WisconsInnovation

From September 25-27, I had the opportunity to travel to New York City for NBC's Education Nation Summit as a representative of my student organization, Future Business Leaders of America-Phi Beta Lambda. About 250 of the nation's educators, professionals, politicians, and leaders (as well as a few studens) convened from around the country to discuss our current educational system and what we can do to improve it. More information about the event can be found here.

A very interesting part of the entire two-day summit was the competition hosted by NBC which featured three different student teams that had proposed new, innovative ideas for the classroom - the Innovation Challenge. The winning team, Class Dojo, won $75,000 from Citi based on their interactive program allowing teachers to better control behavior in the classroom. It was very interesting.

Another speaker at the event, Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, really mirrored exactly what we talked about in class regarding user innovation. His story is unique. His cousins had problems with math so he started out by tutoring them. However, as busy students, they didn't always have time to meet, so Khan would record his lectures and upload them to YouTube for them to view later. His videos started to get very popular (millions of views).

Khan now has over 2,800 videos ranging from remedial addition to advanced calculus. He is operating as a non-profit by choice. His videos take the 'shame' that students could have by asking the same questions over and over again. They can now watch his videos dozens of times until they understand it.

I thought these were simply genius, and I wasn't expecting to see much innovation at this conference. It really was a great experience, and I loved my first trip to NYC!