All posts by Léa Peersman Pujol

University, reinvented.

Best in their fields faculty, online seminars limited to 20 students, opened to the world, a fast-track towards your career, an incredible life experience, tools to enhance your learning abilities, merit based admission guaranteeing a high quality student body, an accessible tuition of 10000$/year, … A very innovative 4 year undergrad model or maybe just finally what university is supposed to be.

« Achieving extraordinary » that’s what the Minerva project is about.

Minerva schools allied with the Keck Graduate Institute to create these four alternative curriculum in Arts and Humanities, Computational Sciences, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. They all prepare student for global leadership and innovation. Every piece of the program enhances critical thinking, creative problem solving, and clear communication.

Minerva is about to revolutionize higher education, and you will want to be a part of it. Find out how!

https://minerva.kgi.edu/

Who said college was the only path for success? parents? society? Maybe not your bank account…

Well before making such an important investment and deciding what to do with your life, you could give yourself a chance. Yes, Uncollege will offer you an opportunity but not a break. Discover their amazing program for your gap year.

If you are lucky you will get one of the 15 available spots and embark on a one year journey which will first take you to San Francisco where you will meet your classmates, the team and your mentor. Over these first 10 weeks you will learn about all the soft skills you need to make all your future learnings a success. You will leave with the group in a fantastic house and really focus on finding what interests you and what drives you. After that, you will depart for a trip abroad – you will be able to either get an internship or just experience the world. Of course this journey will be planed and anticipated for you to make the most of it as a key experience in your learning path. Next you will come back to SF to work on your project and build your portfolio. You will receive all the help you need to build this 21st century resume and really be able to identify what you next steps will be.

Uncollege offers its students an amazing opportunity to find yourself and deploy your potential. You get the time to reflect while being very active and productively planing your future. For all the non-US readers, rest assured because the team is soon opening uncolleges in Sao Paulo, Stockolm, Vancouver, Cape Town, and who know, maybe you want to start one in your city?!

Uncollege is the experience we should all have the right to have!

http://www.uncollege.org/

Entrepreneurs wanting to launch their startup have many options for co-working, incubation and acceleration… As long as they can prove their potential! But sometimes, entrepreneurs really want to focus on one specific industry such as EdTech and then they need the adequate targeted support to improve their products and network. Well, that is also more and more possible now. We already mentioned the Imagine K12 program on this blog and here is another great place for startups working on games for learning.

As they rightfully put it: « co.lab is an accelerator that works with startups leveraging the power of digital games to build transformative educational technologies for PK-12 students and teachers.  » Their program is designed to add value to early stage edtech companies while generating knowledge that will help designers, educators, researchers and funders better understand challenges and opportunities related to developing high quality learning games and applications.

Do you have what it takes to play?!

http://playcolab.com/

On a beautiful Californian day I was lucky to meet Mike, a producer at Glasslab

Located in Zynga’s offices – really cool ones – the new company blends very high quality learning with gaming and aims at making money out of this process. Seems that nothing impossible in the Silicon Valley…

At first I doubted. I am used to meaningless games (I apologize here to my little brother) and even though if I am highly convinced by the fact that games can help people to learn, the part when gamers actually manage to create qualitative online pedagogical experiences wasn’t so clear to me.

I am glad Mike proved me wrong! Thanks to the Gates and McArthur foundations, GlassLab has been working on creating innovative games that allow them to both develop the skills their users need in the 21st century and to collect meaningful data about them to help then pursue their learning experience after the game with other types of material. GlassLab doesn’t only focus on the games but they also create the infrastructure to use the games within the classroom. They base all their work on research, they make sure bast practices are shared among educators and work to improve the assessment part. Their next step is to train and empower the teachers to use the games in the classroom and to improve their products based on their on-going feedback.

More than games, GlassLab is developing dynamic adaptive learning tools and they are smart enough to include human nature in the process. Let’s play!

http://glasslabgames.org/

Strive together is a movement empowering communities to make sure the needs of every child are met until he reaches the job market. The organization works with communities to set up a frame for targeted actions and are innovative in addressing not only organizations and individuals but communities as a whole.

Change needs to be systemic to be meaningful. An interesting model to look at.

http://www.strivetogether.org/

Irene impressed me by only looking at her resume. And then, I met her. A very talented, brilliant young woman with a strong experience in education and business. I couldn’t believe it when she told me that she was interested in failure!

Because she failed. As we all do.

But she succeeded as well. She co-founded Beam, a startup enabling schools and even teachers alone to fundraise for their classroom. The platform enabled many many children to be able to work on great artistic projects, to go on a field trip, to get access to an enriched learning experience. From a crowd-funding model Irene built a powerful tool for change in the educational sector in China.

She had to leave Beam because the team wasn’t functioning well. She reflected a lot on that experience and has been writing about it. A blog that will most certainly become a project of its own helping people better deal with failure and realize that resilience is a key condition to our happiness.

Because we all fail, and we all should learn how do better deal with it – looking forward to your next potential failure Irene!

http://ireneshao.tumblr.com/post/93152841636/be-extraordinary

I first read about Knack in a British newspaper and instantly got intrigued by this startup playing with personal educational data to improve recruitment and talent management.

Knack is based in NYC and the Silicon Valley, its teams assembles experts in gaming, design, neurosciences and business – a killing cocktail to help individuals and organizations better address skills’s gaps and life long learning.

Knack creates games that help you know better what your profile is and what skills you need to develop in order to get your dream job. A game makes us all equals and guarantees all potentials shine. Do you care about people? Are you well organized? Do you plan ahead? All this can be assessed through playing online or on their new mobile app. It’s fun, it’s quick and you can manage your results to identify the best next steps for you in terms of learning and for your career.

Big companies are already using Knack to recruit and identify high potential employees, to build better teams and to enhance their employee’s potential by better targeting the skills they need to improve.

Knack is serving the world at large: adding value to businesses and advocating for equality in job access.

Impressive and only a beginning!

https://www.knack.it/

Startup Weekends are now very famous all around the world. In a weekend you join an exciting and excited crowd of people, you share your skills and knowledge to build a project addressing a specific issue, you ideate, create a prototype, eat lots of pizza, and don’t get enough sleep.

Startup weekends are a playground for brains. The team realized that many participants were actually interested in launching projects dealing with education and therefore created a specific platform.

Startup Edu is now based in SF and works with teams from all over the world to facilitate the organizations of startup weekends around education. They share all the pragmatic tools about how to organize a weekend, how to communicate about it, how to secure funding and partnerships, how to make it successful.

So if you are passionate about changing the world using education and want to meet like minded people to start moving things forward, connect with this fantastic network and make it happen!

http://sfedu.startupweekend.org/

Technology can be of great service to teachers when built, implemented and used smartly; and that is exactly what this young exciting startup is doing.

SmarterCookie works with more and more schools in the US to create specific platforms for their teachers to be able to share best practices through video. You want to get feedback from your colleagues, you wish to improve the way you teach, you need advice on how to handle this class, all these issues can now be solved thanks to a very simple and dynamic tool. You film your classroom and post it on a secured platform for your educational community to see and give you constructive feedback. You will never be alone anymore and you will contribute to improving your school’s culture.

Peer to peer is now available to teachers because at Smarter Cookie they know how good you are and how great you can be!

A very promising startup…

https://www.beasmartercookie.com/

Need to start up?!

Here is one place to be:

- up front for key knowledge about the industry

- up for community amazing events and cool gatherings

- up to leave your mark

- up all night and day

PariSoma is an open incubator and co-working place in SF that will welcome you in it’s unique design and international atmosphere. Join the buzzing crowd and benefit from FaberNovel’s backing.

http://www.parisoma.com/