Last week, from March 7 to 11, we traveled to Austin, Texas to participate in SXSWedu, a conference & festival that fosters innovation in learning, provides a platform for collaboration, and promotes creativity and social change. We also met with some of our partners and clients and learned about the latest trends in the world […]

The Games For Change Student Challenge in  New York City is a competition for middle and high school students to build games that have a social impact. These kinds of competitions are important not only for the products that result and the learning experiences they provide, but also because they empower students. Students know that […]

  A couple of years into my teaching career, I worked at a school that wanted to incorporate computer games into their math instruction. While one group of students played the games, the others would receive instruction from me in small groups. Although I frequently incorporated games into my instruction in the past, I was […]

On the morning of September 23rd, as part of the Mova’s teacher training at the Rodrigo Correa School in Medellín, Colombia, we had the opportunity to share the Medellín Heritage app with a group of 20 teachers. The Mova Móvil, a truck transformed into a moving lab, set the stage of the conversation in which […]

What is your vision for utilizing technology within your school or classroom? So many times we hear about the newest and greatest thing out there, and as a principal or teacher, we want it in our classrooms without doing the proper research to see if it can be utilized correctly within the confines of those […]

“Fantasy play is a critical skill builder: It helps children better understand the world around them.” — Laura Rubin, Ph.D., Pediatric Neuropsychologist, Portsmouth Neuropsychology Center, New Hampshire Once upon a time, there was a kid who hated writing. She’d leave school tests blank because she’d be exhausted after simply writing down her name. Her parents […]

Mobility Labs is excited to announce that we’ll not only be attending SXSWedu, but we’re also sharing the exciting things we’ve been working on. Our team has submitted proposals for five sessions at SXSWedu, but we’ll need your help to make these sessions happen! SXSWedu uses crowdsourcing to choose the sessions they’ll offer, so check […]

Over thirty years ago, an open letter to the public, A Nation at Risk, called for the recommendation of teaching computer science in high school, equipping graduates to “understand the computer as an information, computation, and communication device; use the computer in the study of the other basics and for personal and work-related purposes; and […]

We are excited to introduce Marshal Hurst as our guest blogger! Marshal is the Literacy Design Collaborative / Math Design Collaborative Coordinator for the Arkansas Department of Education. He is also an educational consultant who provides professional development related to curriculum development, school improvement, and educational technology for schools in Oklahoma and Arkansas. As a […]

As a kid, I always wondered why so many games didn’t have interesting girl characters. I grew up in the era of Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog, Zelda, and an assortment of first-person shooter games starring tough white guys. You know the situation’s not great when Princess Peach is the closest you get to […]

Today, 57 million children have no access to primary school and 250 million more children have access, but fail to attain basic literacy or numeracy.  What if tomorrow we were able to provide every child access to a basic level of education?  That is the goal of the new XPRIZE competition for global learning. Because […]

  Last time I wrote on the blog, I explored equity and technology in classrooms with a focus on students; this week, my focus is on teachers.  Outside of just having access to tech, teacher expectations of students and technology as well as teacher support around implementing the technology in their classrooms greatly impact student […]

This profile aims to highlight the work of an outstanding teacher in Colombia. I met Virginia Gómez as part of the Mobility Labs research during a visit to the Marina Orth School, a public school in a rural area of Medellín, supported by the Marina Orth Foundation. Virginia Gómez looks at a TV displaying a […]

One reason I find educational technology so exciting is the potential to increase equity in education. Last fall, I was lucky enough to come across Mark Warschauer’s Learning in the Cloud: How (and Why) to Transform Schools with Digital Media. This book examines the ways that schools use technology and the obstacles to fully integrating […]

  Austin, Texas, and the SXSW Interactive festival have long been an important annual pilgrimage for the technology community. A recent offshoot, SXSWedu, is growing to occupy a similar place in the education technology community. Mobility Labs joined thousands of teachers, education leaders, entrepreneurs, and others in Austin last week for this year’s event. The […]

Digital Learning Day was launched in 2012 by the Alliance for Excellent Education, and has been supported by other groups and corporate sponsors. The purpose is to showcase how technology can “improve student outcomes and support teachers.” There will be a number of events, including one in Washington D.C. that will be live-streamed. Individual schools, […]

The Mobility Labs research team recently visited a rural school in Santa Elena, Colombia using the innovative Escuela Nueva model of teaching. This method has been used in Colombia since the 1970’s and has been getting more international attention including recently being highlighted in this New York Times column. The foundation Escuela Nueva is located in Bogotá […]

We’ve touched on student data privacy before, but it’s a topic we will probably return to frequently. The issue is a growing area of concern for anyone working in the education technology sector, as illustrated by this article in yesterday’s New York Times. Most companies working in the education technology sector are not bad actors. […]

Colombia may be on the brink of the future but can only go as far as the education system will allow. However there are  gaps such as access to quality digital content, this gap is being addressed by a new Colombian initiative to provide over 900.000 tablets for students and teachers. Nearly half of the […]

This week, President Obama announced that he would be proposing legislation to increase protections on the data privacy of students. The actual legislation is expected to be submitted by the end of February. There is an abundance of research that shows gathering and analyzing data on student performance can greatly enhance educational outcomes. As students […]

  Meaningful family involvement in schools can make a huge difference for a child’s learning and for driving improvement in the school system as a whole. Extensive research has shown that students with involved parents have higher attendance, social skills, grades, test scores, and graduation rates. We learned a lot more about this topic when […]