Anthony Kim is the CEO of Education Elements Inc., a California-based for-profit technology company that helps schools shop for and use educational software. He’s a behind-the-scenes leader in the blended-learning movement, where students learn from both computers and teachers. Before founding Education Elements at the end of 2010, Kim started the online virtual school, Provost Systems, which he [...]

Many parents pacify their children with a computer game while getting dressed, taking a phone call or riding the bus. But I would have guessed they’d feel guilty about it. A new study, released on April 17th by the Ruckus Media Group at the Sandbox Summit at MIT, found quite the opposite. In a survey [...]

A computer voice guides 12-year-old Amir Accoo to spell the words he hears through his headphones: emergency, bulldozer,  minutes. Accoo spells “minutes” wrong and is asked to try that one again, several times. Later, he clicks on a proofreading button. “You check what you have wrong out of the spelling words I just did,” Accoo [...]

“I do believe we can teach a child to read for less than a dollar.” So said Shane Hill at the SXSW education-technology conference in Austin, Texas. But how? The Australian-born Hill created Mathletics, a popular math video game. After he sold that company in 2008, he attempted to build a nonprofit social venture to [...]

Here at SXSW’s Ed Tech Conference, there’s a lot of talk about using video games as instructional devices. After all, video games are fun, absorbing and motivating. Why shouldn’t school be the same? I went to a panel session led by Anthony Salcito of Microsoft, which is experimenting with how to deploy its Xbox game [...]

How tough is it for a math teacher to know if his or her students understand basic math? Tougher than you think, according Marilyn Burns, a veteran math educator and founder of Math Solutions, a unit of Scholastic Inc. She found that an alarming number of middle-school students couldn’t subtract 998 from 1000 in their [...]

CHICAGO—Imagine walking into a public library filled with PlayStations, Wii game consoles and electric keyboards pumped up to maximum volume. Teenagers are munching on snacks, checking out laptops and slouching on sofas or beanbags. A carousel of computers sits in the middle, navigated to Facebook. That’s exactly how one enormous room on the ground floor [...]

Psychologist Larry Rosen laments the fact that technology is driving us all to distraction. This past weekend, he spoke at a Hechinger Institute seminar for education reporters, which focused on how digital media are transforming teaching and learning in U.S. schools. The seminar, held in Chicago, was made possible by support from the John D. and [...]

How do advocates of digital learning know that students learn better via computers than more traditional methods? Katie Salen is tired of hearing people say, ‘Prove to us that technology works before we buy it.’ She says waiting for irrefutable proof is the wrong approach. Salen—a professor in DePaul University’s School of Computing and Digital [...]

LOS ANGELES — First-grader Lena Barrett clicks through a series of icons and logs onto a laptop under the fluorescent lights of her classroom. Before long, a cartoon version of a game-show announcer appears. “It’s time to show what you know by finding words,” the announcer says. “In this game, you will click on words [...]

Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise co-chairs the Digital Learning Council with Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida. This council aims to promote the adoption of high-quality digital content and instruction throughout the nation’s public schools. Wise is also president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, an organization devoted to high-school reform, and chair [...]