For those of you who listen frequently, you might be a little confused since normally, we put out only one episode of the EdSurge On Air podcast each week. But this week is special, because we’re coming to you live from the ISTE 2017 edtech conference in San Antonio Texas, where more than 21,000 educators, entrepreneurs and administrators have gathered to share the best in edtech practices and tools. To kick off the festivities, ISTE brought in Jad Abumrad to deliver the conference’s opening keynote. Jad’s got quite a set of accolades: He’s a radio host, a composer, a producer… the list goes on. He’s probably most famous for being a founder and cohost of the syndicated public radio program Radiolab. And when we heard that he would be going to ISTE, my EdSurge colleague Jen Curtis immediately got on the phone to arrange an interview with him. In a moment, you’ll hear Jen’s exclusive interview with Jad minutes before his ISTE keynote. What are his thoughts about the power of podcasts and storytelling in the classroom? Are the liberal arts still relevant in higher education? What does it mean to be a well-rounded student? You’ll hear his answers to those questions and more.

In today’s day and age, Google, Twitter and Pinterest are three of the largest employers in the United States and internationally. But are students gaining the skills that one might need to eventually apply to one of those tech giants, if the students chose to do so? In fact, in the year 2017, what hard and soft skills should students be developing in order to succeed in the 21st century workplace? What about in the year 2020? 2050? Let’s stick with the “now,” for a moment. In a recent interview, EdSurge explored which skill sets lead to career success for students—but we didn’t talk to anyone in K-12 or higher education. In fact, we interviewed three individuals—Alexandrea Alphonso, Ryan Greenberg, and Trisha Quan—representing those aforementioned tech companies. While the thoughts and feelings of each of the folks we interviewed do not represent the opinions of their employers, each of these technology leaders offered their thoughts in this exclusive Q&A on equity and access, areas that formal education didn’t prepare them for, and their advice for teachers working to prepare students for an ever-changing workplace.

Don’t even think of lecturing to these college students. The 14 students who just finished up the spring session of EdSurge Independent want something more active, and they want to have a voice as colleges rethink how they teach and support people on their campuses. EdSurge sat down with three of these students--Amanda Wahlstedt, Jared Silver and Rosie Foulger--to talk about how they viewed the buzzwords and experiments happening at their campuses, and also to get a sense of what they saw as the problems with education that need to be solved.

From Apple, Google and Microsoft battling to take over the classroom, to random acts in both K-12 and higher education compromising the private information of millions of vulnerable students, 2017 has been no short of edtech news. But when it comes to the biggest stories of the year thus far, what are the writers themselves—education reporters—reading and thinking about? While at the Education Writers Association conference on May 31 to June 2 in Washington, D.C., EdSurge reporter Jenny Abamu spoke with a group of reporters focused on the education technology beat—Benjamin Herold of Education Week, Nichole Dobo of The Hechinger Report, and Goldie Blumenstyk from The Chronicle of Higher Education—to hear their thoughts on the biggest education technology stories of the year, what they’re working on right now, and whether the federal government is helping—or hurting—the integration of edtech nationwide.

Sara Goldrick-Rab's latest book is based on six years of studying how students struggle with paying for college. She argues that recent experiments in having students sign "income-share agreements," or ISAs, is part of a broader effort to drain public resources from higher education.

There are few individuals out there who can list both “two-time TED speaker” and “doctoral student at Harvard University” on their resume. Clint Smith is one of those people—though when you ask him about his work, he doesn’t immediately voice those accolades. Rather, he talks about his writings, and the time he’s spent teaching poetry to incarcerated men in Massachusetts. There’s also something else he brings up—his beliefs, specifically his concerns that educators across the U.S. aren’t adequately teaching about the history of inequality and how it has come to manifest itself in this country. Smith is not one for silence (he delivered a TED talk about the “danger of silence” in 2014, in fact) and has used digital venues including Twitter to encourage others to speak up and recognize how history shapes the present. But what are Smith’s thoughts about the role that technology plays in the ways that students navigate the world, online and offline? And when it comes to Twitter, are users merely 'preaching to the choir,” or is it truly an effective medium for changing minds? EdSurge had the opportunity to speak with Smith this week on the EdSurge On Air podcast to get his thoughts.

There are many unanswered questions about the unprecedented sale of Kaplan University, a for-profit institution with several online programs but falling enrollments, to Purdue University, one of the top public universities in the nation. To try to get some answers, EdSurge recently sat down with Donald Graham, chairman of Graham Holdings Company, the group that sold the 15-campus Kaplan University to Purdue (for just $1). (Editor’s note, Graham Holdings is an investor in EdSurge.) A look at some details of the deal revealed in an SEC filing suggest that Graham Holdings bears the bulk of the financial risk, and as one analyst notes, is potentially leaving money on the table. It hands off much of Kaplan University to Purdue in exchange for essentially a long-term business contract for Kaplan, Inc. (which remains in Graham Holdings). Under the agreement, Kaplan will provide technology, marketing, and other support services for the new campus of Purdue that will be formed from the former for-profit. And Purdue has the option of canceling that deal after six years (through a “buy-out”) if it feels that Kaplan’s services aren’t working out. Graham, a former publisher of The Washington Post, knows how to skirt a journalist’s question, and even after half an hour of talking, I’m not sure he fully revealed the reasons for the sale. The reason he sold appears to boil down to his belief in the quality of Kaplan University (he even co-teaches a course for its business school) and his hope that making it part of Purdue will elevate its reputation and success in ways it could never achieve as a for-profit university.

“Personalized learning” is a term that is no stranger to interpretation—even to the point that writers have started to argue about whether it’s worth defining or not (just check out here and here.) But no matter how a school or district defines it, is it worth including technology in that definition—or does edtech merely distract educators from understanding and delivering on what students really need? In early March, three education research experts—Eileen Rudden of Boston’s LearnLaunch, Chris Liang-Vergara of Chicago’s LEAP Innovations, and Muhammed Chaudhry of the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley Education Foundation—joined EdSurge on a panel to discuss the very answer to this muddy and oftentimes challenging question. Check it out on this edition of the EdSurge podcast!

Before the “LMS” became an acronym and a hotly contested market of its own, Martin Dougiamas was writing code to share his “object oriented dynamic learning environment” across the web. That project would go on to become Moodle, one of the most widely-used learning management system across the world today. Just don’t let Dougiamas catch you calling his pet project of the past two decades an LMS. Those three letters make him wince—just a bit. “I prefer to say learning platform,” he says in this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast. “Sometimes we call it an LMS maker,” he adds. Moodle’s “flexible modularity” allows anyone to “build the perfect LMS.”

McComb School District down in McComb, Mississippi doesn’t just believe in the power of technology when it comes to personalized learning. In fact, for superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis and Summit Elementary School principal Lakya Taylor-Washington, the bigger asset in going personalized comes down to removing arbitrary grade level assignments and creating “learning labs,” a style of competency-based learning that Summit has been experimenting with since 2015. At Summit, “scholars” are grouped by readiness and performance—not by traditional grade levels—and indicate evidence of mastery by completing projects at their own pace. In theory, the rollout and success of this instructional approach sounds feasible, but oftentimes, it’s the adults who explain how the program works—without the opinions or inputs of students. How about Summit students adjusting to the change? What do they like? What do they wish was different? In order to hear exactly how different stakeholders feel about this competency-based system, EdSurge brought two Summit students, Kianna and Patricia, together with Ellis and Taylor-Washington to ask the question: “Do students, principals and superintendents all see eye-to-eye on saying goodbye to grade levels?”

A for-profit startup recently launched what it calls an alternative to traditional college, that takes only one year to complete, is advised closely by big-name employers, and that costs nothing at first, though students have to later pay back a portion of their incomes. What’s missing are the general-education curriculum. It’s called MissionU, and the reaction has been mixed, and passionate. Some academics have trashed it as a kind of employment service passing itself off as education. While others have praised it for trying to shake up the higher education system. For this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast, we decided to try something different. We put together a virtual panel discussion, inviting people with a variety of views on MissionU to face off—including its founder, and a critic. Our hope was to start a dialogue and get beyond misperceptions on both sides. That means that the episode is a bit longer than usual, but it gets pretty lively, and we hope you’ll listen through to the end.

“Flexible.” It’s a word that often pops up in conversations about redesigning learning environments, relating to choices in furniture or movable walls. But according to Danish Kurani, redesigning 21st century classrooms goes much deeper than merely achieving flexibility—it involves going all the way back to considering Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Kurani is a licensed architect who focuses his work on learning spaces, and currently teaches a “Learning Environments for Tomorrow” course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education every year. Having worked on locations ranging from Denver’s Columbine Elementary to SELNY, a psychotherapy clinic and adult learning center in New York, Kurani has seen and used a variety of tactics to implement learning design in pursuit of specific goals. This week, EdSurge sat down with him to hear about the most common design constraints, architecture gone wrong, and the work his firm recently conducted on the Code Next Lab in Oakland.

Southern New Hampshire University is known as a place trying new things, and one thing they hope to do is create a culture of change on campus. To do that, they've created a sandbox--an innovation lab called the Sandbox Collaborative. We sat down with the executive director of the sandbox, Michelle Weise, to get a tour of this unusual lab and hear why she thinks colleges need to change.

A few weeks back, EdSurge traveled to SXSWedu to hear talks about technology and chat with educators and entrepreneurs. But while there, we met someone who spoke about how edtech could better serve students with learning differences in a manner we’d never heard before. In fact, that individual, Ben Gurewitz, is a student with learning differences himself. Gurewitz is a Bay Area native and currently a freshman at the University of California, Davis—but that represents only a small fraction of how he spends his time. As cofounder of the Diverse Learners Coalition and an active participant in Student Voice, Gurewitz seeks to use his own experiences with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and slow processing disorder as a platform to create change both inside education organizations and amongst the greater populations. Gurewitz came to the EdSurge offices in Burlingame, California to speak about his own learning experiences in K-12, where the education system is failing to reach students, and whether or not technology is the most important component of serving all students.

Students at the University of Central Florida are busy, and it’s not always with classes. They have sports to play, student organizations to run, even parties to go to. So to keep class schedules as flexible as possible, and to offer more sections without putting up new buildings, UCF leaders have turned to offering more online courses for students on campus. But are those students missing out? On this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast, we talked to Dale Whittaker, provost and executive vice president at the University of Central Florida. He’s currently leading another evolution in online teaching, as the institution moves into adaptive learning. They hope that the future of campus learning is for students teaming up to teach each other as they work through online exercises in campus coffee shops.

It’s pretty clear that very few people in education enjoy those typical sit-and-get professional development sessions. And when blended learning gets thrown into the mix, the situation gets even more complicated—what happens when educators seem afraid of products? Who should deliver PD, the administrators or the teachers? Talk to administrators, and they have some answers to these questions—as well as thoughts about what parts of PD should be left far, far behind. At the EdSurge Tech for Schools Summit in Riverside, EdSurge’s own Michelle Spencer led a panel with Steve Kong (instructional services specialist for Riverside Unified School District), Stepan Mekhitarian (blended learning coordinator for Local District Northwest in Los Angeles USD), Brad Hellickson (student advisor for online learning in Corona Norco Unified) and Michelle Clavijo-Diaz (Global Education Solutions Product Line Manager, HP Inc.) to get their thoughts.

Cal State Channel Islands offers a two-week online training course for professors at the university called Humanizing Online Learning, with tips and strategies for forging personal connections with remote students. The course's creator and instructor, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, and the university's vice president for technology and innovation, Michael Berman, talk about the effort, and about how online education can involve a surprising amount of passion—and even some tears.

Jacob Allen was the first-ever youth president for the NAACP in Wisconsin and a Teach for America corps member in Chicago. But it wasn’t either of those roles that landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list this past January. Rather, it was his efforts to bring an important topic back into K-12 schools—the idea of a student’s self-identity. In 2013, Allen and his cofounder Marie Dandie created pilotED Schools, an afterschool program that has a three-tiered curriculum, specifically focusing on developing students in the realms of academic success, civic engagement and social identity. Over the last few years, pilotED has worked with more than 100 school students and families on Chicago’s South and West Sides. But pilotED isn’t just about helping existing schools anymore. Allen and Dandie will soon be launching the first pilotED brick-and-mortar school—a daunting but unique opportunity. EdSurge sat down with Allen last week to discover how his new school model is tackling themes of trauma and citizenship in the classroom—the stuff that can really impact students’ academic success.

An unusual coding school called 42 opened a campus just outside of Silicon Valley last year. It's free -- for those who pass a month-long coding challenge -- and it focuses on peer-to-peer learning, meaning there are no professors. Brittany Bir, chief operating officer of 42 USA, explains how it works, and whether there are any lessons for traditional educational institutions.

In Tennessee, the education system made headlines a few years back when the state announced the “Tennessee Promise”—an initiative granting thousands of high school students the opportunity to attend two years of free community college. After Governor Bill Haslam announced the scholarship program amongst a flurry of news, students immediately began applying to receive funds to put towards tuition at one of the state’s 13 community colleges, 27 colleges of applied technology, or other eligible institutions offering an associate’s degree program. (And now, adults can get in on the action, too.) But in order for the program to succeed, it wasn’t just about the community and technical colleges agreeing to be a part of the plan. School districts across the state began to see themselves as an integral piece of the equation. And one district in particular, the Putnam County School System in Cookeville, decided to push student ownership over higher education learning even further—with an extensive, dual enrollment college credit program for high schoolers. Sam Brooks, Personal Learning Coordinator for the district, sat down with EdSurge this week to discuss the program, how his team has translated it into even lower levels (think middle school), and what he recommends other schools and districts can do to make their students more college and career-ready.

As more colleges dive deeper into their own completion and retention data, they don't always like what they see. Karen Stout, president of Achieving the Dream, talks about how community colleges can face their own internal report cards, and take action.

A few years back, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) found itself in the news for the rollout of iPads districtwide, which some ilsteners out there might remember. Since then, what’s going on with technology in Southern California’s biggest public school district? Well, in one region—the local Northwest sector of the district—administrators, schools and teachers have been busy expanding efforts for blended learning implementation in collaboration with Stepan Mekhitarian. Mekhitarian is currently the Blended Learning Coordinator for that LAUSD sector, but that’s not the only education role on his resume. He’s been a math teacher, an administrator and conducted a doctoral research study on the skills and training needed to implement blended learning effectively and as such, he’s got advice for district admins on how to connect with all of those respective groups. Mekhitarian is the first to admit that it can be challenging for administrators to lead blended learning initiatives when they themselves don’t have classroom experience or haven’t use blended tools before. But there’s hope, he adds. EdSurge caught up with Mekhitarian to hear about his best practices for leading edtech professional development and what advice he has for schools new to blended learning.

Last year, the U. of Michigan launched a major campus-wide effort to encourage a culture of continual improvement in teaching. The university's president, Mark Schlissel, explains why, and weighs in on the MOOC craze, fake news, and the value of higher education.

This week, we take you to Auckland. A few months back, our own Betsy Corcoran traveled to New Zealand, where she sat down with Pete Hall. Right now, Pete is the newest principal of the Taupaki School, but he also has a background in entrepreneurship and teaching. Back during this interview, he served as the Educator Engagement Lead for Network for Learning (N4L), and principal at Upper Harbour Primary School. Betsy spoke with Pete about New Zealand’s schools, and discovered a few unique facts--including the reality that standards aren’t the be-all, end-all of schooling in New Zealand. In fact, the schools place a huge emphasis on bringing the community into the running of programs like makerspaces, and offer students a sense of autonomy that you don’t always see in standards-obsessed systems. What can the U.S. borrow from New Zealand's schooling system?

Donald Trump is about to take office, and one of the many places where change is coming will be the education department. To find out what that could mean, we checked in with Richard Culatta, who served as director of the education department’s Office of Educational Technology in the Obama Administration and is now Chief Innovation Officer for the state of Rhode Island.

The classroom. Since the 1950s, the setup of your average second, sixth or tenth grade classroom hasn’t changed all that much. Desks lined up, students facing forward, teacher up at the front giving a lecture. The same can be said for higher education oftentimes, as well. What gives? In early October, EdSurge hosted the Austin Tech for Schools Summit in Texas, and while there, heard a bit about what administrators and entrepreneurs are doing to actively create the “modern classroom.” How do educators redefine what classrooms look like? Blow up the design entirely? Bring in more project-based learning? In this podcast, you’ll hear from Superintendent Royce Avery and CTO Angela Matthews of Manor ISD, Director of Technology Erin Bown-Anderson of Austin ISD, assistant principal Kris Waugh of Ann Richards School, and Jon Phillips of DELL, who looks after worldwide education strategy. What will it take to propel the “modern classroom” forward?

It’s here, it’s here! Once again, we’ve come upon that week in December when we celebrate all things programming. December 5 kicks off national Computer Science Week, and what better way to start the celebrations than with a perfectly-themed interview? Today, we’ve got Jeffrey Martin on the EdSurge podcast. The founder of an organization called "honorCode" recently won the $500,000 Global Change the World competition for nonprofit entrepreneurs as part of the Forbes Under 30 Summit held in Boston in October. HonorCode is a nonprofit that provides curriculum and training to schools to help prep teachers to educate K-12 kids on coding. That’s right people—it’s not just about the kids, you have to educate the adults, too!

Want to hear the full interview with Sandy? Check out the EdSurge On Air podcast. For those who are familiar with the global design firm IDEO, a few words might come to mind. Consulting. Design thinking. K-12 and higher education? Yes, IDEO has indeed carved out a space for itself in the education market. At the center of it? Sandy Speicher, the Executive Director of the Education practice and a designer by trade. She’s worked with organizations across the public, private, and social sectors. For example, recently, she and her team finished up a project with the San Francisco Unified School District centered around redefining the school lunch program. Recently, Speicher spoke with EdSurge about the genesis of the Education Studio at IDEO, the role that design thinking plays in improving K-12 education, and where she sees the biggest opportunities for growth and improvement in schools.

Jim Shelton, President of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), provided one of the keynotes this past Thursday at the iNACOL conference in San Antonio, Texas. Jim has played a number of roles in the edtech space—-he was most recently President & Chief Impact Officer of 2U, Inc. Previously, he was the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and the Program Director for Education at the Gates Foundation. So, it's safe to say he’s seen a lot in the education space. Is personalized learning the real key to solving equity issues? Shelton is optimistic, and spoke to the concept of unlocking human potential and promoting equity through transformative personalized learning.

If you could create a college from scratch today what would it look like? Minerva Schools at KGI has done just that, building an accredited, four-year undergraduate program that has an inaugural class in its sophomore year. Hear Jonathan Katzman, chief product officer at Minerva, explain how students use the latest video technology to actively learn from all around the world.

Today, we’re actually bringing back an old favorite while we generate some new content for you. Back in 2015, in Davis California, we brought superintendents from across California together at an EdSurge event to chat about data and assessment, and how it gets best used in the classroom. How can we use data to make sure that we’re improving student achievement? How does one even define “student achievement”? We talked to Bryant Wong CTO, Summit Public Schools Devin Dillon CAO, Oakland USD Gregory Firn Superintendent in Residence & Director of Strategic Partnerships,, Dreambox Learning; and Alix Guerrier President/Co-Founder, LearnZillion, on a panel to answer these questions and more. We’ll get to that in a second, but first, the news.

Thirty-two. That’s how many years John Deasy has spent in education as a teacher, high school principal, and superintendent in four different districts across three states. Of all these roles, his stint at the Los Angeles Unified School District may be the most memorable—and controversial. As superintendent, he led one of the largest and most highly-critiqued 1:1 device deployments in the country—one that that led to a frenzy of media reporting, and a number of columnists from L.A.-based and national publications alike asking, “Where did it all go so wrong?” After leaving LAUSD in October 2014, Deasy joined the Broad Center as a Superintendent-in-Residence, where he’s been working to develop school district leaders from across the country. But now, he’s gearing up for the next chapter: creating an organization to address juvenile incarceration and, eventually, reduce juvenile recidivism by 50 percent. EdSurge caught up with Deasy to chat about the up’s and down’s of superintendencies, where he made mistakes, and whether technology is adding to issues of inequity.

Many faculty see introductory science courses as "gateway" classes to weed out students. Not Marco Molinaro. The assistant vice provost at the University of California, Davis, is leading the school's efforts to overhaul these classes and make them more accessible to students. Hear how UC Davis is using adaptive-learning tools and active-learning techniques to improve pass rates in these notoriously tough classes.

Blake Montgomery, one-half of the EdSurge On Air podcast team, is bidding EdSurge adieu to take on a role as a Tech Reporter at Buzzfeed. But before he leaves, he's got some thoughts about what he's noticed from his year at EdSurge. Specifically, what is he optimistic about? What was his biggest scoop of the year? Why has he become distrustful of edtech company pitches? Catch all that and more in Blake's farewell EdSurge On Air podcast.

Bridget Burns sees plenty of "superheroes"—26-year-old Silicon Valley types with good intentions, yet little understanding, for how to change higher education. Burns is executive director of the University Innovation Alliance, a coalition of 11 public research universities focused on making quality college degrees accessible to a diverse body of students. The UIA serves 400,000 students, more than a quarter of whom receive Pell grants. In this recording from an EdSurge Meetup, Burns shares what she wishes product developers understood about the challenges higher-ed institutions face.

Unity is one of the most widely used game development engines, but what does that have to do with education? We sat down with Megan Stewart, Unity's Head of Global Education, at her new office to find out.

A few weeks back, EdSurge published a podcast interview with education consultant and commentator Alan November, and Director of Secondary Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment for the Houston Independent School District Mike Dorsey, after chatting with the two education experts at ISTE. The interview got quite a number of listens, likely because November said that the edtech industry had created a “mess” at one point in the interview. However, November was only able to be with us for about ten minutes in that interview, so we really didn’t get a chance to delve into what he meant by “a mess.” Hence, EdSurge decided to enter back into that conversation with November, this time in a Q&A covering his thoughts on the “$1000 pencil,” whether Khan Academy is or is not pushing the envelope, and how any change in the classroom has to start with the teacher. How has the edtech industry created a “mess”—and more importantly, whose responsibility is it to clean up that message, according to November?

Our guest today is Gretchen Shipley, a partner at the law firm Fagen, Friedman, and Fulfrost, who often works with schools on data privacy regulations. We interviewed her for a recent article on the student privacy issues of Pokemon Go, and at the end of our interview, she started talking about some new laws that could mean big problems for schools. Compliance complaints related to the Americans with Disabilities Act are on the rise. California Teachers' access to student devices has gotten much more complicated. We sat down with Shipley at our California Superintendents’ Summit to get a fuller picture of the biggest legal issues schools will face in the upcoming year.

Jahana Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, knows what it takes to be a good teacher. In fact, she’s been in the game for twelve years, currently serving as a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, Connecticut. But she also believes that not everyone is cut out for the profession, especially if they aren’t willing to change with the times—times that have brought an onslaught of new technologies and practices into the classroom. What does it mean, then, for the teaching profession to prepare for 2020? Last week, EdSurge had the opportunity to sit down with Hayes to hear about her thoughts on what the profession is missing, why there’s a dearth of minority educators in the field, and how her own district struggles with “antiquated ideas” about social media and the like.

Technology can do a lot of things in the classroom, but can it help educators be more empathetic towards their students? This week on the EdSurge podcast, we talk to Dr. Jason Okonofua, a postdoc at Stanford University, about just that. Okonofua is interested in how the effects of one person’s stereotyping and another person’s threat reverberate and escalate over time. He currently researches this interest in the context of education and criminal justice, and recently completed a white paper hypothesizing that an empathetic mindset will eliminate school suspensions. According to his research findings, published in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, training teachers to have more empathy towards their students lowers suspension numbers by 50%, an incredibly high number when you consider that Jason’s trainings only include one 45-minute online session in the fall, and a 25-minute online session in the winter. Why are they so successful? And empathy something that can be taught through technology, or does it rely on that in-person element?​

This week, we're talking to Yuta Tonegawa, founder of the Japanese equivalent of the Hour of Code. He's passionate about engaging young Japanese students with coding, but the barriers he faces are distinctly different obstacles that face his American counterpart, the Hour of Code.

The life of a district superintendent isn’t easy. You have to juggle a lot, from managing big of groups of administrators and teachers, to pushing a district forward. So, what is the hardest part of a superintendent's job, and is it related to technology? In a series of interviews that EdSurge conducted at the ISTE conference in late June, EdSurge podcasters Mary Jo Madda and Michael Winters had the opportunity to interview Dr. Greg Goins, superintendent of Frankfort Community Unit School District 168 in Illinois. The man has made some pretty strong movements with edtech in his district, and EdSurge wanted to get to know his methods. Does Goins think Smartboards are effective? What are the edtech products he’s tired of hearing about? Listen to this episode to find the answers to those questions and more.

With Amazon making its first big education platform debut in years, we were wondering: how are other blue chip companies—Microsoft, Apple, Google—reacting to this news? While at ISTE, Mary Jo and former EdSurge podcaster Michael Winters hosted an in-person taping of the EdSurge On Air podcast with a live audience and two Google leaders, Jonathan Rochelle and Jaime Casap. Rochelle and Casap both have a long history with the Google for Education team. Casap is a Google Education evangelist, and Rochelle is a Google Education Product Manager, not to mention a co-founder of Google Drive. Between the two of them, they have more than 20 years of experience with the search company. We asked both Casap and Rochelle about their thoughts on Amazon Inspire, where Google Education plans to grow, and why conferences seem so homogenous. By the way, in each of our interviews, we decided to play a little game. Since edtech buzzwords drive us crazy, we had a secret word that the interviewees didn’t know about, and if they said it out loud, our audience hit the buzzer. See if you can hear when it gets said during this interview!

Alan November is a big-name educational consultant who was once a champion of technology in the classroom. But after EdSurge talked to him at ISTE, it seems that his message has slightly changed: technology isn’t having the impact we hoped for in schools. Expectations were high for edtech. People said it would solve every problem in education, and some venture capitalists agreed. Now, November says, we’re facing a more sober reality as we see what technology can and, more importantly, cannot do. EdSurge caught up briefly with November and Mike Dorsey, Director of Secondary Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment for the Houston Independent School District, for this week's podcast.

Long before competency-based learning was trending, Southern New Hampshire University gave it a shot, largely driven by the vision of its president, Paul LeBlanc. Today SNHU is seen as a leader in closing the gap between what students learn and what the workforce wants. LeBlanc sat down with EdSurge CEO Betsy Corcoran and 1776 Partner Rusty Greiff to share his thoughts on “blowing up the delivery models” for higher ed.

It’s not easy being a game designer in college—but it sure teaches lessons about collaboration and tough decision-making. At the College Gaming Competition at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), we talked to two game creators—one technical designer and one artist—about how their game came to be and what they’ve learned from it.

Last week, I ventured down to LA for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, more commonly known as E3, the biggest videogames convention in the country. I was in search of educational video games. I found assassins and Lil Wayne, but not a whole lot of educational games. LEGO made an appearance, as did Sid Meier’s Civilization, but for a multibillion dollar industry, there wasn’t much in the way of direct educational material. I did, however, find one thing: the College Gaming Competition. It’s a game design contest where university students submit their games to a panel of industry veterans for evaluations. The experts select six finalists and one winner. All the finalists receive the honor of exhibiting their games on the main floor of E3 alongside giants like Microsoft and Sony. To get a better look inside how the game came together, I interviewed both leaders of the Savannah College’s team. Their game is called Brobot Beatdown. It’s a virtual reality game where the player is seated inside a giant robot and does his best to destroy other players’ robots in arena combat. I played it, and I liked it! What's even more impressive is that the small Savannah College team of students created an online multiplayer game in virtual reality, something no other college even attempted. Major studios, by contrast, have hundreds of staff on one game. I got to talk to the winning team from the Savannah College of Art and Design just before and immediately after they won. I interviewed Justin Coushot and Spencer Humphries, Brobot Beatdown's lead game designers, about how their school supported them, the "crunch" just before the competition and what they've learned from creating such a technically demanding game. Tune in! —EdSurge Reporter Blake Montgomery

When should students specialize their learning? Does doing so narrow their futures or allow them to follow their passion to a strong portfolio? Peter Warburton, co-founder and production manager of Rizing Games, believes that kids who like video games should start building their own as early as 10. The reason? By the time they graduate from university, he argues, they’ll be near-professional quality video game makers. They’ll also have an impressive portfolio, as gaming is a heavily project-based pursuit. Rizing Games, a two-year game design academy attached to Cambridge Regional College, instructs 16 to 18-year-old British students on how to design games and run a gaming company as they train towards their A-level exams. It started in 2011 with 15 students in each class; it now takes 65. This year, Warburton took his second year students to E3, the gaming industry’s largest gathering, to present their games and see industry professionals at their best. We sat down with him amidst the chaos of the convention to hear his thoughts on the benefits of learning game design, the British government’s support and how terrible he is at video games.