The EdTech Digest Awards Program recognizes people in and around education for outstanding contributions in transforming education through technology to enrich the lives of learners everywhere. Featuring the best and brightest in edtech, the annual recognition program seeks to highlight and celebrate the most effective products and the most innovative people.

Nominations are open January 3, 2012 through February 14, 2012. Finalists will be announced in early March, winners will be announced in late March 2012. As one of the earliest awards programs in the year, finalists and winners will have one of the longest time periods in which to promote their success.

Don’t miss your chance to enter.  To enter the 2012 edtech digest awards, write to: victor@edtechdigest.com

See 2011 edtech digest award winners.

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Taking place in NYC Feb 3-5, 2012 at The Mandell School, the weekend agenda shows a high caliber event.

Bring your idea, be ready to pitch and use the Mentors available to move your idea to a reality and change the lives of learners.  Attending the weekend will prove to move your ideas forward.  Attendees include developers, designers, educators and those with business expertise.  Coupled with a stellar list of mentors, it’s a weekend sure to be a success.

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McNealy has been active in the education technology startup space with Curriki.org and Wayin.

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MeTycoon

This may sound strange, but the game does a great job at showing kids that there isn’t always a linear progression in life and how we earn and achieve.

Created by PlayGen, the game puts kids in charge of making decisions from continuing their education, choosing a vocation or getting a job post high school.  The player needs to manage their career, work-life balance, friends, purchases/expenses.

How does one win you ask?  Well, that all depends on what you want out of life.  Rankings are provided for happiness, wealth, jobs, life achievements and even items purchased.

All in all, the game is an interesting look for tweens and teens at what may lie ahead and give thought to

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This fall at NBC’s Education Nation summit in New York, a pair of young entrepreneurs from Southern California competed in the Innovation Challenge with Truant Today, a new text-messaging service that informs parents of students’ attendance records in real time. They didn’t win the competition, but they might as well have. The audience gasped in wonder when Tom Brokaw revealed that they were still in high school. When the two teenagers were asked why they founded the company, the pair simply shrugged and said, “It’s a problem, and we know how to solve it.”

And consider these examples from elsewhere in the country: Two sophomores from the University of Texas at Austin realized that their friends were mostly using Facebook to ask each other homework questions, so they launched a more efficient study-group service this summer called Hoot.me. Frustrated by his school’s professional-development options, a Teach For America alumnus in St. Louis built Edthena , a video-based professional-learning platform. In Indianapolis, a 20-something entrepreneur wanted to know if he could persuade his sister to become an active reader, so he created Pocket Tales, a social-reading game platform for which he recently won Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Global Education Challenge.

The national call to action to reform and invest in K-12 education has taken on a grassroots dimension. Young innovators are participating in the sector’s transformation in the way they know how: by solving problems that are immediate and relevant to them and to their communities. And they are doing it with the technologies and tools they know. They don’t wait for someone else to tell them what to do. They build it. They don’t strive for perfection, only iterations toward a vision of what is possible. They are optimistic, tenacious, and resourceful.

They have help, of course. Online do-it-yourself websites – Codecademy, Lynda, and Quora – offer easy-to-learn options for how to code, design, or troubleshoot technical projects. Technical infrastructure, such as Web-hosting services, now costs less than a latte a day. Distributed networks of creative freelancers, such as 99Designs and eLance, connect pipelines of flexible, on-demand human capital. The convergence of these lower-cost tools and resources has enabled innovators to move from idea to product relatively quickly. Many, but not all, aspire to be edu-tech entrepreneurs. Certainly the conditions are ripe. The recent acquisitions of education technology companies, such as Wireless Generation and Schoolnet, have attracted investors to the sector who are actively mining for the Next Big Thing. The emergence of edutech startup communities- including my company Startl; Imagine K12; and Startup Weekend – offers young innovators places to hone their produce ideas and business skills. Media companies and organizations, such as NBC, the New York Times Co., and Austin’s South by Southwest festival, compete to showcase these talents in front of national audiences. And in January of this year, President Barack Obama launched Startup America, which added momentum to the movement.

It would be easy to dismiss the ideas of these young innovators. Their solutions might seem insignificant given the scale of the problems that we face in education. We are sued to a research-and-development model that costs millions of dollars and years to build. We expect technology to address multiple aspects of education reform, and all at once. In contrast, these products, built in months, seems too lightweight, and the innovators seem to inexperienced to tackle gnarly, systemic problems. But we might be missing the point.

Likely these innovators’ successes and failures will create fertile ground for the eventual transformation of the sector. Their small innovations contribute to an environment in which the next breakthrough will become possible. They may or may not uncover the Next Big Thing in education, but their ideas are essential to the evolutionary nature of innovation.

In the August issue of Wired, Clive Thompson wrote about the “long nose” theory of innovation: “…[P]aridigm-busting innovations are easy to see coming because they’re already lying there, close at hand. …Big ideas poke their noses into the world very slowly, easing gradually into view.” Before Khan Academy could exist, we needed the familiarity and infrastructure provided by video-sharing sites like YouTube and the widespread sharing of open educational content. Before the children’s book Olivia landed on the iPad, we experienced Leapfrog interactive books and a decades’s worth of online children’s media. Neither example solves big, systemic problems at this moment; however, both are likely necessary to spark other digital-learning innovations in the near future. Innovations that will seem fresh, yet are familiar.

For this evolution of edu-tech innovations to have the transformative effect that we expect, we must guide the process and make the best use of it. We can experiment by testing and giving innovators feedback about what is useful and what isn’t. We can cross-pollinate by connecting innovators with other working on similar problems. We can invest by contributing our time, resources, social capital, and brainpower to help them get to the next level.

In the late 1990′s, a real estate developer met a pair of young men with an idea for an edu-tech venture. The idea didn’t sound great in the first go-round. But when the pair returned with a better idea, he got involved. That idea became Wireless Generation. In recalling the encounter, the angel investor mused that as someone who had no direct experience in education, he simply saw something interesting, acted on instinct, and caught the right opportunity.

It may be too early to tell where these innovators will lead us. But we will need these young innovators as much as they need us shaping the future of learning and ensuing the sector’s vibrancy. Not all of us can or will aspire to innovate like them, but we could still participate in the innovation process. To paraphrase a slogan from the US Department of Homeland Security’s public awareness campaign: If you see something, do something.

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Scribble Press for iPad includes:

• 50 story templates
• over 500 drawing tools, including markers and stamps in a vast array of colors
• a unique sticker collection
• your own photo library
• an easy and fun to use book layout tool
• sharing tools that make it easy to show the world – or just family and friends – your great finished product!
• PLUS, you can use Scribble Press for iPad to read books created by other kids, from all around the world!

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The program will run from May 14th to Aug 17th (with Kickoff Weekend in New York April 27th & 28th).  See the full schedule for the application process and program.

The program is seeking applications for companies as well as individuals (Hackers, Strategists, Designers, and Interns).  The early decision deadline for companies is February 22nd and the deadline for individuals is April 6th.

Click here for more information about the program and our FAQs!

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Digital Learning Series: Demos and Discussion

General Assembly

902 Broadway, 4th Floor (btwn 20th and 21st) NY, NY 10010

January 4th, 7pm-9pm

Cost: $10 (for admittance, drinks and light Hors d’oeuvre)

Come gather with other NY Education Technologists!

Wondering who you’ll see? Here’s a sneak peek

Codecademy

EasyBib

tutorspree

P2PU

littleBits

Study Edge

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Congratulations to Toontastic for being named one of “5 Best Apps” for iPad Education in Apple’s 2011 Rewind.

If you haven’t played with Toontastic yet, what are you waiting for?  It’s a brilliant app allowing kids to make their own cartoons, helping them with storytelling skills such as sequencing.  Creativity abounds!  Be sure and checkout ToonTube, the Toontastic Global Storytelling Network for Kids.

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Learn more about Project Noah on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/projectnoah and download the app to get started!

Project Noah at Saguaro National Park from Project Noah on Vimeo.

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