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Edtech Insiders

Edtech Insiders

Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell

At Edtech Insiders, we interview founders, investors, operators, educators, and thought leaders about the future of education technology. You’ll hear from leaders across the education technology industry and learn about all of the important edtech trends happening globally.

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Top 10 Edtech Insiders Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Edtech Insiders episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Edtech Insiders for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Edtech Insiders episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

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Francie Alexander is Chief Research Officer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) and an industry leader in the fields of Early Childhood Education, Literacy, and Intensive Intervention for striving reading and math students. Francie provides inspirational and informative leadership on topics from early and adolescent learning to brain development and its influence on childhood and teenage learning and is focused on Future Ready Readers and the future of learning. She works closely to listen to and learn from key school districts across the U.S. in order to lead HMH's efficacy efforts.
Francie serves on the board of Text Project and formerly Los Angeles Universal Pre-K (LAUP). She served for almost 10 years on the PBS Next Generation Media Advisory Board. She was previously chief academic officer for Scholastic.
Additionally, Francie has authored more than 50 books for children, including Curious George Readers.
Prior to her time at HMH, Francie held key positions in both state and federal education agencies, including serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of Education's research branch, where she led Department-sponsored standards efforts and campaigns in support of libraries and the arts.

HMH is an education technology company and a leading provider of K–12 core, supplemental, intervention, and professional learning solutions.

Recommended Resources
Shaped, blog by HMH
Educator Confidence Report by HMH

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Trish Sparks leads Clever as CEO. Previously she was VP of Customer Success and Sales. Trish came to Clever with a wealth of executive leadership experience at companies such as LinkedIn, where she scaled a global customer success organization, and at DemandBase, where she was Chief Customer Officer. As a North Carolina Teaching Fellows Scholar, she started her career as a middle school teacher in Wake County Public Schools. Trish holds BS degrees in Business and Education as well as an MBA from Meredith College. After living in the Bay Area for 20 years, Trish now resides in Chapel Hill, NC.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  1. How Clever has grown to serve 28 million students and teachers across the U.S.
  2. The role of digital identity platforms in securing and simplifying education technology.
  3. Insights from Clever’s “Classroom of the Future” report on AI adoption in education.
  4. How AI and automation are reducing teacher workloads and improving teaching conditions.
  5. Clever’s innovative cybersecurity solutions tailored for K-12 schools.

Episode Highlights:
[00:02:47]
Trish’s journey from teaching to leading Clever and her passion for EdTech.
[00:04:54] The critical role of identity platforms in protecting student data and facilitating digital learning.
[00:08:04] Key findings from Clever’s “Classroom of the Future” report
[00:09:41] The rapid adoption of AI in EdTech and its evolving role in education
[00:11:12] Cybersecurity challenges in K-12 schools and Clever’s solutions to mitigate risks.
[00:14:44] Exciting EdTech trends, from addressing teacher shortages to advancing student data protection.

😎 Stay updated with Edtech Insiders!

🎉 Presenting Sponsor:

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

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2024 was an incredible year for EdTech, filled with transformative shifts and groundbreaking innovations!

In this special year-end episode, Alex and Ben dive into the defining trends of the year—from the ESSER funding cliff reshaping K-12 strategies to the rise of AI-powered learning tools. They also look ahead to 2025, making bold predictions about the future of education technology, including the potential of gaming, assessment overhauls, and micro-company innovation.

Stay tuned for Part 2, coming in January, where Alex and Ben will share predictions from thought leaders across the EdTech space to kick off the new year!
✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:00:43] 🎄 Kicking off the year-end special with reflections on a transformative 2024.
[00:01:38] 📉 ESSER funding cliff and its implications for K-12 EdTech investments.
[00:02:17] 🚀 The Cambrian explosion of AI and its impact on innovation and startups.
[00:04:02] 🤖 AI in K-12 education: challenges, successes, and lessons from the field.
[00:06:24] 🗺️ Big Tech’s growing influence on education and learning models.
[00:08:03] 🎉 Reflecting on EdTech Insiders' major milestones and community highlights.
[00:11:46] 🎮 Predictions for AI-driven gaming and real-time multimodal learning tools.
[00:13:21] 📊 The coming assessment revolution and its transformative potential.
[00:18:55] 🎓 Higher education’s pivot toward career-focused, practical learning models.
[00:23:20] 💼 Workforce learning shifts: upskilling for productivity in a competitive market.
[00:27:02] 🤔 AI agents and their transformative potential in education and beyond.

😎 Stay updated with Edtech Insiders!

🎉 Presenting Sponsor:

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

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Edtech Insiders - This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 1/7/22
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01/07/22 • 46 min

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Ben and Alex discuss How US Schools are Opening and Closing and Opening, The Merging of Edtech Platforms with Content Providers, The Mental Health Crisis in Schools, Chegg's Lawsuit by Investors, and Edtech's Huge Year and the Global Landscape Shift.
We also predict the number of IPOs and Unicorns in 2022, look at the LatAm Edtech market, and do a Deep Dive on GSV Partner Luben Pampaoulov's Medium post on how we get to the first trillion dollar Edtech company through LTV.
RESOURCES:

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Dr. Yenda Prado is an edtech researcher, educator, and author, whose work focuses on exploring the social uses of emerging edtech to support children’s inclusion across complex learning environments.
She has written and advised on inclusive technology use in education and media for diverse organizations including the U.S. Department of Education, PBS Kids, and the University of California.
Dr. Prado also serves as a Ready to Learn Consultant Advisor for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In this role, she has advised on various projects including research and development for Lyla in the Loop – a children’s animated series highlighting critical and computational thinking skills - which will debut February 5 2024 on PBS KIDS.
As the former Emerging Technologies Impact Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education, Dr. Prado supported the development of national edtech policy and investigated emerging technology trends for the Office of Educational Technology. In this role, she developed the EdTech Evidence Toolkit to amplify policies, practices, and resources that support evidence-building activities for effective edtech adoption in schools.
She is currently finishing writing a first-authored book for MIT Press titled “Voices on the Margins: Inclusive Education at the Intersection of Language, Literacy, and Technology” - which will be released Spring 2024.
Previously, Dr. Prado served as a research fellow with PBS KIDS, an education researcher with the UC Irvine Digital Learning Lab, and as an ESL teacher and reading interventionist in California libraries and schools.
Yenda holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Irvine, an Ed.M. in Education from Harvard University, and a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University.

Recommended Resources:
Voices on the Margins: Inclusive Education at the Intersection of Language, Literacy, and Technology By Yenda Prado and Mark Warschauer
Common-Sense Evidence by Nora Gordon and Carrie ConawayCAST

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In this week's Week in Edtech, Ben and special guest co-host Hailey Carter:
1) Talk to Salwa Muhammad of Fourthbrain.ai about the upcoming 3-day workshop with Andrew Ng and other AI Education leaders
2) Discuss "Study Hall", new Youtube/ASU/Crash Course Collaboration (Youtube Blog)
3) Take note of a recent survey that expresses doubt about Edtech leaders (Edweek)
4) Compare Recent Reports on the State of Edtech Funding
- Reach Capital (US)
- Brighteye Ventures (Europe)
- Inc42 (India)
5) Explore the Push for the $60K Minimum Teacher Salary in the US (Edweek)
6) Look at the Race to Adapt to a ChatGPT World (Forbes, NYTimes) and Quill and CommonLit's Free Tool to Detect Cheating

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Ellie Bertani is the President and CEO of the GitLab Foundation, with the mission of improving lifetime earnings and economic mobility of workers worldwide. With a background in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors, she brings a shared value, cross-sectoral approach to drive sustainable impact.

Prior to joining the GitLab Foundation, Ellie spent ten years in the private sector, with roles at Wells Fargo and Walmart. Much of her work focused on frontline worker economic stability and mobility, and included work on instant access to earned pay, scheduling predictability, removing hiring barriers, and developing internal learning and career pathing programs. In 2020 Ellie was awarded Walmart’s highest recognition, the Sam Walton Entrepreneurship Award, for the development of LiveBetterU, the largest free educational benefits program in the US, and Walmart’s most successful diversity & inclusion program.

Earlier in her career, Ellie spent nearly ten years in the nonprofit and public sector, including positions with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. State Department, Third Sector Capital Partners, and Rotary International. She received her Master of Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and her MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Recommended Resources:
A Time to Build by Yuval Levine

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Edtech Insiders - This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 1/28/22
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01/28/22 • 51 min

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Topics This Week:
1) Labor Shortages Loom in K12

2) College Enrollments Dropping, Higher Ed Making Digital Shifts

3) School Districts Getting more Cyberattacks and Ransomware

4) Mergers and Acquisitions

5) Omicron Stimulus Money Being spent on Virtual Tutoring

NOTE: A few important things happened this week after recording, which can be read below and will be covered in next week's episode.
1) Spain-based Domestika, an online platform for creatives, received a $100m round at a $1.3b valuation, becoming the latest Edtech Unicorn.
2) Fourthrev, a UK-based career accelerator program, announced an $8m Series A.
3) Brighteye Ventures put out its 2022 European Edtech Funding Report. Breakdown from Brighteye head of research here.
4) Singapore-based college application platform Cialfo received a $40m funding round.
5) Singapore-based personalized coaching and mentoring platform Ascend Now received a $2.1m seed round.

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FAQ

How many episodes does Edtech Insiders have?

Edtech Insiders currently has 314 episodes available.

What topics does Edtech Insiders cover?

The podcast is about News, Tech News, Podcasts and Education.

What is the most popular episode on Edtech Insiders?

The episode title 'Measuring Educator Confidence with Francie Alexander of HMH' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Edtech Insiders?

The average episode length on Edtech Insiders is 50 minutes.

How often are episodes of Edtech Insiders released?

Episodes of Edtech Insiders are typically released every 3 days.

When was the first episode of Edtech Insiders?

The first episode of Edtech Insiders was released on Oct 26, 2021.

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