Supercool School

Starting an online school is one click away - a new education platform for the masses launches at DEMO Spring 2010

PRESS RELEASE

MARCH 23, 2010

PALM DESERT, CA;

Starting an online school is one click away – new education platform for the masses launches at DEMO Spring 2010

Supercool School, a white label online education platform is about to give the power of education to the masses. The landscape of education has changed as anyone can now create an online school, customize it, invite students and start teaching live over the web using the Supercool School platform.

People can now create real-time classes where students from all around the world can connect and learn together complete with streaming audio & video, and even sharing documents and presentations over the web. Every live class is recorded and stored so that thousands of students can view them afterwards. Online schools can offer classes for free or even charge for classes and turn an online school into a global education business.

According to Hoover’s more than 45,000 companies and 300,000 self employed individuals post revenues of roughly $30 billion per year in the U.S. education and training services industry. This industry is about to be revolutionized by providing people in the education industry with a revolutionary platform to create online schools with a simple click of a button.

Since Supercool School’s beta launch in January 2010, people have created over 100 new online schools in 13 different countries around the world ranging from test preparation and language learning schools to biotech and even online dating schools. To try Supercool School, go to www.SupercoolSchool.com .

 

Contact:

Steli Efti

[email protected]

415-794-7719

www.SupercoolSchool.com

www.twitter.com/SupercoolSchool

  

About DEMO

Produced by the IDG Enterprise events group, the worldwide DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products innovations, which are hand selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying cutting-edge technologies and helping entrepreneurs secure venture funding and establish critical business. For more information on the DEMO conferences, visit http://www.demo.com/.

Is it coming? The educational revolution will empower the next global economic acceleration

Imagine a world without factory workers and farmers. But instead a society of happy & educated people with 10+ lifelong professions. People who start as nanotech engineers, work as taxi drivers while they launch a biotech startup and retire as a blogger and personal consultants for the next generations. A society & culture where we will be learning continuously - adjusting to new technologies and new economic opportunities on a day by day basis.
 
Education is already the oil that makes our society and economy work today and it will soon become the foundation underlaying our entire future global economy. Instead of capital and labour costs future economists will learn about the dynamics of education costs.
 
The education, training, consulting & research businesses has been accelerating in growth and is by far the strongest growing global industry - and that ALTHOUGH we have trillion dollar budget cuts on education, research & development. As traditional education is becoming increasingly expensive and exclusive - information becomes abundant online and informal peer to peer learning is empowered through forums, social networks, wikis, blogs, twitter, etc. As knowledge already today is outdated in a matter of months - the access to education by subject matter experts becomes the crucial competitive advantage of every individual. And this is just the beginning of a global paradigm shift that will an have an unimaginable impact on our culture today.
 
 
 
We believe a dynamic, long tail infrastructure of education will be needed to satisfy this rapidly growing demand for education word wide. The same that blogging has done to publishing will happen to education on a global scale. The education entrepreneurs will empower the next jump in our global economic growth.

What do you think?

Supercool School Presenting At Demo Spring 2010 This Tuesday 3:11pm PT

We're very excited to announce that Supercool School  is going to be presenting at Demo Spring 2010 this coming Tuesday at 3:11pm PT. You can watch the livestream directly at http://www.demo.com . If you're a supercool supporter wish us good luck and tell your friends about the upcoming 6 minute live presentation of Supercool School on Tuesday :) Click here for a list of all the presenting companies at Demo.

We deserve better - 17 Billion cut for Education in California!

Yesterday I was torn back from the future of education in todays reality of education when I stumbled in a demonstration against the 17 Billion cuts for schools and colleges in California. I am amazed how anybody could even consider saving money for public education. Its as if I would save on the food of my newborn because I need gas for my SUV. 

Following a quick interview I made with a demonstrator and some links in case you would like to get involved.

Facts:

    •    In the last two years, $17 billion was cut from schools and colleges.

    •    Entire art, music and PE programs were eliminated.

    •    More than 16,000 educators were laid off.

 

Join the demonstration here:

http://www.standupforschools.org/

http://www.cta.org/

or start taking education in your own hands and create a school on Supercool School :)

Interview with a Mike Del Ponte - Principal of the Sparkseed School

Mike is a friend who we got to know through Sandbox. He is the founder of Sparkseed - an accelerator for social entrepreneurs. The Sparkseed School kicked off with a fantastic webinar on funding with Tom Suddes that I recommend to everyone who is seeking fresh inspiration. 

 

1. Mike we are huge fans of Sparkseed. Please tell our readers why Sparkseed is meant to be a game changer?

 

Sparkseed is a game changer for two reasons. First, we aim to incubate the most impactful social ventures in the world. To do this, we target an especially creative and bold group of entrepreneurs: college students. Knowing that college students have founded companies like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, and Facebook, we know they can start social ventures that are equally significant. Therefore, we have three programs that identify the top student-led ventures in the U.S., incubate them, and then invest in them like a venture capitalist would…Which leads me to the second reason why Sparkseed is a game changer. We are a 501c3 non-profit organization, but we are also committed to earning our own revenue. By making equity investments in some of the ventures we incubate, we will be able to eventually fund all of our programs with the investment income we earn. Once we prove this model to be effective, it can be replicated by scores of other organizations in the nonprofit sector.

 

2. What impact does social entrepreneurship have today already on our global society?  

 

To answer that question we need to agree on a definition of social entrepreneurship, which is a long-standing debate. To make things easy (yet still accurate), let’s just say that a social entrepreneur is someone who builds an organization with business best practices to address a significant social or environmental issue. This person – the social entrepreneur – could lead a for profit or nonprofit organization, so long as she does it like an entrepreneur would in a regular business (as opposed to government or traditional nonprofits). With that said…

 

Social entrepreneurship has had a varied impact on the world and the results are still out on many ventures. I thin there are two important things to note. First, social entrepreneurship changes the way do-gooders operate. I think less things are taken for granted. For example, when you have to generate your own income, making payroll takes on a who new life. You have to be scrappy, innovative, lean…and all the other entrepreneurial clichés that are actually very important when you’re building a social venture. Secondly, social entrepreneurship is, perhaps, more empowering to those it helps than hand-outs. For example, microfinance helps people start small businesses and generate their own income, so they are paying for their kids’ education, food medicine, and so on, rather than the government or NGOs giving hand-outs. This has an important psychological effect that will pay dividends for generations.

 

3. What role does the Sparkseed School play within the Sparkseed universe?

 

The Sparkseed School is the place where our webinars and video conferences are held. Each month we host a webinar on topics that are important to social entrepreneurs – business planning, managing a team, pitching to investors, etc. We’ve tried a variety of platforms and Supercool School has been the best.

 

We are also starting peer-to-peer video conferences for our student innovators around the country so they can learn from one another. Supercool School allows us to do this.

 

4. How can people get in touch with you if they want to join Sparkseed? 

 

They can reach out to me directly at [email protected]. They can also follow us on Twitter @sparkseed.

 

5. Anything else you would like to share with us?

 

The biggest lesson that I’ve learned is that success is often predicated on one’s ability to 1) discover what people are best at and what they love, and 2) give them opportunities to do those things for one’s venture. At Sparkseed, we’ve been blessed to have incredibly talented people help us and help our ventures. We are excited to meet more of those people, perhaps through this blog post.

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Build your own online school here: http://www.SupercoolSchool.com 

 

Supercool School Speaking at BIL 2010

 

STELI EFTI – COMMODITIZING EDUCATION: HOW FUTURE SCHOOLS ARE GOING TO BE BUILT WITH ONE CLICK!

by BILL ERICKSON on FEBRUARY 2, 2010

About the Talk:

The old education infrastructure is what’s holding the world back from moving forward and truly empowering people to live a learning life-style that fits the information age. We need to build a new infrastructure for learning. We need to build new digital roads, bridges and highways to connect people world-wide to learn and teach from each other on a daily basis. We need a next generation school. A technology platform that can create schools and connect them within seconds. In this talk I will share some of the stories of our experiment of creating 50 online schools in 50 days…the things we learned…the things we screwed up & the things that surprised us most!

Hope to see you there :)

Tagged as: education, future, innovation, technology

Build Your Online School With 1 Click - Now For $15/mth!

   

We've seen great growth in the first month since we opened up our platform to the public. Today after only a couple of weeks over 60 next generation schools have been created on the Supercool School platform.

What we learned talking to our first end consumer customers is that many of them want to turn their online schools to education businesses and monetize parts of their content/classes as soon as possible. This means that we are going to focus on integrating a payment system on every school to enable school owners to easily monetize their schools and participate in the growth with them. 

For that reason we decided to radically reduce the monthly fee for a hosted school to $15/mth starting today to empower as many people as possible to start their next generation school NOW and help us accelerate the momentum and the growth of the platform in the coming weeks before we launch the payment functionality.

Everyone who has created a Supercool School will benefit from the reduced price as well :) We are very grateful for all the great support and feedback we're receiving from our early customers and users - you guys are the most passionate educators out there & we're proud that you are part of the Supercool Family!!!

We have TONS of cool features and announcements coming up soon so please stay tuned! :)

Start your own online school here

Follow us on twitter here

The Supercool Dream of Learning GO by Octav Druta

A couple days ago Octav Druta, co-founder of Trigwee contacted me and told me about his dream of learning an ancient Chinese game called GO. He wrote:

...I felt that I should experience this mysterious game some day. With time, this feeling turned into a quiet voice - a constant longing in my mind...

Read his full blogpost for the full dream :)

Unfortunately there is no Supercool School yet to learn GO so I couldn't help him really - but he then came up with idea of just creating a School by gathering enough people who also share his dream. So if you also want to learn GO you add yourself here ;)

If you would like to teach GO or maybe even become the principal  of the GO school - then please write an Email to octavdruta at gmail dot com.

This is a wonderful example for how a group of people who share the same dream of learning can make it become reality with Supercool School.  Please help us to spread the word to realize this Supercool Dream.

The Supercool School Family is growing - meet Brandon Timothy Middleton

Brandon joined the team and the supercool movement for better education. The following interview is dedicated to him:

Before you start reading ... you should start the soundtrack that goes along with that post.
Click here to get to Brandons playlist.

1. Brandon we are really proud to have you on the team with us. Besides having an awesome personality & passion you bring a great mix of experience to the table. Tell our readers briefly about you.

Well Brandon the engineer is from Chicago, IL, studied Electrical Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, graduated and came to Silicon Valley to work for Cisco Systems for 3 years.  I stopped that and now I'm doing IT consulting with a handful of non-profits and startups that deal in education in one form or another.  This is where my passion lies, in educating others.  Brandon the musician is also from Chicago and performs with 4 Bay Area bands.  I am a hip hop lyricist, pianist, drummer, and bassist by night. So it's pretty Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with me.

2. What are the epiphany moments of your personal learning history?

 In the summer of 2008 I had a bit of an epiphany while listening to motivational speaker Kevin Carroll (author of What's your Red Rubber Ball?).  I was faced with this truth: while there are many things that I CAN DO, there are a lot fewer things that I WANT TO DO, and even fewer things that I SHOULD DO.  I was challenged to find the things that I SHOULD be doing, so I've made it my mission to identify my passions and pursue those things with all my heart.  It's been so much more rewarding than what I had been doing and it's a lot of fun to challenge others to do the same. This approach has yielded better work, greater satisfaction and a lightness (happiness) that comes from doing things that you enjoy.

3. What is your vision of the future of global education?

My vision is pretty far out: a blend of traditional classroom mixed customized online educational resources (games, interactive activities, etc.) that give learners a good baseline for what they SHOULD know but also gives them a big chunk of what they WANT to know. Giving people what's interesting relatable to them does in fact keep them engaged and it helps them to learn better/faster.

4. Why did you decide to join Supercool School?

I feel that Supercool School is the platform that will facilitate what I've laid out as my vision. The ability to create autonomous Social Knowledge Networks is just what we need to help aid learners in this day and age.  I joined to help contribute to an effort that I think will be a part of the standard practice for learners in the future. This work definitely falls into what I SHOULD be doing.

5. What are some Supercool Schools you would like to learn at?

I am very much enjoying Startup School right now and would like to actually create a Music School of my own since I'm a musician, songwriter and producer.  I've also been keeping an eye out for the Educators 2.0 school.  But overall I'm excited to see what schools pop up in the near future, it's all so very interesting.

Connect with Brandon:

:: www.facebook.com/brandon.middleton

:: www.twitter.com/bware218

:: www.myspace.com/brandontimothy

The premier space for educators - an interview with the Principal of Educators 2.0 Benjamin Stewart

Supercool School wants to give people worldwide access to education by empowering educators and people who want to become educators to build their own schools.
 

Educators 2.0 is an aspiring school built on the Supercool School platform for educators from around the world to meet up and learn from one another. Benjamin Stewart is the principal of Educators 2.0. He is a phd student in education and a teacher at the university Autónoma de Aguascalientes in Mexico. 

 

1. Benjamin, we have experienced you as a truly innovative educator. 

What do you think are the must do & must haves for a modern educator?

 

I think a definite must is to realize the importance of developing one’s personal learning network (PLN) and making the PLN work for you (i.e., as a teacher and a learner) in finding innovative ways to better engage the learner.  Certainly today’s technologies provide affordances in developing a PLN that we did not have before, but it also means that teachers must also be comfortable about sharing experiences with others, reflect on those experiences as to how to improve in the future, and also not be afraid of making a mistake in front of others.  It’s about making one’s learning an ongoing, transparent process that ultimately influences others within the social network.  If I give you a dollar, and you give me a dollar, then we both just have one dollar.  If I give you an idea, and you give me an idea, then we both have two ideas!   

 

 

2. For about a week now you took over the lead for Educators 2.0. 

What do you have on mind for the future of Educators 2.0?

 

Educators 2.0 is a community of teacher leaders dedicated to providing a more equitable education for everyone.  I feel everyone has something to teach and that everyone should have the right to an open learning experience based on one’s needs, interests, and learning preferences.  It’s this reason that terms like teacher and student are really not an accurate way to describe the people who make up our community because we all are teachers and we all are students depending on the particular moment and the kind of interaction that is taking place.  Whether you are a Ph.D. working at a university or someone who likes to teach on the side, Educator 2.0 provides the support necessary to build one’s personal learning network in a way that develops the understandings, skill set, and dispositions required to be a teacher leader in the 21^st century.    

 

The vision that I have for Educators 2.0 is to become the premier space for educators to interact on any given subject at any given level, and a place where teachers can brainstorm, share experiences and knowledge, and reflect on new ways of promoting creativity through social interaction. This can be done by building both interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary learning networks through diverse and open dialog while promoting life-long learning skills in the process. 

 

3. How is being a principal of an online school different from a school offline?

 

Well, since I don’t have the luxury of meeting most of the educators face-to-face, I must reach out to them through both synchronous and asynchronous communication in order to provide the support they need to succeed.  Integrating the latest technologies will definitely be required as I will carefully need to use the appropriate written and spoken discourse to communicate most effectively.  It’s important that educators feel they have an adequate support system, so I will have to use a variety of technologies to make that happen (i.e., emails, forums, live classes, recorded classes, etc.). 

 

4. What is your vision of how Supercool School as a platform & movement will change education?

 

Supercool School (SCS), I feel, will have a big influence on how we will begin to merge the traditional notions of formal and informal education.  Formal institutions will begin using SCS to open up their classes to the community, and those pursuing an informal education will begin seeing opportunities to get accredited.  SCS is in a great position to make both of these happen.

 

Also, SCS empowers people by creating learner autonomy.  Since anyone can request or create a class, the typical teacher and student roles begin to disappear as I’ve mentioned above.  Imagine an environment where students can freely request a class or teach a concept recently covered in school with people outside their own classroom.  These same students could also create a meeting, presentation, debate, etc. directly with the local or global community thus creating a more authentic experience that directly benefits society.     

 

SCS will bring the social element of learning to a new level.

 

5. How can people contact you if they want to get involved with Educators 2.0? 

If anyone is interested in learning more about Educators 2.0 feel free to send me a message on Educators 2.0 or post a comment in my blog: http://bnleez.blogspot.com/