education

Summertime conjures visions of endless outdoor activities, but what protects a kid's brain from melting in the day's heat? JumpStart World, 2nd Grade (there's also a kindergarten version) is one of CNET Download.com's many educational software programs to keep students' brains sharp over vacation.

From the beginning, JumpStart World reminds me of a Second Life for second graders--the download and installation are lengthy, and slurp up quite a bit of memory. Users begin by registering, choosing an avatar, and entering an interactive 3D world replete with an orienting tutorial. The main difference is that kids go on "hero" missions at their virtual summer camp, earning shields and gems--the in-game currency--for following instructions, doing good deeds, and mastering fun games.… Read more

Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin said Monday it signed a pact with Microsoft to develop a new digital education system for school districts. Under the deal, Houghton Mifflin will build its learning system with Microsoft technology, including the.Net framework 3.0 and its latest SharePoint servers.

In 2001, Houghton Mifflin, an American institution in education publishing, bought instructional technology from IBM. That technology became what it called Learning Village, a system for school administrators and teachers to access curriculum, among other features. Now used by 45,000 schools in roughly 30 countries, the software is due for an update, according … Read more

Type the word "education" into Google and the search engine will spit up 690 million results, with top links to a U.S. government site, Wikipedia, the New York Times and Apple Computer.

For PTA types, that much information could be a curse. That's why a Silicon Valley upstart aims to cater to time-pressed parents with a new reference Web site that's all about child-age schooling.

The site, called Education.com, launched in beta Thursday. According to CEO Ron Fortune, the site is designed to be "the WebMD of education" for parents and teachers … Read more

Amazon.com's BookSurge subsidiary announced Thursday that it has partnered with book digitization company Kirtas Technologies on a project to archive and distribute hard-to-find books. This new initiative involves collaboration with public and university libraries to provide their collections of "rare and inaccessible" books; the titles will be digitized through Kirtas and then reproductions will be sold through Amazon through the BookSurge print-on-demand service.

In return, the partner libraries--initially consisting of Emory University, University of Maine, and the public libraries in Toronto, Ont. and Cincinnati, Ohio--will receive a cut of the revenue to fund further book preservation … Read more

A home-schooled girl named Caitlin Snaring this week became the second girl to win a National Geographic Bee competition, making her the most recent winner in a string of contests dominated by children who were educated outside government-run schools.

Educating kids at home has become easier and more affordable through advances in technology, including distance learning and the Internet. That's led to ideas like the Laurel Springs School, which offers an online program with one-on-one interaction with teachers. (Estimates place the number of home-schooled kids at around 1.1 million 2003, which would be 2.2 percent of the … Read more

Half Moon Bay, Calif.--A novel trend emerged at the Think Tomorrow Today conference here this week: educational investing.

Not as in "the government must invest more in education." Instead, a number of companies that specialize in managing schools or creating curriculum have begun to crop up on the in radar screen. And some are growing fast.

Mosaica Education, for instance, is expected to hit revenues of $120 million this year, according to CEO Michael Connelly, up from $65 million in 2003. Mosaica runs charter schools in many inner cities in the U.S. as well as in … Read more

This afternoon, I went over to NYC's Cooper Union to sit in on the final project presentations for the Web 2.0 Paradigms class, a hands-on course in the school's electrical engineering department taught by adjunct professor Sanford Dickert. In this course, the students--who were required to have software development experience--created their own Web applications from start to (very beta) launch, with a focus on the end user experience and what kinds of consumers would use such a service.

Here's Webware's recap of the four products that were demonstrated--a fifth team had been working on developing … Read more

Thursday's briefing by Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child initiative seems to have meant different things to different folks.

The Associated Press led with the rising price of the laptop, designed for school-age tots in developing nations ("'$100 laptop' to cost $175"), while the Reuters news agency focused on the potential for use closer to home ("U.S. schools may join inexpensive laptop project"). And The Boston Globe, for which the just-across-the-Charles-River OLPC is in part a local business story, got caught up with the laptop's sense of fun, style and mission (&… Read more

We came across Merriam-Webster's MWD-480 as part of TechEBlog's feature on must-have gadgets for college kids. It's an electronic dictionary that doubles as an MP3 player. Just think: now you can look up antidisestablishmentarianism while listening to Slayer.

The MWD-480 has 274,000 definitions in its database. A phonetic spell correction feature allows you to enter words the way they sound and get alternatives for misspellings--type in "nolige," for example, and see "knowledge." Another function, called Confusables, alerts you when one word might be mistaken for another (their vs. there)--thus letting you … Read more