity, Actualization and Profitability of idea)
  3. Functionality (Usability of interface for idea)
  4. Team / People (Who is your team and how will they make your company a success?)

Here are the Higher Ed startup finalists from the LAUNCHedu website:

CollegeSnapps

collegesnapps.com
CollegeSnapps™ is a mobile communication platform that facilitates students’ progress to-and-through college by pairing an innovative mobile app that delivers just-in-time, high quality information and alerts to students with a multi-functional web-based dashboard in order for high school counselors and college advisors to effectively communicate with and support their students.


Flinja

flinja.com
Flinja is an exclusive, college-centric marketplace where students, staff and alumni can hire and be hired. We provide a vetted, freelance workforce of talented college students and alumni. Our mission is to innovate the hiring process by connecting user participation with college affiliation.


Kahoot!

getkahoot.com
Kahoot! is a platform that enables learners to play with knowledge in a collaborative and social manner. A web-based, mobile and tablet friendly educational platform, with a core emphasis on user experience design in a social, fun and game-like environment.


LRNGO

LRNGO.com
LRNGO.com is a marketplace where people can teach their skills and connect through learning. On LRNGO, you can buy, sell or trade what you know for leisure or achieving your goals. Teach. Learn. Share. LRNGO, INC. is a company that develops social learning utilities to accelerate the transfer of knowledge.


Matchbox, Inc.

matchbox.net
Matchbox disrupts undergraduate and graduate admissions by replacing outdated software with an iPad app. Our streamlined system gives customers a competitive advantage by arriving at decisions faster and gaining visibility into the incoming class. This insight enables universities to proactively adjust their recruitment efforts improving yield and increasing tuition revenue.


MediaCore

mediacore.com
MediaCore’s video learning platform is the fastest way for anyone at any institution to easily capture, manage and share media content securely and privately. Currently it serves over 500,000 students at 300+ schools and universities worldwide.


More Than Money Careers

morethanmoneycareers.com/
MTM Careers helps college students and graduates get clear, get connected, and get hired for well-paying jobs in CSR, sustainable business, and social enterprise. Since 2010, over 30 universities have leveraged our process and resources via our online staff and faculty training programs or our ‘Netflix for Impact Careers’ library.


School Yourself

schoolyourself.org
We’re reinventing math textbooks by making them more fun and affordable. So far, we’ve launched three e-books (most recently “Hands-On Calculus”), each of which we wrote and published ourselves. Unlike almost all other textbooks on the market, our books make math come alive with engaging content and touch-based interactive demos.


scrible

scrible.com
We make useful online reading and research apps that enable you to annotate/comment on webpages in your browser and then save, share and manage them in the cloud. Our Student Edition adds academic features (e.g. citations, bibliographies, reports, etc.). Instructors use scrible for thoughtful and collaborative e-reading assignments.


SpeakingPal

speakingpal.com
SpeakingPal is an innovative education company with a unique focus on teaching English speaking skills using automatic speech recognition on smartphones, tablets and Smart TVs. Founded in 2009, SpeakingPal’s multidisciplinary team has created highly engaging and interactive educational products that are used by over 1M people worldwide, and growing.


MapStory

mapstory.org
MapStory, a compliment to Wikipedia, is a new dimension to the global data commons that empowers a global user community to organize knowledge about the world spatially and temporally. Perhaps more important, MapStory is an infrastructure enabling ‘MapStorytelling’ as a means of communicating important issues to a global audience.


USEED

useed.org
USEED is re-engineering philanthropy in Higher Education. We provide universities and colleges with an innovative online fundraising solution specifically tailored to the unique challenges within the industry. USEED builds a large pipeline of new donors for the institution while simultaneously empowering students to pursue their dreams and discover their passions.

EdTech Startup 19 Pencils Is Saving Lots Of Time For K-6 Teachers

19pencils,startup,startups,startup interview, edtechMost teachers don’t have nearly enough time to spend finding resources and lesson planning. Cuts in education typically mean that average teachers have a larger class load, and some are often faced with pulling down multiple jobs in school and even after school. This can be especially difficult for K-6 teachers who often want to give their students all they possibly can.

This is where Jason Fabbri and his Sacremento based educational startup 19Pencils comes in. 19Pencils provides an online community for like minded elementary school teachers. Using their platform teachers can search and discover great educational content and upload and share things that have worked for them in the classroom.

Fabbri has been a software engineer for the last 17 years. He’s had a long career with Adobe contributing to projects like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Services and more. It was volunteering at his children’s schools that prompted him to create 19Pencils. He saw firsthand the frustration that teachers had in curating good web content for first grade students, and then sharing it.

We got a chance to talk to Fabbri in depth about 19Pencils and the growing startup community in Sacremento, just 90 minutes outside of Silicon Valley. Check out the interview below.

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Orlando Startup: ASPIREDU Is Helping College Students Stay In School

Aspiredu,Orlando startup,startup,startups,startup interview, EdTechA group of educators based in Florida has teamed together to help prevent attrition and improve the dropout rate of college students. It’s a pretty big goal for Orlando startup ASPIREDU.

They’re not offering incentives, rewards or a cute little app to manage the school day better. The team behind ASPIREDU is taking their decades of experience in education and using an analytics tool to help identify at risk students enrolled in online courses so that they can help these schools better manage student retention.

While they’ve been working on ASPIREDU for quite some time they just launched their public facing product after months of testing, yesterday.

The combine a simple overview of at risk students with easy access to details about each student, which helps colleges and universities have a better overall picture of students that could drop out.

ASPIREDU was formed after one of the cofounders, who had been in higher education for ten years, found that she was spending over half her day working on student retention. When she went searching for a software tool to help identify and manage at risk students there wasn’t one.

The bootstrapped startup received a little seed money in the form of a grant from Startup Weekend EDU.

We got a chance to talk with one of the founders Kevin Kopas, about ASPIREDU, because the other two cofounders are still working on ASPIREDU while employed full time they’ve withheld their names for this interview. Check out the interview below.

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Kauffman Foundation Official Leaving To Launch Match.com For Teachers

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is known for their vast support of startups and small businesses across the country. Through multiple sponsorships, partnerships, research, data initiatives and educational information, the Kauffman Foundation serves as the backbone to a web of startup events, and evangelical efforts across the country.

Munro Richardson, is stepping down from his position as the vie president of education at the Kauffman Foundation to pursue a startup of his own.  According to the Kansas City Star, Richardson is teaming up with Alicia Herald the Executive Director of Teach for America in Kansas City, to launch what is essentially a match.com for teachers.

The startup is called myEDmatch.com and is expected to be a national job site with a social focus, and profile/resume highlights specifically for educators.

“It’s a mashup of LinkedIn, CareerBuilder and eHarmony,” Richardson said of the startup to the Kansas City Star. “It’s right at the intersection of education and entrepreneurship. It’s a for-profit opportunity that actually could be important in addressing a real problem.”

The key problem is that primary and secondary schools are spending too much time and resources on trying to fit teachers with their missions. They could be using that time for educating. With myEdmatch.com schools and teachers would have a better platform to see if they’re a better fit and use less resources.

So far there’s nothing quite like it on the internet. Teaches will be able to focus their efforts on finding real jobs in education and educators will be able to view teachers resumes and weed out candidates they may find on other sites that aren’t as qualified .

Both Richardson and Herald have the educational background to back this venture. Richardson is a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University as well as a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Herald holds an MBA from Washington University.

Richardson has been at Kauffman since 2002. He helped develop the Kauffman Scholars program and also helped launch the charter school. His last day at Kauffman is October 31st.

Linkage:

Stay up to date with myEdmatch.com here

Here’s more startup news from “everywhere else”

Speaking of “everywhere else”

Swedish Startup: Studemia Is A Collaboration Platform For Students INTERVIEW

studemia1
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:

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

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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.

More after the break
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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.

More and video after the break
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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.

More after the break
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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.

More after the break
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