From the Editor

Last week, the U.S. Department of Education announced the winners of this year's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract awards. ED's SBIR awards program is run by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), providing up to $1.05 million to entrepreneurial small businesses for the R&D of commercially viable education technology products. This year more than half of the awards - 12 in all - went to games and game-related projects. According to the IES website, this year's game winners display several common elements:

• Most include an adaptive component that auto-adjusts the game difficulty to the competency level of the player.
• Most include rewards and competition to drive game play.
• Several use story-based narratives to engage students.
• Most include a teaching component that supports the implementation of the game as a supplement to or replacement for standard instructional practice.
• Several include teacher dashboards, where formative assessment results are provided to the teacher in real-time to inform them of player status for further instruction and remediation.

Voice from the Industry

How to Become a Top-Selling K-12 Sales Rep in a Rapidly Changing Industry

Dayton Johnson, President, Dayton Johnson Executive Search and Consultancy

It’s a leaner, faster world…and here’s what it takes now to become a top-selling K-12 sales representative:

• Technology Expertise
• Customer Knowledge
• Product Knowledge
• Territory Research
• Interpersonal Skills

She Snoops for Scoops: The Personal Side of the EdNET Community

Do you hear a weekend calling? Me, too, and I am ready! Catch up on my scoops for you—then, let's clear our desks and head out....

Featured News

Free Education Metadata Workshop Scheduled on June 5 To Support Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

Association of Educational Publishers — Thursday, May 16, 2013

On Wednesday, June 5, 2013, from 8:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m., the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) will host a free LRMI Workshop following its annual Content in Context (CIC) conference in Washington, D.C. The workshop will provide background information and updates on the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a project co-led by AEP and Creative Commons to create an education-specific extension of the Schema.org web markup standard. Like Schema.org's goal to improve the general search experience, the LRMI aims to make it easier for educators, students, and others to find precisely the right instructional materials at the right time. The workshop is free and open to both CIC attendees and the general public.

Association of Educational Publishers Will Help Implement a New Metadata Standard That Improves Online Search

Association of Educational Publishers — Tuesday, May 07, 2013

The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) has been awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to continue its efforts as co-leader of the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI). The LRMI has produced a new metadata standard for describing educational content that has since been adopted by Schema.org, a joint effort of Bing, Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex to establish a standard method of tagging webpages across the Internet. The new LRMI standard is a key component in the movement toward personalized learning. LRMI tagging allows content publishers to assign valuable, education-specific metadata to their resources, which makes it easier for search and delivery platforms to serve up results that meet the specific needs of teachers and learners.

New NSBA Report Examines School Improvement and Turnaround Strategies

National School Boards Association — Thursday, May 02, 2013

As states and the federal government push for more turnaround strategies for low-performing schools—and put billions of dollars into their efforts—a new report by the National School Boards Association's (NSBA) Center for Public Education (CPE) finds that while there have been some successes there's not much evidence yet that many of these strategies will work overall. The report, " Which Way Up? What research says about school turnaround strategies ," reviews numerous methods of school improvement to determine which, if any, hold the most promise.