Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the motivation for private schools to use your digital platform?

Steve Gross: A couple of things. We have history on the home school side. Most traditional home schoolers home school their children from grade K through 8. That makes sense. It’s easier to teach third-grade math as opposed to 11th grade Chemistry. Historically, that’s where our focus has been.

As we moved beyond home schools into virtual schools, we retain that historic strength. There’s not a lot of different >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Steve Gross, CEO of Calvert Education (Part 1)

A very interesting discussion on the pedagogical gap in online-offline hybrid learning methodology for younger kids.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Calvert Education.

Steve Gross: Calvert is a very established organization. It was founded in the early 1900s. It’s probably the world’s first distance learning organization. It was founded as part of a private school in Baltimore, which is where the company is based. It is fair to say that we have been doing personalized learning genuinely since 1906. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to be me about the state of the union as far as virtual reality games are concerned.

David Lord: It’s an interesting time. The promise of virtual reality is infinite and yet the delivery is still three to six months in. That three to six months was a little bit more exciting than I think anybody had anticipated. Now, we’re at a time when we can start to evaluate new games in an entirely new light. To take the leadership in virtual reality for education, you have to first use virtual reality to understand its capabilities.

Secondly, you have to understand that content will drive the adoption. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on some of these trends that you are talking about. Tell us a bit about what is in the horizon versus what is already active. You talked about personalized learning. Are products already in the market that are personalized learning games?

David Lord: I would call the products that we have today similar to personalized. They don’t necessarily have the ability to adapt in mid-motion like technology allows us to today. It really comes from the learnings that we’ve made as we converted our games to the cloud. The technology jumps that have been taking place have enabled us to have different views of data. That’s really what’s driven the technology capabilities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 1)

This discussion takes us into the realm of learning games and their future.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Jumpstart.

David Lord: I’m the CEO of JumpStart. JumpStart has been the leader in learning-based games for the past 25 years. JumpStart was founded by Bill Gross before Idealab. Our key brands are JumpStart Math Blaster and School of Dragons. We have been educating children, which is our mission, for the past 20 years.

Sramana Mitra: Children of what age do you focus on?

David Lord: We try and build products and subject matter that apply to children of all ages, but our core age range is kinder preparation to K-3. >>>

Technology Tools for a Flipped Classroom

By 1M/1M Premium Member and Co-Founder of Omninox Jake Yap

The idea behind a flipped classroom has become more popular amongst teachers as of late, which can most likely be attributed to the rise of technology in and out of the classroom. Tools such as computers, smartphones, and tablets are typical items in a student and teacher’s arsenal in more recent times. These technological tools allow for the necessary instructional strategy required for a flipped classroom, which include teaching content at home and activities and discussions (often regarded as homework) being conducted in the class. Learning at home can include reading the required textbook lesson or watching online lectures, which would not have been possible if it was not for the advancement in technology. >>>

Future of Education: Three Conversations

There is a lot going on in the educational technology market. In our effort to bring you continued insights in that market, we would like to bring to your attention three recent roundtable discussions:

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Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 5)

Warren Barkley: There is a district in Washington State who have way less money than most districts. They’ve a lot of kids who are in and out of school, but every kid has a laptop in its population of 20,000. The curriculum is online for pretty much everything that they want to learn in the K-8. So if the kids miss a class because something happened with their parents, they can catch up. The way the superintendent did it there is through community. He has kids who do PR almost. They’ve parents who are massively involved. This is a district where you would not expect this type of thing to happen if you look at the demographics, yet they’re wildly successful with their technology and with their ability to affect the learning outcomes with kids.

When you talk to the superintendent, he will say that it’s all about the community. How is the community involved? I’ve seen this in other places as well and the recipe of success is community involvement. You can get to an effective use of these >>>