5 differences between consumer and institutional edtech

We have had a couple of institutional edtech exits in the last month — engrade and area9. Institutional edtech companies are ones whose customers are the insitution — teachers, schools, districts, etc. consumer edtech companies make…

Minimum Viable Instruction

At Zeal, we are pretty big believers in the lean startup approach. The fundamental thesis is that you are constantly doing just enough engineering work in order to understand what your customer needs, by doing small experiments and analyzing the results. You are building the…

The new vocationalism

In the past 30 years, “vocationalism” became a dirty word in education, especially among those of us serving low income students. VocEd meant a two-tiered system in high school with a few kids getting ready for college and the rest stuck in shop class, getting ready for something “less.”

Are schools better than parents?

I am in the nice position as a third time founder that I no longer have to look at the world as a zero sum game. My success and those of other entrepreneurs in learning technology are correlated in my opinion, not inversely correlated as I remember feeling in my first…

Know think do

The way I think about learning is in three parts. First, you have to know a bunch of things to be successful in life. There is no way to fake it if you dont know multi-digit addition. At some point, if you don’t, you will put the wrong things into your calculator and give $20 change on an $18 purchase…

My Trip to India Part 4 — Affordable Schools

It was very interesting to be in a country where over 50% of students attend non-government schools. Let me say that in my opinion this proliferation of school choice is probably the second best reason to have hope for India, right behind the fact that…

Who’s your customer?

One of the things I have been struck by the past few edtech gatherings is that the traditional education technology industry doesn’t seem to know a lot of teachers or students. Coming from the world of teaching, this struck me as pretty bizzare. 

But I realized, because the person with the…

Why Blended Charter Schools are “Whales” in the ed institutional context…

My past few posts, I’ve painted a pretty grim picture of what it takes to sell to schools and districts. I want to take a moment just to answer the question “But hey, Rocketship doesn’t act that way, you…

The Case for Humans

It may seem strange to a lot of people that Zeal has put so much focus into live math coaches. After all, isn’t software supposed to be eating the world? Isn’t artificial intelligence supposed to expose us humans as insignificant? Maybe some day, but in education, human relationships are…

Kids learn when they are solving problems

It’s funny, sometimes I have the same conversation 10 times in a couple of weeks. Lately the conversation has been about the nature of how kids are going to learn online. I think the idea that kids are going to learn from pre-recorded video of a teacher…

5 things to remember about teachers when you are building your edtech product

1 — teachers are among the busiest people on the planet. The best thing you can do for a teacher is to save them time so that they can focus more on their students.

One of the biggest uses for zeal is personalizing homework. It is incredible how valuable saving a couple…

The Shift from Institutional to Individual Learning

As I get my new company going, I’ve been reflecting a lot on exactly why online learning has been so bad for so long. I keep coming back to the fact that if I had to start this company today, and sell our online learning system to…

The Big Shift

When Rocketship started almost a decade ago, we were outliers. We believed that students learned best when they were taught developmentally for academic skills and through projects for developing their hearts and minds. This bifurcation between the methods for teaching was not generally accepted. Most…

Universities — Get Your Ed Schools Involved Quickly!!!

One of the most striking things to me about the higher education side of online learning is how poor these classes are. It’s really not that incredible that a tiny percentage of students ever finish a class. Now at this point…

Teachers vs schools

This may seem like an odd title, because for the last couple of centuries, teachers are usually bundled into schools. There is the normal amount of friction, but teachers needed schools and schools needed teachers. Over the next two decades, that need is going to disappear. Specifically…

Why Beyond Schools?

A bunch of folks have asked me about the title of my blog. Since I worked and led schools for a decade, I clearly have a lot of affinity for them. So why “beyond”? I think we have reached the limit of what we can load on teachers and schools and expect them to do. It is a bit like moore’s law…

Digital video editing

A friend of a friend told me a great story about being with avid when they brought digital editing to the film industry. The first time he showed the system, the editors said, “you don’t understand, if the director comes in and we aren’t cutting film and taping it together, he will think…