We know that arts integration can open all kinds of opportunities for learning and fostering creativity. We’re learning why computer science is an essential skill for every student to thrive in the digital world. And we’re understanding how allowing kids to get their hands on do-it-yourself projects shows them the value of designing, creating, and the process of making.

Until such time that schools provide these essential skills to all students, certain individuals and organizations are stepping in to fill the void. We met a few of these changemakers who are bringing these essential tools to students recently at the Big Ideas Fest in Half Moon Bay. Here are their stories. Perhaps their work and influence will make progress towards bringing these skills from outside the school system to where it belongs.

SMARTHISTORY: Making High Art Accessible

Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the creators of Smarthistory, a huge collection of videos that take you inside the most important museums in the world, talk about how their explanations of significant art work make otherwise abstract or hard-to-understand concepts more accessible to students.

BLACK GIRLS CODE: Teaching a New Generation of Innovators

Moving from being consumers of media to creators is the goal of Black Girls Code, an organization devoted to teaching girls of color in-demand skills when they’re thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, says Kimberly Bryant

CAINE’S ARCADE: Showing the Value of Making By Hand

Nirvan Mullik, the creator of the wildly popular video Caine’s Arcade, about a young boy who built an arcade out of recycled cardboard boxes, talks about the importance of knowing how to make things by hand, and how the video has helped propel the Maker Movement in schools.

STARTUP WEEKEND EDU: Entrepreneurs Helping Educators

While these organizations provide tools and opportunities for students, another group is attempting to bring innovation from the fringes directly to teachers. Introducing educators to the world of technology and innovation is the goal of the grassroots movement called Startup Weekend EDU, and the organizer, Khalid Smith, talks about what teachers can learn from tech entrepreneurs, and what educators want from entrepreneurs that can help them be better teachers.

[Videos co-produced with Matthew Williams]

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There appears to be no shortage of new businesses looking to apply technology to education. An entire ecosystem has emerged in recent years to develop and promote the latest product or service for the classroom or district. But a major hurdle remains: the divide between what entrepreneurs build and educators need.

The ecosystem stimulating the “edupreneurial” activity ranges from startup instigators (Startup Weekend EDU) and startup showcases (LAUNCHedu, SIIA Innovation Incubator), to startup incubators (Y Combinator, Imagine K12) and startup investors.

But in many cases, enthusiastic edupreneurs are propelled from this starting ramp to run full speed, like Wile E. Coyote, into an oversized anvil — actual teachers. It doesn’t matter how good the concept, how cool the technology, or how pressing the need. There can be a fundamental disconnect between passion and reality.

And that can keep good ideas out of the classroom.

To dissect the disconnect, the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest recently brought together a group of insiders: traditional education company executive Randy Reina, senior vice president of digital product development at McGraw-Hill Education’s Center for Digital Innovation; a not-so-recently-startup edtech company CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson, who’s chair and president of DreamBox Learning; and teacher/entrepreneur Lindsey Own, a Seattle-area middle school science and health teacher and co-organizer of Startup Weekend Seattle EDU.

A handful of key themes emerged, casting light not just on what entrepreneurs need to know, but on issues parents and educators should expect as ed-tech startups get more attention.

TECH ALONE WON’T IMPROVE EDUCATION.

The biggest misconception that entrepreneurs (and even parents) have about the role of technology in education today, said DreamBox Learning CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson, is that, “you can overlay technology on whatever is happening in education and you will see improvement.” The reality, Woolley-Wilson noted, is much more complicated. “Technology can help scale greatness” like a good teacher or teaching practices, but “the underbelly is that it can help scale bad things, too.”

But technology isn’t necessarily needed to “improve” education, said Own, a middle-school teacher, regarding her earlier experience in Chicago with project-based learning. “We didn’t need a computer (for every student) to do that,” though it would have made it easier. “We’ve had education reform for a very long time without technology.”

That’s something entrepreneurs — and parents — should consider when blindly pushing for technology in the classroom. Avoiding, as Woolley-Wilson calls it, too much “exuberance for technology for technology’s sake.”

TIME — NOT COMPETING PRODUCTS — ARE ENTREPRENEURS’ BIGGEST CHALLENGE.

Teachers are busy. But startups tend to forget that.

From implementing Common Core State Standards to preparing for high-stakes tests, educators have their hands full. Entrepreneurs, Woolley-Wilson said, might look at competition as products and funding, “but they often underestimate the competition for time. Teachers just don’t have that much time. So the solutions have to be easy to implement. They have to make the teacher feel inspired, rather than stupid.”

McGraw-Hill’s Reina agreed, pointing out that “when entrepreneurs come in with a great new idea they don’t necessarily think about the ripple effect the idea may or may not have with the rest of

[RELATED: The Rise of Educator-Entrepreneurs, Classroom Experience to EdTech]

the organization. Education is a complicated system and, in many ways, it’s a political system.” With a nod to author Malcolm Gladwell, Reina said, “We are at a tipping point — but that tipping point is going to tip slowly.”

Even with that caution, Woolley-Wilson noted there are a lot of innovative teachers willing to look at new things. But choose the moment carefully. “They’re focused on shelter and food, and you want them to talk about self-actualization.”

THE BEST PRODUCTS INVOLVE TEACHERS AND FIT WITHIN THEIR PRACTICE.

Another area of disconnect: A clear understanding of how a product will actually be used. “You can come up with a sweet widget. It might be great,” Own said, “but it really has to be rooted in what is going to be happening in the classroom. In the pedagogy. In the learning objectives.”

That problem tends to surface when entrepreneurs wait too long to get teacher input and feedback. And beta, Own said, is too late: “There need to be teachers involved from day one.”

Finding those teachers, though, is another matter. Reina, Woolley-Wilson and Own suggested contacting foundations that work with teachers, attending small, local education conferences, and soliciting help on Twitter and from LinkedIn’s ed-tech groups. Once startups make a connection, Own predicted, “Teachers will tell you all day long what they need.”

RISK IS A BIG OBSTACLE.

Startups fail. Startups “pivot” (the current euphemism for abandoning a product or a business model that isn’t working). Both are anathema to education institutions which may trust student data — and a student’s education — to consistent, reliable use of a product or service.

Then there’s the core matter of trusting that an entrepreneur’s educational solution will work.

Some support for entrepreneurs facing a skeptical school on the last point may come from a surprising source: foundations. Woolley-Wilson says she’s very hopeful about their role with educators: “What I think foundations can do is generate data that will help ‘de-risk’ a decision to try something new.”

Reina agreed, pointing out foundations have done a lot of good work on, for example, using games in learning. Having that kind of support, “changes the conversation with both educators and parents.” It’s a kind of research-based heavy lifting that foundations can do — which others can later review — that most startups cannot do for themselves.

[RELATED: What the Heck is a Teacherpreneur?]

Another way to reduce the risk of seeing if a product actually works is to adopt a “freemium” pricing model, in which some or all of the product can be used without charge. “The teachers need the opportunity to see it, to try it out and see if it’s worthwhile,” Own said.

There are other areas of disconnect, from entrepreneur assumptions that all districts — or schools in a district — have the same access to computers and Internet bandwidth (Own: “There’s no safe assumption (of what) even 50% of schools have”) to teacher expectations that good tech products will be completely free, forever (Reina: “You need to be able to get funding coming back to the people who are building the products so they can reinvest in the product”).

But overall, there’s hope the gap can be closed if K-12 educators and technology entrepreneurs listen to each other, often and early, and realize theirs is a symbiotic relationship. “The teacher is there to inspire kids and to help kids work together,” Reina said. “And do a lot of the things technology can’t do.”

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes a column for GeekWire. He moderated this MIT Enterprise Forum session, co-authored a companion paper, and really likes it when edtech proponents and teachers just get along.

Startup Weekend EDU San Francisco

Last weekend, at the Washington, DC Startup Weekend EDU, it was clear that teachers are starting to play a more important role in these intense entrepreneur-fests.

For those unfamiliar with Startup Weekend, here’s the general idea: entrepreneurs have 54 hours — from Friday night until Sunday afternoon — to pitch an idea, assemble a team, and build and demo a product. The pitch is judged on a number of factors, including whether it’s been vetted by the community, the strength of the business model, and, of course, whether the actual product works.

The good news for the education community is that the Startup Weekend enterprise has recently made the commitment to hold events specifically addressing education issues.

But what can you build in 54 hours, you might wonder? Turns out, a whole lot.

Since 2007, when the idea of these weekend-long events started, thousands of startups have been created, and least one-third of those are still working on their idea months after their individual Startup Weekend.

But the move to create a series of Startup Weekends focused solely on education comes with its own set of challenges. Chief among these: how do you make sure to include educators? After all, if the goal is to help launch new education startups or to foster education innovation, how can those who are integral to the process — those with the most extensive “domain expertise,” those who know both the problems and what the potential solutions might look like — feel welcome?

Watching Startup Weekend EDU develop over the course of the last few events, it’s clear that the organizers are working hard to make sure that educators are not just present (reaching out to various teacher list-serves, for example, to encourage participation) but that their voice there is really recognized. After the pitches on Friday nights, for example, the educators present received special “teacher approved” stickers during the voting process, and they were asked to say why they thought some ideas were particularly important, needed, or doable.

But there is still lots of work to be done to make this event really “work.” How do you bridge the cultural divides — perceived and real — between entrepreneurs and educators, between hackers and high school teachers? How do you convince educators, already overworked, to spend 54 hours over the course of a weekend working on building an education technology startup?

In some ways, the emphasis on “building a startup” might be the wrong thing to tout. There are viable ideas that come out of the weekend. (LessonCast, for example, a startup that was founded back at the first Startup Weekend EDU in San Francisco in June and that I covered back in July, is still going strong.) But the most valuable outcome of Startup Weekends aren’t just the products built or the startups launched. It’s the process itself.

And it is an intensive learning process. For many who participate, it’s their first hands-on experience in product pitching, product design, customer validation, and business model creation. It’s a hands-on learning experience in what it means to build a tech product and potentially a tech company. That might sound appealing to the entrepreneurs and engineers who participate, but for the classroom teacher (particularly one with no intention to leave the field to start a business), not so much.

But if you ask teachers, there actually is a reward. “It was the most incredible and immersive learning experience I have ever have,” said Sharon Grimes, from Baltimore County Schools.

Despite all the talk about implementing “project-based learning” in the classroom, much of educators’ own professional development still looks a lot like the sorts of teaching practices and experiences that are beginning to be eschewed in the classroom: lectures, the “sage on the stage,” no participation, little to no interactivity, no opportunity to identify a problem let alone work towards designing or implementing a solution. Participating in Startup Weekend, on the other hand, provides a project-based learning opportunity, one where teams must be coordinated through research, development, and marketing — something that educators may be incredibly well-suited to do here.

Some of the startups that were pitched last night at the end of the DC Startup Weekend EDU were clearly teacher-driven projects: a tool to translate student data into easy-to-read and actionable infographics for parents, an openly licensed bank of assessments created for teachers by teachers, an app to make the notion of “our global world” more engaging for students based on their own interests, a browser-based plug-in for language-learning.

Again, it’s the experience itself, not just the products that were built over the course of the last 54 hours — that’s what Startup Weekend EDU seems to be working towards. It isn’t simply launching startups; it’s building a network of educators, engineers, and entrepreneurs who’ve worked together and who are beginning to think through problem-solving and hands-on building in order to address needs in education.

Check out this quick overview video to get a sense of what these startup weekends are about.

http://youtu.be/jjgg63cGRLY