I have literally seen one future of education conferences. And I hope, for all of our sakes, it’s not the dystopia I’ve viewed through Zoom.
Three months ago, I had a busy schedule lined up through early summer. As a former education industry…

Who’s Zoomin’ Who? Remote Education Conference Woes and Wows

There is nothing like going through an interview process to help crystallize your thinking about the practice of a profession. Especially if you have to look at it through the lenses of eight different people.
Recently, I went through an intense day…

Unique, believable and true: Mantras for good marketing

In 1994, I got a call from an editor I knew at a Seattle-area newsweekly. Computers for personal use—and the companies that made them possible—were getting a lot of attention due to this newly accessible Internet. I'd been a full-time journalist and…

What I've learned from writing tech columns for 25 years

Common Sense is weighing in on kids’ use of media in a detailed new report this week. But the takeaways for educators and the edtech industry are most obvious in the sections on homework.
The report, “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and…

Common Sense Survey: Homework Gets More Digital for Teens and Tweens

A new museum exhibit celebrating Minecraft’s tenth anniversary doesn’t just highlight the block-building game’s role in education. The entire exhibition itself is, subtly, all about learning.
This month, the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle…

World-Premiere Exhibit Explains Minecraft to the Most Challenging Audience: Parents

CALL ME MAYBE: A common 21st-century adage has it that “email is for old people.” Yet it still may be the best way to consistently reach busy parents with routine teacher and school communications.
A new report from nonprofit Project Tomorrow—its…

Project Tomorrow Survey: In an App World, Email Still Reaches Parents

WIFI WOES: A new report released by Common Sense may give pause to companies that promote their digital products as a means to increase achievement for students in schools serving lower-income areas. Especially if those products are designed to be…

Common Sense Survey: Lower-income School May Mean Less Digital Homework

DO OR DIY: While self-published reports are usually self-serving, it’s hard to dismiss a new Pearson Global Learner Survey, conducted by The Harris Poll, that queried some 11,000 people ages 16-70 in 19 countries. It may also provide some insight as…

Pearson Survey: ‘Do It Yourself’ Education Becoming a Global Trend

About 1,200 adults in uniform went “Back to School” yesterday. No, not to their wooden desks, blue books and plastic seats. But to BMO’s annual education industry conference, where company executives, investors, bankers and financiers of all stripes…

‘Back to School’ Hijinks and Lessons for the Education Industry

ASU GSV. SIIA. SXSW EDU.
No, these are not scattered arrangements of alphabet blocks from an especially precocious early learning classroom. They’re abbreviations for major conferences for companies in the education industry.
I’ve been attending, and…

Should I Stay or Should I Go? An Opinionated Guide to Changing Edtech Industry Conferences

One overused catchphrase in education is that learning should be “student-centered.” But what if we took that to its logical conclusion and also made it the goal of our education technology predictions?
We’d need to consider not just what technology…

Analysis: Is Higher Ed Ready for the Tech Expectations of the Teens of 2022?

It was not the project that Mark Campbell had been dreaming about.
“It was actually Mason Bates, the composer, who suggested the idea of Steve Jobs as an opera,” recalled Campbell, a librettist whose earlier work received a Pulitzer Prize in Music.…

Turning Steve Jobs’ life into opera: Balancing man, myth and the technology that changed everything

Many people don’t have a clue how journalism works. Journalists may have less access to events and their newsmakers than the general public does. All this for a career with limited job options.
Those are the headlines from my recent temporary return…

Returning to journalism, 30 years later: Can the profession’s standards survive its disruption?

In my home, we’d rather run out of toilet paper than fresh coffee. The former can be replaced by facial tissue. But nothing adequately substitutes for the latter as a kickstart to our get-up-before-dawn day.
So when I heard of Bottomless’ solution to…

Hands-on with Bottomless coffee: Can the internet really keep refilling a caffeine addict’s endless cup?

A voice-activated microwave. A smart toilet. And a flamethrower … not. Those products represent a handful of the highlights for our Geared Up gadget geeks from 2018.
On this year-end episode of our consumer electronics podcast, we look back at some…

Geared Up: Alexa from end to end, a hot-selling Elon Musk keepsake, and more crazy moments of 2018

T-Mobile CEO John Legere is outlining how he sees 2019. It’s a vision of 5G, taking on cable and satellite TV, and continued jabs at the company’s mobile competitors — plus optimism about the planned merger with Sprint.
In a blog post Thursday…

John Legere all but confirms T-Mobile TV’s launch will be delayed to 2019, and promises ‘real, live’ 5G

First: It’s not just about digitizing books.
That’s the biggest misconception that the public has about the role of digital technology in libraries, according to the chief digital officer of what is arguably the world’s largest public library.
New…

Interview: NYPL’s chief digital officer says public is better off when libraries are ‘risk averse’ about tech

If you bought an Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote, or Echo as a gift — or received one — you’re not alone. Amazon says those are among its best-selling Amazon devices this holiday season, a season in which it now says customers…

Amazon reports ‘record-breaking’ holiday season with its own devices selling ‘millions more’

Is Amazon a sleeping giant of education technology? Or one of its biggest, underreported failures?
Those are questions to which answers have varied, especially in 2018. But now it seems the answer is definitely yes. To both.
As someone who lives in…

Analysis: Microsoft, Google, Apple — why is Amazon the lagging tech giant in the classroom?

People in Seattle and the other cities or unincorporated areas of King County, Wash. now can text emergency responders for help, in addition to calling.
On Thursday, King County announced that all of the county’s 9-1-1 call centers are able to accept…