Digital Harbor Foundation

The Rise of Educator-Entrepreneurs: Bringing Classroom Experience to Ed-Tech

October 4, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By MindShift

By Katrina Schwartz

Most teachers are happy doing their job — helping kids understand and make sense of the world around them. But there’s a growing number of educators who are wading into entrepreneurship, frustrated at the lack of tools they need, and wanting to extend their sphere of influence. As technology becomes more widely used and accepted in the classroom, teachers are taking their ideas about how to improve learning environments, sharing them online, and creating web-based tools to benefit teachers and students.

At the same time, the fact that the multi-billion dollar ed-tech space is exploding has not gone unnoticed by investors. Programs like Imagine K12 run crash courses in ed-tech entrepreneurship, connecting fledgling companies to Silicon Valley venture capital firms (and staking out a six percent equity).

But, as most educators know, while tech entrepreneurs can sometimes hit gold, not every newly minted site or software is useful to teachers. That’s what sets educator entrepreneurs apart — they have relevant classroom experience that can’t be gained any other way than by doing the hard work of teaching.

CASE STUDIES

Jack West has taught for 16 years and has been at Sequoia High School in Redwood City for most of that time. He’s a physics teacher and is naturally inclined to innovate, even if his students aren’t as enthusiastic about his non-traditional teaching style. West returned to traditional teaching for eight years until he figured out how to use his innovative techniques not only to spice things up, but to actually help his students do better. That’s what led to the launch this year of Braincandy, a tool to help students understand the underlying concepts behind their misperceptions.

“Teachers are usually the last people to be consulted on many of these education technology companies.”

West and his co-founders wrote trick-questions on physics concepts that many kids get wrong. The answer choices are all the common misperceptions. The goal is for students to be completely sure that they’re choosing the right answer, the obvious answer, only to find out that most got it wrong. “These aren’t test questions. They are instructional questions,” explained West. “So what we’re trying to do is create a discrepancy event, a shocking event to open the door for a teachable Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Braincandy, ClassDojo, Digital Harbor Foundation, eduClipper, Socrative

Closing the Loop Between Students, Teachers, and Technologists

March 8, 2012 | 6:00 AM | By Tina Barseghian

In the public school system, many argue there’s a disconnect between teachers, students, and technologists. Educators and students don’t have enough tech training, and those who create the technology to be used in schools don’t work closely enough with teachers and students. To close the loop, a newly launched program in Baltimore will bring together a network of students, technologists, and educators linking teacher professional development to student after-school programming.

Through Digital Harbor Foundation’s EdTech Link program, teachers will be trained by volunteer technologists, then teach their new skills to students in after-school programs. Continuing the cycle of learner-as-teacher, students who attend the after-school program will, in turn, take their own training to educators in other schools. And volunteer technologists will get to experiment with new ideas directly by working with their users.

It’s a model that Andrew Coy, co-director of the new foundation, has been piloting at Digital Harbor High School in inner-city Baltimore. Once a week after school for the past year, Coy, who’s a ninth-grade technology teacher, has been taking four of his high school students to nearby Liberty Elementary School, where the students coach teachers on how to implement their one-to-one iPad program.

“We want to connect students to a vision of themselves as technologists, and pull them into that trajectory.”

Students help teachers figure out how to do things like use Google forms, Khan Academy videos and dashboards, and apps like Class Dojo in the classroom. They’re paid $20 per hour for their time and expertise by Liberty’s principal. And although Coy says only one out of the four students has an iPad at home, they’re fearless when it comes to playing around and figuring out how to use it, and showing educators too. “Kids look at things differently,” Coy said. “They can download an app and figure out quickly how to use it and show teachers how to use it. And what the teachers love about it is they get to work Continue reading →