Imagine if you walked into a doctor’s office today with a terrible ear infection and he proceeded to treat it with a good ‘ole fashion bloodletting. You would run, right? Politely excuse yourself first and then run for the hills or to a doctor with both feet firmly planted in the 21st century.

So, it is truly mindboggling that we are arming teachers with technology of a similar ilk to engage their students in the process of reading and learning. Neither the technology nor the user experience that drives reading instruction in our schools has advanced very far in the past 600 years.

Reading in schools today still works largely the same way it did when doctors treated all medical ills with bloodletting.

It is time to flip the book!

We did not let our nostalgia for bloodlettings get in the way of eradicating the plague; and, we shouldn’t let our nostalgia for the printed book get in the way of providing our students with dynamic, engaging, and effective learning experiences – even if it means flipping the printed books that have long anchored our love affair with reading.

Gobstopper, a new interactive ereading platform for teachers and students, flips reading instruction in the same way Khan Academy flipped how we teach math. Through our intuitive, teacher-centric, and dynamic technology, Gobstopper allows teachers to place questions, quizzes and rich media directly into the texts they teach at exactly the place they want kids to interact with and respond to the text. The questions literally pop out of the text as students turn the page. When students answer the question they get timely feedback on their answer letting them know immediately if they truly understand the text.

Using Gobstopper’s flipped reading platform, teachers can film short videos of themselves explaining a difficult passage or calling their students’ attention to a literary device and place the video inside the text at exactly the place they want each student to receive video-guided individualized instruction. Teachers can now be present for every child, whether they teach 20 or 120, while they do their reading at home, on the bus, or at the library.

Students no longer stare at static pages that fail to compete with a multitude of distractions that surround them. They no longer trudge through Hamlet page by page wondering if they really understand it and inevitably giving up to wait for the teacher to explain it the following day. Immediate feedback when they answer a question lets them know they got it. Videos of their teacher explaining Shakespeare’s turns of phrase deepen their interest in the play. Snippets of Mel Gibson performing Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy playing in the margins gives the printed version a richness and depth that reading has never held before.

Flip the Text & Unleash the Data

Those interactive elements certainly make reading more interesting, but left alone don’t effectively flip the reading experience and allow teachers to revolutionize their classrooms. Truly flipped reading instruction provides teachers with data that allows them to create more engaging and authentic learning experiences during class time. Flipped reading delivers Common Core aligned data reports to teachers everyday that help them plan effective instruction that nimbly responds to student progress day-to-day as opposed to every few weeks when a benchmark or end of term exam is given.

At Gobstopper, teachers can flip a book themselves by placing their own layer (we call it a curriculet) of questions, quizzes, and rich media on top of the books they teach, or they can use a Gobstopper curriculet to flip the books they teach more easily. It is an amazing and amazingly easy way to elevate reading instruction in your class and revolutionize the reading lives of your students.

Interested in flipping the texts you teach and flipping your Humanities class in the process? Visit www.gobstopper.com and check out our amazing new ereading platform.

The post Flipping the Book! appeared first on Gobstopper.

After a few months of furious create-pilot-improve cycles, our first batch of Beta Invitations is out and users are now browsing and enjoying what Gobstopper has to offer. We are happy to have attracted a great batch of early adopters: teachers, administrators, students and educators from all over the country have signed up to share their ideas, give us feedback and help us make Gobstopper better. Rip Empson at TechCrunch reviewed our product and wrote an article that succinctly describes what we are doing.

Beta invites are going out at a steady pace, server fans are whirring and more people are joining the reading revolution. Sign up for an invite and watch your inbox, it may already be on its way.

The post Beta Invitations going out today! appeared first on Gobstopper.

When you think about it, hoping a 21st century middle or high school student will obsess over reading like they do. . .say. . .Tumblr or their new iphone. . . is almost laughable. It is as anachronistic as wishing for an age before freeways or toys before plastic.

Indeed, expecting kids to deeply embrace and read books today whether for independent reading or homework is not a whole lot different than asking them to churn their own butter, carry their favorite music around in their backpack as an lp collection, use a telephone that is wired to the wall, or watch their favorite shows on a black and white tv with rabbit ears.

Given the revolutionary scale of change for all things that make up the trappings of youth in 2013– phones, music, computing, media, and gaming to name the most obvious – it is startling how little has been done to revolutionize the experience of reading a book. Books are (and especially in schools where ebooks are almost completely non-existent) essentially unchanged in their dimension and functionality since the advent of the printing press. Better cover art and greater portability in the form of an ebook for many titles, but otherwise almost entirely the same.

Beyond the kids who are burgeoning bibliophiles by nature, books are understandably a hard sell to young people amidst the noise of much flashier, multi-dimensional, wildly connected and interconnected forms of entertainment. This is ironic considering the wealth and quality of contemporary literature focused on the teen market. The quality of the art is in many respects enjoying a tremendous renaissance while the medium struggles to resonate and prove its relevance with the next generation upon whose whims it will either flourish or fail.

If reluctant readers are going to discover and embrace a passion for reading, it will most likely be catalyzed in the classroom. They are, for lack of a better term, a captive audience. Their success as students is inextricably tied to their reading skills. If we want them to discover and embrace the gift of reading, we need to make the medium more relevant. We must give teachers tools that bring dimension and dynamism to the text. In an age when kids are accustomed to response times measured in nanoseconds, it makes no sense to ask students to wait until the next day or perhaps longer to know if they are progressing as readers and understanding the books in front of them.

Still grasping on to your nostalgia for the printed text?

Consider these findings from a now practically ancient 2010 study released by the Kaiser Family Foundation (http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia012010nr.cfm) focused on media use by kids. The average young person in 2010 spent 7 hours and 38 minutes engaged in the above forms of media EACH DAY! That is 53 hours a week – more than most hard working adults spend at their job. Of that incredible investment of time, energy, and focus, only 25 minutes was spent reading.

It gets worse. Way back in 2010 – 7th–12th graders were already spending nearly 4 times as many minutes each day TEXTING than they were reading!

Gobstopper’s mission to revolutionize the reading lives of kids is not novelty it is necessity. Regardless of the level of modernity of the medium reading will always be fundamental. There is no time to waste in making it relevant, engaging, and fun to the next generation of readers. Whether we like it or not, their academic achievement and our prosperity – both cultural and economic – depend on it.

The post Are books jumping the shark? Why students don’t read. appeared first on Gobstopper.

Over here at Gobstopper International headquarters we have a rather simple theory to explain at least part of the reading achievement gap. In a recently conducted survey we asked our subjects (you might call them officemates) if they read every single homework assignment they received in middle through high school. Unfortunately guffaws were not one of the available answer choices so we coded those responses – which accurately characterized 100% of the responses we received – as a resounding – No!

We were as surprised as we imagine you are (* wink *) that not one of our. . .well. . .four respondents had read every assignment given to them by their teachers. So with our robust methodology we pushed those respondents to reflect even further. . .”Can you please tell us then, did you ever tell a parent or teacher you did a reading assignment that you did not actually do?” Again, the data was hard to ignore which is to say that either our team at Gobstopper is defined by a certain academic moral depravity or there is a significant accountability gap when it comes to reading.

Clearly, let’s go with the latter explanation – a lack of reading accountability is a huge factor in low reading achievement.

Despite literally hundreds of assignments over the course of middle and high school and hundreds of hours of class time devoted to independent reading time most of our kids are simply not reading . . .even when they say they are reading. . .even when we see them staring at the pages of a book open in front of them.

Need proof? Look at the college level where 30% of students attending 4-year colleges and 42% among those attending 2-year colleges need reading remediation.

Reading remediation? . . for students qualified to be accepted into and actually attending college?!?

Forgive the lack of rigorous research to back up our claim, but it hardly requires it. It is one of those findings so obvious that when you read it in a magazine or hear it on the radio your first reaction is. . .”Really!?! They spent thousands of dollars proving that?” Simply run your own sophisticated study similar to ours and ask all the people sitting around you right now the same two questions.

Gobstopper is solving this exact problem and closing the reading accountability gap forever. Unlike math, reading is a black box for teachers. In math students are generally expected to show their work. There is a clear solution to each problem that let’s students know right away if they understood how to complete it.

Conversely, reading is a free for all. There is no work to show – no real time feedback mechanism that tells students in the moment that they understood the text as they read. Our only tools to measure engagement and understanding have been profoundly anemic and ineffective – quizzes the next day that take up valuable class time and still need to be graded; worse, yet, reading logs that require a parent’s signature; or, the ultra wimpy, fete accompli, standing at the doorway asking kids as they walk in. . .”Did you do the reading last night?”

Consumed by the futility of it all? Don’t worry.

By January of 2013, you will be able to use Gobstopper’s e-reading platform to teach. . .say. . .The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and without exaggeration – EVERYTHING will change. When students log into Gobstopper to complete their reading homework, questions will pop up throughout their reading that give them automatic feedback confirming they understand the text or need to re-read it again to gain a better understanding. Real time feedback immediately deepens their engagement. By the time they complete the reading and all the embedded questions their homework will already be turned in. If they don’t know a word while reading, they will be able to double click on it and immediately see the definition. They will be able to view teacher annotations at core moments and encounter fun facts that capture their interest. As their teacher, you will even be able to embed a quick video of yourself explaining a difficult concept like, say, irony in perfect context so that it pops out of the text at the best possible moment for authentic learning. It is reading and learning on steroids.

It gets better!

By the following morning a report is waiting for you at Gobstopper that tells you exactly who did the reading and who did not, who mastered common core standards and who didn’t. The quiz at the end of the reading is already graded. There are no papers to photocopy, hand out, or collect. There are no books for you to manage or for your students to lose or damage.

You get to focus your energy and your superhero teaching powers on what you love best – making your class engaging and student centered. You have time to discuss the text, do projects, or use your extra class time to read more awesome books.

If you haven’t yet signed up for our beta, click here to close the reading accountability gap in your classroom and, in turn, drive up your students’ reading achievement.

The post Mind the Gap! Create Reading Accountability and Drive Reading Achievement appeared first on Gobstopper.

Subsequent posts will get to the flash and pomp of our awesome ereading platform for schools. We want to take this opportunity to introduce you to who we are and what we believe as a company. We’ll start with the obvious and, perhaps, the most telling.

Why the name Gobstopper?

We do love the Gobstopper candy and eat embarrassing amounts of them in the office, but our name is only distantly related to it. Our “Gobstopper” is from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It is more about Charlie Bucket, the main character, and the “everlasting” moniker Willy Wonka places on his revolutionary invention, the everlasting gobstopper, than it is about the candy itself.

Being Charlie Bucket. . .
We honestly believe Gobstopper will revolutionize the reading lives of kids in wonderful, joyful, and engaging ways. As a company we believe in innovation that comes from honoring the wonder of creativity, holding conviction, practicing optimism, believing in idealism, enjoying every morsel of the experience, doing more with less, and doing good – pretty much a young Charlie Bucket in a nut shell.

Toward an everlasting Gobstopper. . .
We are swinging for the fences over here at Gobstopper. We are working hard to build something great for some pretty awesome people: teachers and readers.

We revere teachers of every sort whether they stand in front of a classroom or work patiently with a child at the kitchen table to learn an elusive skill like reading. We are resolutely focused on readers – both skilled and aspiring. We are determined to revolutionize the way we teach, learn, and inspire young people down a path to a meaningful reading life.

For us to live up to those lofty aspirations we hold for our work, Gobstopper must help teachers become a little more magical and kids’ love for reading extend beyond any one book and into a reading life that is. . .well. . .everlasting.

We are thrilled you are along for the ride. We can’t wait to share our flagship product with you when we launch in January. We hope over time that Gobstopper will become as meaningful to you as you are to us.

In the meantime, check in on the blog from time to time and follow us on twitter @gobstopper. This is the beginning of something big!

The post Being Charlie Bucket. . . appeared first on Gobstopper.

There are two fascinating conversations burning up the blogosphere these days. Within education circles, Paul Tough’s enlightening new book, How Children Succeed, has re-ignited a deep exploration of school culture, character development, and the impact they can have on student success – academic and otherwise. The blistering pace of innovation within the edtech sector has left our minds spinning and blogs humming about how we can use technology to drive student achievement. Since I have not seen any posts attempt to bend the arc of those two essential conversations toward an intersection point, I thought I would offer one here.

Into the wild frontier. If you are reading this, you have likely already lit out into the edtech hinterland convinced like the rest of us that soon enough edtech will simply be education as we know it. More than likely you are a teacher, technology coordinator, or administrator who is exploring and experimenting with every possible option to revolutionize your classroom or your school with technology.

The challenge as I see it (both as the CEO of Gobstopper, a dynamic, new e-reading platform launching in January, and the founder of two high performing KIPP charter schools) is that the very essence of a frontier is that it is untamed, unrefined, and undefined. By its very nature it lacks cohesive intentionality and purpose.

If you were a pioneering teenager, parent, or educator in 2003 during the rise of myspace.com and the early settling of the social media frontier, you know exactly what I mean – so much happened so quickly with very little thought to the impact beyond the doing. Within the walls of schools, social media was (and many times still is) beguiling and destructive.

The frontier of edtech 2.0 must be different. We have stuffed the educational opportunities of our kids and the hopeful dreams of their parents into our backpack and struck out for a brave new world. It is healthy to remind ourselves that we are carrying ridiculously precious cargo and the stakes are high.

If I were in your shoes and standing on the cusp of leading my students or entire student body out into the edtech frontier, I would start with the decidedly un-techie questions of “culture,” the stuff that Tough’s book has all of us talking about – our shared attitudes and purpose, a clear understanding of what we value, our goals, and the practices we put in place that define our work and achieve the greatest academic and social outcomes for kids.

Defining those things before one considers how to leverage technology to transform learning in our classrooms or schools gives purpose and meaning to how we use precious learning time and establish standards of academic rigor with new technology tools at our disposal.

Just for kicks and giggles, let me take you back to my English I classroom circa 1994, an island unto itself for which I was the fearless leader. The culture of my classroom was held together by applying the following three filters and their itinerate questions rigorously to nearly every decision I made:

1. Critical thinking = academic rigor. Does this assignment provide students an opportunity to think deeply and construct their own well-supported thesis? Does this practice or classroom structure encourage or inhibit good critical thought? Did the language I used today demonstrate that I value creativity, curiosity, and open-mindedness? Do the activities planned for tomorrow provide a platform for sharing perspective?

2. Courage trumps comfort. Did I give enough wait time to allow students to strive and persist? To create the most enduring understanding of “bravery” should we read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or Henry V? Did I ask “Why?” enough to deepen each student’s thinking or did I simply complete their thought, regurgitate, or over summarize for the sake of expediency and accuracy?

3. Intelligence is more than just knowledge. Was the group work I assigned merely a chance to exchange knowledge or did it offer the more complex opportunity to navigate and negotiate different personalities and situations? To what degree did our learning explore both differing perspectives and the many dimensions embedded in the skill or content taught?

Those filters gave the work we undertook purpose and meaning. Every book we read or social question we pondered was in and of itself a new frontier but the likelihood that our work would devolve into the simple act of doing without thoughtfulness and intent was nearly eliminated.

We should thoughtfully select and apply filters to our exploration of the edtech frontier as well. What those filters will be for any one teacher or school leader will vary, but the utility of applying them is universal. It is worth exploring a current edtech genre, gamification, to see how this all plays out.

Get your game on. Gamification is one of the hottest areas of the edtech frontier. Each day more and more money is pumped into the sector, games are released, and student learning opportunities are hitched to rising stars to the outcomes new learning games can achieve. Is focusing on tools that are leveraging gamification right for your classroom or school? Are there certain examples of gamification that drive the kind of learning you hope to engender and others that don’t? It is much easier to make the call when you have culture filters to apply.

So let’s go back to my old classroom and see how my filters would have affected the role of educational games or gamified learning in my classroom.

1. Critical thinking = academic rigor. It is very difficult to support authentic critical thinking through learning based games, but some do. Gamification that pushes kids into richly simulated environments that let them see in short order the long view implications of their decision making certainly reach that end. Trite, multiple-choice question-rich, online versions of Jeopardy don’t.

2. Courage trumps comfort. The far majority of products in the gaming space fail this test miserably. They are largely rooted in independent and inauthentic learning experiences. The “game” largely translates into fun where nothing is actually risked. . .and. . .ergo little is likely gained.

3. Intelligence is more than just knowledge. On the score of providing opportunities to develop and practice social intelligence, most offerings miss badly if not entirely; however, there are a number of exciting products that would be a good fit because they do give students a chance to explore the varied dimensions and perspectives inherent in certain content and/or skills.

At Gobstopper, we think incessantly about you, your classroom, your school, and the role we play in the learning opportunities our products create for the kids you teach. We want to learn more about the filters you apply to the edtech tools you choose to weave into the fabric of your learning community. If you, too, are thinking about the intersection of culture and edtech in your classroom or school, we hope you will help educate us on what matters to you by emailing us at info@gobstopper.com.

In the meantime, sign up to learn more about Gobstopper as we prepare for our January launch. We look forward to seeing you on the frontier and transforming education together!

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In 1977 Lee Majors was the Six Million Dollar Man – the star of one of the hottest shows on tv and a hero to 2nd grade boys across America. I wanted to be bionic just like him, run faster than any human alive, possess superhuman strength, and see things mere mortals could not through my computerized eye. So you can imagine my unbridled joy and awe when he walked into the restaurant bathroom I was in with my brother. We looked at each other, me 7 and him 9, as if we were in the presence of greatness and then found the courage to ask him THE burning question….

Five minutes later the Six Million Dollar Man… the SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN… escorted US back to the table. He politely introduced himself to my parents while holding back obvious laughter .  “I told the boys I can’t show them my powers at a restaurant.” he said. My father seemed all at once, amused, confused, and concerned. “I’m sorry did they bother you?” “No, no, not at all.” The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN responded with a wink and a deadpan look, “but I can’t rip the urinal off the wall . . .not even for the five bucks they offered me. I am just not allowed to do that.”

Thirty-five years later I now know Lee Majors wasn’t really bionic, but I still have a thing for superheroes and I still think they exist. In fact, I know they do because I have spent nearly all of the last 20 years working alongside them.

I believe good, passionate, and committed teachers are superheroes. I have seen them save lives, defy daunting odds with an unbreakable and inspiring smile, and make light shine in places and moments when darkness should have prevailed. While others have waited for Superman, I have had the distinct pleasure of working alongside him and his female counterpart.

In this moment of enormous technology disruption in the world of education I believe the promise of technology will be squandered in our classrooms if the apex of its innovation rests at simply making things more efficient or attempting to make the art of teaching dummy-proof.

Technology for teachers should do what it did for the Six Million Dollar Man – it should allow them to do things that are the province of Superheroes, things you and I normally cannot.

Gobstopper, the new company I will launch as an EIR at New Schools Venture Fund, will endeavor to do just that – give superhero teachers additional superhero powers. Gobstopper will allow teachers to dynamically reach their students from inside the texts they teach and become truly omniscient and omnipresent by giving them the ability to publish and place a “curriculet” – a layer of questions and rich media – on top of any epub, Word, or pdf document. Our new learning platform will make them omniscient – able to know who did their homework and who didn’t and whether students mastered the standards they practiced at home before they arrive at school the next day. We will make them omnipresent by allowing them to virtually be at the kitchen table with their students while they do their homework – whether they teach 20 or 150 – and ask them the exact questions they need to be asked or provide an essential explanation at precisely the right moment for each individual student whether they are doing their work at 5pm or midnight. Gobstopper is going to help students engage more deeply in the process of reading and learning and help their teachers serve and reach them better than ever before.

After spending the past 10 years founding two KIPP schools (yes, I am a proud and passionate KIPPster) I look forward to immersing myself in a community of entrepreneurs I have long admired and respected from outside. I can think of no better place from which to launch Gobstopper than New Schools Venture Fund. In my humble estimation, no other organization or venture fund has done more to seed, catalyze and support the development of superheroes in education than NSVF. I look forward to supporting and contributing to that work as a member of the NSVF team.

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