Alex's blog

"Hacking Education" Event Featured in TIME Cover Story

Submitted by Alex on Sat, 06/06/2009 - 11:13

A few months ago, I attended (and blogged about) “Hacking Education,” a full-day discussion organized by Union Square Ventures.  As I mentioned in the blog post, one of the most interesting components of the event was the large Twitter projection at the back of the room; it was a place for people inside and outside the room to participate in the conversation.

During the event, I sat next to Steven Johnson, a thoughtful entrepreneur and author who has written six books, including Everything Bad is Good For You and The Invention of Air.  He has just written a Time cover story on the power of Twitter and discusses the event in detail.

It’s definitely worth the read.

 

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BetterLesson Teaches Graduate Class at Stanford University

Submitted by Alex on Thu, 04/16/2009 - 10:08

 

This past Thursday, I had the pleasure of delivering a lecture to the “No Teacher Left Behind” class at the Stanford D. School.   I hadn’t planned or delivered a lesson in over nine months, so it was exciting to be back in front of a classroom (with substantially older students). 
 
The class began with a discussion of the difficulties that K-12 teachers currently encounter trying to collaborate within and across instructional communities. We then transitioned into a dialogue about BetterLesson’s technical platform and the iterative journey that it has taken over the past year.   The students asked tough questions and provided great feedback that will inform future interface decisions.
 
Alex Grodd teaching class at Stanford University on behalf of betterlesson.
 
As you can (almost) see in the picture above, this was also an opportunity to use BetterLesson to structure my lecture notes and aggregate all of my instructional resources in one place. One of the cool, unintended consequences of this process is that BetterLesson has turned out to be a great way for teachers to actually deliver instruction to their students. It was exciting to put this into practice.
 
A few hours after the class ended, I received the following email from a Teach For America alum and Stanford PhD student:
 
“Thanks so much for coming to No Teacher Left Behind at Stanford today! I loved hearing about BetterLesson and really believe this is hands down the best online teacher sharing/networking site I've seen.  And I have looked at a lot of them, because as I mentioned in class, this is a start-up idea that I have bounced around as well.  I'd love to get involved any way I can and help you spread the word about BetterLesson.”

 

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BetterLesson Hacks Education

Submitted by Alex on Mon, 03/09/2009 - 16:56

 

“A hack solves a problem in a way that breaks some established and widely accepted rule or conventional wisdom.” --Union Square Ventures wiki, March 2009
 
This past Friday I had the pleasure of attending Union Square Venture’s “Hacking Education” event where a distinguished panel of attendees met to discuss how to use the web to reinvent teaching and learning in the United States and abroad. 
 
 
The discussion began with opening remarks from author Sir Ken Robinson, who summarized the central tenets of his provocative TED lecture, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” The panel then opened up into a series of engaging discussions on how to harness the transformative power of the internet to hack at education from inside and out. Some highlights:
 
- Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, proposed that students should have their own “Google 20% Time” during which they could explore any intellectual topic of their choosing (a potentially nice way to rebrand ‘elective’ periods).
 
- Activist and scholar Danah Boyd made the case for employing social networking tools to scale high-quality instructional content and best practices; I responded by presenting BetterLesson’s unique plan to achieve this vision.
 
- The New School president Bob Kerrey provided everyone with a history of 20th-Century education policy.
 
- Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, emphasized the importance of giving students more control over their education: “That's what the web does. It transfers control from institutions to individuals and it’s going to do that to education too.”
 
Throughout the conversation, participants also contributed thoughts and ideas on a large Twitter projection at the back of the room. This offered a fitting backdrop for rigorous debate and a great way for people outside the room to participate in the conversation.

 

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Roxbury Prep 6th Grade Curriculum on BetterLesson

Submitted by Alex on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 11:57

Sixth grade teachers at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, one of the highest performing urban middle schools in Massachusetts, have uploaded their curricula to BetterLesson.

Chris Cullen, a 6th grade Science teacher at Roxbury Prep, summarizes his motivation: "At Roxbury Prep, we write all of our curricula from scratch.  Until now, we've had no way to share our hard work with other teachers across the country.  BetterLesson provides us with a quick and easy way to 'open source' our instructional content and make a real impact beyond our hallways."
 
Roxbury Prep 6th grade Social Studies teacher, Greg Woodward, adds, "BL is a great place to organize my curricula and I've already found a number of really helpful lessons and files that I've used with my class.  It's been great to consistently check out new instructional perspectives and techniques."
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Welcome to the BetterLesson Blog

Submitted by Alex on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 14:44

 

A year ago, a group of Roxbury Prep colleagues and I had an idea for a different kind of teacher website:
 
There would be no red apples.  There would be no chalk or crayons or little yellow school buses. The site would not belittle or demean the craft of teaching but, instead, would respect its seriousness.  It would be focused on making teachers' lives easier, focused on making teachers feel less isolated and overwhelmed, focused on creating the right suite of features and incentives to encourage educators to share the highest-quality content, best practices, and ideas.
 
Over the past year, it's been incredibly exciting to watch this idea evolve from sketches in a composition notebook, to Photoshop mock-ups, to a living, breathing beta-site with over a hundred active users and 2,000 user-generated instructional files.  It's been incredibly rewarding (and cathartic) to upload all of the lessons and files that had been wasting away on my desktop and begin sharing them with teachers across the country. 
 
Thank you so much to all of the educators who have helped bring this idea to life in 2008.  We're going to build on this momentum by aggressively adding new features, schools, and communities in 2009.
 

- Alex Grodd, Founder and CEO of BetterLesson.org

 

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