Teachers Own Curriculum

This is more of a K12 trend than an idea, but a ton of ideas become possible if it is true. For decades, there has been a deep tension between ‘administrators’ (principals and central office staff) and teachers over curriculum. Politically, textbook companies like Pearson were able to…

Synchronous Online School

This is almost a category than a single idea. It’s pretty clear to me that the world of asynchronous content for learning will always be pretty mediocre and cheap or free. See Udacity or Coursera who exist only because we haven’t come up with the right way to teach online yet. I…

Teacher tools for Zoom

One of the things driving several of my startups crazy is the lack of classroom management tools on top of Zoom. Zoom has become the de-facto standard for online learning very quickly. It’s video quality and connectivity is much much better than previous video networks. It has an API…

Addition

This is going to sound like the most boring, mundane idea, but as a former elementary and middle school math teacher, i can tell you that if you can get a student to add fluently, it probably doubles their chance of being ‘good at math.’ Subtraction, multiplication, and division probably double their chance…

Study Together

Students in college have study groups all of the time for working on problem sets. The challenge is that students need to be in the same place at the same time, working on the same thing. But as education progresses, more and more learning is going to happen online, not in physical locations. Making it seamless to study together could be very useful.

The Coach on Your Phone

One of the big changes I’ve blogged about before is the availability of reliable synchronous video. It’s definitely more reliable on desktops now than on phones, but it’s getting there fast. The main things that enables is to carry your coach around with you at all times. I mean a real…

The Reading Teacher

Like addition, learning basic reading fluency is one of those things that has a massive impact on your life. When you become…

Make Your Own College

I’ve seen a bunch of ideas around this space, but nothing that’s fully clicked for me yet. Suppose college was totally disaggregated and you could take any class from any university you wanted. Then suppose that most students needed to study in groups and get help from TA’s. How would you…

Simple bandaids

Why is it that right when you have some wound bleeding all over the place, you have to find a bandaid, open it, peel it back, etc. It seems totally possible to make a bandaids that adheres on contact.