Supercool School

Supercool School Presenting at DEMO Spring 2010 (Video)

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/.

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.

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 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/

Supercool School Sessions At The Connecting Online CO2010 Conference

We're happy to announce that we are going to participate at this years CO10 Online Conference :)

You can see the two session that Supercool School is going to be holding below. Hope to see you at the event :)

REGISTER HERE FOR THE WHOLE EVENT AND ALL SPEAKERS

 

Title of the presentation
What we learned creating over 50 online schools in 5 weeks!

Description of the presentation
I will share some behind-the-scenes stories about the launch of Supercool School and what we learned from all the new online schools that were created on our platform, the online classes held and the things we completely screwed up. Should be fun ;)

Live Online Session: Friday February 5, 2010 3 PM (EST) - CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

 

Title of the Presentation
Why learning online is better than offline!

Description of the Presentation
I have been teaching business related classes in different environments offline and online for about 3 years.
It is an amazing consequence and a hard statement that I was thinking about for some time - but today I am sure: learning online is qualitative better than offline. If you are interested to find out why - come and join my presentation.

Live Online Session: Sunday February 7, 2010 7 PM (EST) - CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

 

Short Interview On The BART With Aaltoes Entrepreneurship Society

Below you can find a short interview that our friends from Aaltoes made with me while on our way to Startup School in Berkley :)

Interview with Steli Efti from Super Cool School from Aaltoes on Vimeo.

Supercool School Interview With Edukwest

A couple of days ago we had the pleasure to talk to Edublogger Kirsten Winkler from Edukwest about the future of education and Supercool School. Check out it!

Donating A School for an Office

Do you have free space in your office or do you know someone who does?

Supercool School is searching for supercool office space in San Francisco from January or February for four people.

In exchange for the office space we will donate one fully customized online school for a cause of your choice. 

It could be a school to help kids with reading disabilities or a school for cancer scientist worldwide to learn from one another.

Its your choice to identify where education can tap in to make a change.

We will contribute 5% of our time to make this school a success together with you :)

By offering the office space to us you will contribute to our cause. 

We want to do for education what blogging has done for publishing - democratize and decentralize it! 

Check out some examples of how people use Supercool School:

• StartupSchool - A global entrepreneurship school that allows founders to teach other founders
• Nachhilfeschule - A german tutoring school that aims to bring down the cost for test prep tutoring in Germany
• Howard Rheingold's School - The famous Howard Rheingold is going to be using Supercool School in the classes he teaches in Berkley & Stanford
• Business Cum Academia - An invite only global campus-based student initiative

So far we are hosting about 50 school that have been created from individuals up to large Silicon Valley companies.

Thanks,

Your Supercool School Team

 

Iphone Dev Camp For Kids - A 16 Week Free Learning Program for Kids Who Want To Code An Iphone App

Attention young techies and entrepreneurs!!! 

 

Got an idea for a cool iPhone app, but not sure how to get started?  

Supercool School has just the thing to help you get started, and it's called Kid Dev School.  

Kid Dev School is a free online 16-week iPhone app school that helps kids build iPhone apps and become successful entrepreneurs. Apply today for our spring class starting February 2010. Complete this form to apply.

When should you apply?

- You are below 18 - the younger the better.

- A team of 1-5 people

- At least one team member is familiar with object oriented programming

Program/Schedule:

All the sessions will be at nights during the week every Wednesday.

It will start on February 10th 2010 and end on June 16th

Three Cycles:

1. Preparation Cycle

2. App Building Cycle

3. App Selling & Iteration Cycle

What will we teach you:

How to build & sell a great Iphone App

1. Teach how development process in team works

   --> Create: prototype your concept in a non-technical way and get feedback

   --> Enroll: recruit a team of individuals who are passionate about your project

   --> Execute: development phase, do what it takes to make your app happen

   --> Acknowledge: celebrate your accomplishment, evaluate your finished product

2. Teach how to publish and market

   --> Becoming familiar with iTunes Connect

   --> Marketing strategies: PR, ads, website, contests, etc.

   --> Updates: new features, in-app purchases, push notification

3. Support & Council evolving the app

   --> Finding a local development support system

   --> Metrics: how to know if you've made a hit

   --> Just Do It: testing other apps, leaving reviews, immersion in app culture

Who will teach you:

Brandon Middleton attended the University of Illinois (Urbana Champaign) and has a passion for creatively engaging students in education. In the last couple of years he has worked for Cisco Systems and consulted for educational nonprofit organizations. He is from the southside of the South side of Chicago, but currently lives on the south side of San Jose, CA. When he grows up he wants to be a rock star and a teacher, but for now he's focused on making mobile phone applications (Tic Tac Toe Ten), making good music and making friends.

Bjoern Lasse Herrmann is very passionate about entrepreneurship. He programmed small games many years ago in School and sometimes wishing the Iphone would have existed at these times. Maybe thousands of people would be playing his games today. Bjoern is originally from Germany and studied economics. He spent a lot of time in Russia, Bangladesh & other countries all over the world. Now he is in San Francisco working on Supercool School. 

  

Steli Efti is a high school dropout who became a serial entrepreneur in Europe and recently founded Supercool School in San Francisco to turn education on its head. He is the author of ebooks such as  "7 Lessons You Learned In School That Could Ruin Your Life" as well as "Hip Hop Millionaires Success Secrets".  As an expert in marketing, communication and entrepreneurship he enjoys supporting great project with profound impact on a global scale.

Interested?

Apply now