Education Blog

Disrupting Class: Challenging Tradition, Part 1

2009-11-19T14:33:00Z

This book that really challenged our view of how technology supports the learning environment. The book is titled Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton M. Christensen. Here is a link to an article about the book. In the book Christensen discusses why it has been so difficult for schools to change to a more student-centric approach to learning and how technology will support the change in the context of disruptive innovation.

The premise is based on the notion that we have tried to integrate technology into a system that is very resistant to change. The processes and structures of the system will only produce pockets of innovation with technology, but will not produce a total shift toward student-centric learning. The author believes that the shift will happen in two phases. The first phase will be to apply disruptive technologies in places where the alternative is nothing. For example, in schools that have students that want to take Latin, but the school lacks the resources, they can use online or distance learning to provide the instruction. The second phase will occur when 50% of all instruction is delivered online and is gives the student the ability to learn based on their dominant learning styles.

Here is where I am challenged – my view, up to this point, has been that we will reach a tipping point when the technology finally becomes ubiquitous and we can focus on learning. I guess my premise failed to account for the fact that the school systems that we work in will continue to support antiquated processes and structures.

Do you think we can truly get to a student-centric approach to learning if we don’t consider learning styles, change the present notion of schools (a building), and build the technology to support this approach?

Let the Voting Begin – Dell Asks You to Vote in the Student Photography Contest

2009-11-17T13:24:00Z

Vote for your favorite student photo for a chance to win a Latitude 2100 notebook. Our first global student photography competition, Where Do You Like to Learn ended on Sunday with more than 200 entries from all around the world! On Monday, we selected our nine finalists, shown below. Our panel of Dell judges included Jason St Peter, a Dell employee and photography blogger and KerryatDell and I from the Education team. With so many fantastic student pictures, picking the top finalists was no easy task.

How to vote and be entered into the prize draw:

Voting is easy, simply post a comment to this blog and indicate the number of the photograph that you want to win (i.e. 'I vote for photo #6'). In addition to helping one student win a Latitude 2100 netbook, and a teacher win a tablet PC and projector, you will also be entered into a prize drawing for your very own Latitude 2100*!

Voting is open from November 19 - December 4, 2009, so pick your favorite photo (click on it below to see a larger image) and ask your friends to join the Edu4U community to vote! Only one vote per person will be counted, so help your favorite photo win the grand prize.

Vote #1

Vote #2

Vote #3

Vote #4

Vote #5

Vote #6

Vote #7

Vote #8

Vote #9

Author's Note: You may notice that there are 9 image finalists instead of 10. The reason for this is that since the time of the finalists being selected the 10th image has been withdrawn from the competition.

*Sweepstakes limited to residents of United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Click here to read full terms and conditions for this contest.

EDUCAUSE 09: Cloud Computing, LMS and Virtualization Created Buzz in Denver

2009-11-13T11:18:00Z

Last week brought sunshine and beautiful weather to Denver… Along with more than 3700 Higher Education IT professionals, in Denver to attend the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.

The conference buzzed with people talking about a few key topics:

- Cloud Computing: How will Higher Education leverage the trend towards Cloud Computing? Can Cloud Computing change the cost structure and mitigate complexity for Hi Ed IT? How do institutions manage thorny issues related to Cloud Computing- such as security, access, privacy, data ownership, and others? With Dell’s recent acquisition of Perot Systems, we’ll be looking for a compelling solution to meet Hi Ed customer needs for Cloud Computing and help answer some of these questions. Read the article in the November/December, 2009, edition of EDUCAUSE Review by Brad Wheeler, Vice President for Information Technology, Chief Information Officer for Indiana University, and professor of information systems in IU’s Kelly School of Business; and Shelton Waggener, Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at the University of California, Berkley: Above-Campus Services: Shaping the Promise of Cloud Computing for Higher Education.

- The extension of the Dell and SunGard Higher Education partnership: We announced that we’ll be extending our partnership with SunGard, and even setting up a remote test center on-site at Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. This test center will allow the two companies to expand upon the great work already underway at SunGard’s Open Digital Campus Test center, and accelerate the testing of Dell products, including EqualLogic storage, with SunGard’s Banner and PowerCampus software suites.

- The emergence of the Learning Management System as a mission critical application on campuses: How can colleges and universities make the best choice between the commercial and open source options for LMS? Dell partners extensively with Blackboard, and our partnership continues to grow, offering customers a scalable, reliable platform to run their LMS. In fact, Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers allowed Blackboard’s Managed Hosting™ service to provide 99.7% availability to more than 630 campuses worldwide. We’re also working with MoodleRooms to offer choices to our customers who are interested in deploying Moodle’s open source offering.

- Virtualizing the Desktop: The next big wave of virtualization in Hi Ed will take place in the desktop environment, as colleges and universities wrangle with the right way to share information and resources and information with their student population. Dell’s Flexible Computing solutions continue to emerge to help customers to help tackle this problem. It’s another great example of how we’ll be able to use our expertise to help solve the challenges facing our Hi Ed customers.

It was a productive week in Denver. I personally enjoyed the opportunity to meet with so many customers in such a short period of time. The EDUCAUSE conference never fails to deliver on its promise of insight, thought leadership and interaction with the Hi Ed IT community.

Authored by Alice Mercer: Discovery Educator Network National Institute

2009-11-10T20:33:00Z

Follow @alicemercer on Twitter.

Who am I and why am I writing here?

I am a teacher. I am a computer and technology teacher. I teach at an elementary school in Sacramento. I also blog about what I do at. Sometimes I'm witty, sometimes I'm insightful, but there are lots of blogging teachers, why me, why here? You can blame it all on Steve Dembo.

What is a DEN "Star" and what is their National Institute?

At this point, you may be wondering what is DEN? Discovery Educator Network is a professional development network that supports Discovery Education services. It has a number of employees (like Steve) who provide support in the form of presentations, ideas, and support, but the most important part is getting together, online (on blogs, in Second Life) and in person with fellow teachers who are using Discovery Education, to share our ideas and experiences.

What is a Star educator? Those educators are doing more with Discovery Education products and more importantly, with technology. The requirements for becoming a Star are pretty do-able. You view a video, answer an online quiz, fill out an application and report about two events (any "meeting" where you discuss Discovery Education services with three or more teachers).

Once a year, Discovery Education has a National Institute for their Star educators. It's a really great deal because they cover all expenses for the 5 day institute except for travel to and from the site. This year is was at the Headlands Institute in Marin, California. This is a short two-hour drive from my home, so I applied to go (the application usually comes out in Spring).

Why the National Institute?

Discovery Educator Network's National Institute is really a different gig than most of my other professional development experiences. It is at once so intimate (fewer than 100 educators, and we're all rooming together), and the schedule is so full (starting early at 8 a.m. and finishing after dark at 8 p.m. or later) that it truly is a morning, noon, and night experience.

It's also a great contrast between "play" and business. This in my second National Institute, and they started both with a group activity to get us all working together, and dorky though it was, it was a chance to get to know each other. The first full day we did a tour of nearby San Francisco. Last year, it was a night tour of monuments in Washington, D.C. Those activities, and doing them together, make it more of a group activity. While there is a definite structure, unlike district PD, there is no one taking attendance, so you do have the freedom to abstain, or do your own thing.

It has a variety of educators in terms of geography, age, experience, and technology expertise. DEN has everything from teachers relatively new to technology, to district tech specialist. For those looking for how-tos there are those, but for those with more advanced skills, we help by doing presentations, or in other ways.

My part was to help with the "documentation", but it was a was not my task alone. Dean Mantz, a DEN Star from Kansas set up a "live blog" using Cover It Live. I've used Cover It Live before but it has some new features that really made it shine in this instance.

Cover It Live is a way to live-blog that will self-refresh for viewers. This means that unlike, say twitter, new entries will come up in the live blog window when you add new info. It's not static. But that's just the start, you can add video from LiveStream, or UStream, or YouTube. So you can live stream video and type in comments. You can also pick up twitter feeds for search terms or hash tags or for specific users. This was used during Malcolm Gladwell's Keynote at NECC 2009, so that tweets with the tag #necc09mg could be included in a live blog.

Now all those options have a very heavy bandwidth load. I like to think of this as the F-15 dashboard approach. Lots of options, lots of shiny buttons to press. What about when you have a really lousy connection, cause that seems to happen more and more at tech conferences. That twitter feed can really save a Live Blog. If you are having "connectivity issues" with wifi, but you're getting cell service that will let you send out tweets, you can just have it pick up your twitter feed, and use that as your live blog. You can have multiple "producers" on a blog and have folks "back home" take care of the administrative details, like making the blog live (turning it on), putting it in standby, or ending it. Dean, who set up the Live Blog for DEN National Institute, wasn't at the conference, but he was outside making sure it all ran smoothly. It was a real labor of love on his part. This is a really important way to share and get some participation from folks like Dean that couldn't be there. I had many folks who gave me positive comments and thanks for the video feeds I managed to get out.

Curriki: From HyperStack to HyperLearning

2009-11-06T20:10:00Z

Joshua Marks has focused his 20-year-long career on using emerging technologies to enable and improve learning opportunities for all children in both formal and informal settings. As Chief Technology Officer, Joshua oversees all technology development and hosting infrastructure for Curriki.org.

Not many people remember The Manhole or Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond The Mackerel as they were very early CD-ROM games and the first from Cyan Worlds, who went on to make the blockbuster game Myst. The Manhole actually pre-dated the CD-ROM and was packed with several floppy disks in its first version. I still have a really cool special edition Osmo with a holographic Osmo world on the CD jewel case. What fewer still know is that Myst, like Osmo and The Manhole before it, were created using a nifty program by Bill Atkinson for the original Macintosh computer called HyperCard. HyperCard gave the world, and educators in particular, the promise of the concept of Hypertext and HyperMedia even before the advent of the World Wide Web. HyperCard was like a “gateway drug” for many future game designers and developers, and an early example of the promise of making tools for average people to create interactive media and hypertext-based content.

HyperCard, when released in 1987, was quickly adopted by educators because its graphical drag-and-drop and intuitive “Index Card” metaphor-based user interface enabled them to easily make simple quizzes and interactive lessons that allowed kids to explore concepts in a more engaging, multi-sensory and self-directed way. Much like the Public Domain shareware libraries of Basic programs I talked about in my last post, HyperCard once again enabled a group of innovative people, now without an interest in learning a programming language, to create and share interactive learning resources. These shared HyperCard games and activities become known as “Stackware.”

Some of these Stackware programs were enhanced and commercially published. Perhaps the best ever, besides Osmo and Myst, was the Voyager iterative exploration of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (which you can’t find anywhere but would make a killer interactive DVD with its detailed movement-by-movement analysis of that amazing work. Here’s a demo.). Sadly, HyperCard was officially discontinued in 2004 after years of neglect and now most of that creativity has been lost to history. But the lesson remains that if you provide innovative teachers a tool that is easy enough to use and understand, they will create really useful stuff and share it. That is what we are trying to do at Curriki, and in a way that will never be able to be discontinued.

As we continue to evolve Curriki, we seek to enable and inspire creativity and sharing. We, like HyperCard, are thinking beyond the “book” metaphor and into the world of hyper-connected hyper-media. What is new about Curriki is the collaborative way we seek to have end users create, mix, remix and improve the content. It is no longer about an author creating a work for a large or even mass audience; it is about the massed creating and sharing with the masses (or communities of practice with themselves). While Apple first used the “desktop” metaphor, and HyperCard used the “index card” metaphor, Curriki is lacking that single concept, idea or picture that serves as the organizing principle to bring all of the pieces of Curriki together: the communities of practice and peer review, the collaborative editing and remixing, the multitude of content and media types, the interactivity, and the idea of a shared library we can all add to.

Please add your comments on what metaphor you believe best encapsulates the ideas, purpose and experience of Curriki. Is it a “garden,” or a “library” or “rock soup,” or…???

Joshua Marks
Chief Technology Office
www.curriki.org

Authored by Paul Tumarkin: Over 230 Organizations Send a Clear Message: We Need to Integrate 21st Century Skills into Content

2009-11-05T22:39:00Z

Along with being a father, guitarist, student of aikido, and dog-lover, Paul Tumarkin serves as the Communications Director for the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the leading advocacy organization focused on infusing 21st century skills into education.

In June, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) hosted the first National Summit on 21st Century Skills in Washington, D.C. focused on the critical need to combine rigorous core subjects with skills such as critical thinking, communication, innovation and creativity. Over 350 policy-makers, education leaders and business professionals joined in the discussion. In addition, the Partnership held an online Cyber Summit that drew over 3,000 participants. Those events were not endings but beginnings.

Based on feedback received from the national, state and local participants, the Partnership put forth a set of guiding principles to clearly define and advance the teaching of 21st century skills and core content. The National Action Agenda on 21st Century Skills was launched on October 9, 2009. You can read the principles on the P21 website here. The effort was widely supported by over 230 organizations – including Dell, the National School Boards Association, Upper Arlington City (Ohio) School District, Community Unit School District #200 (Ill.), National Staff Development Council, Catalina Foothills (Ariz.) Unified School District #16, National Association of State Boards of Education, Norfolk (Va.) Public School District and many others.

Certainly, discussions continue, but the message is clear from all sectors of U.S. society: our education policies, practices and strategies need to change to effectively prepare our children for the world that awaits them.

According to Ken Kay, President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, “The fact that so many schools, districts and state departments of education have signed demonstrates that the 21st century skills movement is gaining momentum in our communities and that we are closer to providing a world-class education for every child.”

So where will the movement go next? As we head to an eventual reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the 21st century skills movement will have a voice in the process. The Partnership will engage with the Obama administration and state and local leaders to ensure education policy is on the right track.

Still, a movement is only as good as its supporters – we need your voice! So, subscribe to blogs like this one or the P21 e-newsletter or Twitter. How about writing your own blog or--even better--a letter to the leaders in your state?

Whatever you do, be heard. Be a part of change.

Keep Your Photos Coming!

2009-11-03T20:23:00Z

It’s been two weeks since we launched the Where Do You Like to Learn student photography competition. We have already received some absolutely stunning photos and I invite you to check out the Flickr set of the entries so far.

As you can see from the pictures below, students enjoy learning in places that inspire them, and sometimes that is outside the classroom walls.

LeighV

C-DS

JovanaS

Show us where you like to learn! There are two weeks lefts to enter the competition for the student’s chance to win a Latitude 2100 netbook and a tablet PC and projector for their classroom.

Don’t forget to check back on November 20, 2009, when we will announce the top 10 finalists and you to vote for your favorite. (By the way, you’ll be entered to win a Latitude 2100 just for stopping by and voting.)

Authored by Jan Demedts: Maximize on the Power of Peer Training

2009-11-02T16:25:00Z

Jan Demedts

IT Consultant and System Administrator

Don Bosco Onderwijscentrum, Belgium

Maximize on the Power of Peer Training

On training pioneer teachers in IT skills so that they can act as IT role models and influence colleagues through peer to peer training (from a K-12 perspective)

A demanding job

Teaching is a multi-layered and demanding job. The educational landscape is constantly changing, with new generations of students entering the classrooms every year, bringing in new words, fashions, skills, likes and dislikes. Teachers are challenged on a daily basis to prove themselves as educator, instructor, administrator, manager, psychologist, coach, companion, even standup comedian. Successful teachers need to draw from a broad range of social, educational and collaboration skills while they are working with students, colleagues and other partners outside of the school.

With the invasion of audiovisual equipment, computers and other electronic devices into everyday school life, teachers are also challenged to prove themselves as able technologists, not just during moments of preparation, but also on the class battlefield with up to 30 IT-savvy youngsters watching, commenting, assessing. Lots of things can go wrong: the projector doesn't show the pc image, there's no sound from the speakers, the webserver or even the school's internet access is down. Arghhh!

It's not just being able to handle the hardware and do some basic troubleshooting. To maximize learning and educational opportunities and to facilitate school administration, teachers are required to manage their subjects/class groups in learning platforms and student management systems, be proficient with online assessment/grading tools and collaboration tools like Google Docs. Frequent changes in software and platforms (upgrades, new functionality, change of provider) mean that there's always something new to be learned. Also teachers have tried out many web 2.0 applications and put them to good educational usage, with You Tube as one of the better known examples.

Teachers must also know about the potentially unwanted aspects of information technology. They need to know about the darker sides of the internet (as many students already do), about the pros and cons of social networking (Netlog, Facebook …) and should be able to advise their students on how to deal with privacy and cyberbullying.

The picture will be clear now: to get through the daily routine of 21^st century school life, teachers need a broad range of IT skills combined with flexibility, creativity and … stamina.

Training the teachers and dealing with resistance

Taking all this into account, a major question arises: how to provide efficient IT training that makes teachers adopt the required IT skills and make them feel proficient, happy and confident in their daily routine?

This is no easy matter: not all teachers welcome the new IT techniques and some teachers even openly question IT at school and resist IT decisions made by the school management.

It is important to understand why. Many teachers have a strong individualistic side to their personality since they are used to managing class groups on their own and behind closed doors. At the same time they are intellectuals, critical of decisions taken at higher levels and wary of yet another change. Many times they have good reason: over the last decades K-12 schools have been swept by waves of pedagogic reform and an increase of control and administrative requirements.

A second reason why some teachers resist IT is the stress that comes with IT: some people are good with computers and others simply are not. Some teachers jump at new software and will readily put new IT techniques to the test in the classroom, while others dread having to take a class to a computer room and will postpone this as long as they can. They feel clumsy in front of their students and oppressed by the new curricula that want teachers to use computers in their classes to improve the students' interest, activity and learning efficiency.

Especially the fact that teachers have to use IT in front of large groups of IT-savvy and highly critical (pre-) adolescents should not be underestimated. Being able to work a computer at home or in an office does not equal being able to work a computer publicly in a classroom with the projector magnifying the demonstration of the teacher's IT skills.

It certainly does not equal managing a group of 25 students, each working on a computer of their own, and being able to teach well in the subject that is being taught: IT is only the method, improved learning is the real aim.

A good IT training strategy

A good IT training strategy should accept this resistance against IT/change and should try to work around it. The school management should not simply try to force new IT skills down the teachers' throats. The motto for school leaders is: be respectful to your human capital, motivate your decisions and set up well-devised change implementation schemes!

Good support facilities at school are very important in this respect: teachers should be able to get help and advice from school-based IT coordinators whenever they need it. Teachers also have every right to a dependable infrastructure: enough high quality hardware, a stable computer network and server infrastructure, good backup facilities, a trustworthy internet connection ... so ample IT funding for schools by the government and education boards is vital.

There should also be regular training opportunities. However, sending all the teachers on a regular basis to IT training sessions during (paid) work hours, is not feasible. That would be too disruptive for school life: the lessons must always go on for most of the students. Sending all teachers to IT training sessions after work hours (in their private time) is also something a school cannot easily do. Although widely underestimated, teachers have loads of school work after school hours ...

On the job IT-training to evangelize new IT-based methods

What then is the best way to train teachers in IT skills?

Let's start with the input. Teacher training schools have an important responsibility in procuring freshly trained teachers that are fully proficient and motivated to implement the K-12 schools' IT strategies. But once on the job and through the years, both young and older teachers will need IT-training to keep up with change in school IT.

A major question then is who should give the IT training sessions. Every school has one or more IT administrators: are they the best IT trainers? For many teachers they aren't since the IT-guys are perceived as being too savvy and too fast with IT ("IT is easy for them"), which to many teachers is intimidating and causes stress.

In my experience there is a better way to optimize the efficiency of K-12 schools IT training schemes:

send a small number of volunteering teachers during work hours to internal or external training sessions on specific IT subjects given by specialised trainers or by the school's own IT-administrators

for most teachers, target at on the job training in the school when the teachers aren't teaching (in between lessons, during noon breaks)
work with a peer training model: train volunteering/pioneering teachers to be IT evangelists/role models and let those teachers spread the news, the IT-skills and examples of concrete implementations into lesson plans
invite and reward these evangelists to give short IT training sessions in the schools on well-defined subjects and make sure the announcement/invitation to these sessions is worded in simple language so that it is clear to the target group
for these sessions, try to get some teachers of the target group to put their name on the attendee list: if the training session is meant for beginners, the IT skills of the teachers on the list should be rated by their colleagues as indeed beginners level ... otherwise real beginners will not put their names down for fear of losing face during the IT training session
stimulate the different departments (maths, modern languages, science, ...) to organise internal demos and share lessons material on the schools learning platform
do not rush things: let the IT evangelization spread at its own pace.

Curriki: Building Communication and Digital Literacy in the Classroom with Digital Storytelling

2009-10-30T14:05:00Z

Anna Batchelder is a Curriki International Consultant and Founder of Bon Education.

If you are looking for a project to build your students’ communication and digital literacy skills, why not have them participate in a digital storytelling project?! As this excellent introduction to digital storytelling by Curriki member Robin Surland points out:

Digital storytelling consists of a series of still images or video images, combined with a narrated soundtrack to tell a story. Many times an additional music track is added to invoke emotions.

Once, you’ve reviewed Robin’s excellent backgrounder, you’ll be ready to take a look at the link Curriki member Anne Leftwich posted here that provides in-depth information on how to create a digital story. Thanks Anne!

Need help visualizing the process before you get started? Here’s “How to make a Digital Story” in a nutshell:

Determine what personal experience you wish to present in your story. If you need a bit of help selecting a topic, try filling out this worksheet on the seven basic elements of a digital story by Indiana University.
Select images that you wish to display in your story. Beyond your own digital photos, Flickr (creative commons licensed images) and OpenStockPhotography are useful places to find images to accompany your narration. Indiana University has a nice template that will help you storyboard your ideas.
Draft a 3-5 minute script to accompany your images.
Select music (optional). ccMixer and Open Source Audio are two places where you can find large quantities of open music. Make sure that the track you select allows you to share and remix the original music. For example, click on the cc box featured on the left hand side of this audio. You should be directed to this page that tells you exactly what you can and cannot do with the track.
Note: If you find this whole copyright thing confusing (i.e., What images and music from the Internet are you allowed to use legally in your digital story?), the Creative Commons website has lots of great advise. The Wanna Work Together video is particularly helpful.
Pull it all together! Create a final storyboard that clearly shows how your images, script and music will all fit together. Indiana University has provided a useful template for this.
Select which software you are going to use to create your digital story. Here is a list of possibilies. Voicethread is another nice tool for this. To learn how to use Voicethread, watch this YouTube tutorial.
Produce your digital story!
Share it with others! (The fun part!)
Create a digital storytelling assignment for your students and share your lesson plan with others in the Curriki community here.

For more detailed information on digital storytelling, take a look at the Digital Storytelling Cookbook from the Center for Digital Storytelling. Or, take a moment to watch this YouTube video (created by Stanford’s Teacher Education Program).

Have fun and feel free to share additional digital storytelling resources in the comments section of this post.

Anna Batchelder

Curriki International Consultant

Dell and The University of Texas Social Innovation Competition 2010

2009-10-26T19:39:00Z

Heather Alden, senior program coordinator of the Dell Social Innovation competition, works at the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin.

Everyone has an idea with the power to change the world. The RGK Center at the University of Texas is excited to collaborate with Dell to inspire college students to explore and develop their own world-changing ideas. Solutions to solve issues like poverty, global warming, and disease come from rock stars like Bono. Why not college students studying engineering, business, journalism, and architecture? Traditionally, we discuss social problems in the public policy or social work schools, but students of every discipline are learning skills that will someday translate to large-scale world change.

To this end, Dell and the University of Texas are teaming up to challenge and train college students to become social entrepreneurs and dream big to change the world. As an incentive to start dreaming, we created the Dell Social Innovation Competition to award $50,000 in seed funding to student social entrepreneurs worldwide with ingenious ideas to tackle pressing social issues.

We define student social entrepreneurs as risk-takers who are passionate about helping people. They not only dream up ground-breaking solutions but also possess the fortitude and personality to mobilize people and resources to see their ideas through to reality. Students from any university are invited to create change at home, or anywhere in the world, with an idea that brings new resources in the form or technology, knowledge, people or action to an old problem for amazing results.

The goal of this competition is to engage a ground swell of ideas from students and teach them to identify and develop plans to implement ideas in the future. We put no limits on the imagination of contestants and hope to give students a pathway to make their dreams of a better world a reality.

How to Enter

The deadline to enter is March 1, 2010. There is plenty of time to brainstorm and get started. The entry form is a quick overview of your idea and takes about 30 minutes to complete. If you are in college or know someone in college - encourage them to enter. If not, you can show your support by voting and commenting on the ideas at each round of competition!

There are three rounds of competition. A group of 50 students will be selected as semifinalists from the initial entry form and asked to write a venture plan detailing their idea. From the venture plan entries, judges and the public select the top three teams and they come to Austin, TX to compete live. One winner walks away with $50,000 to start their venture.

Inspire or Be Inspired

You must be a college student to enter, but anyone can comment and vote on the ideas entered into the competition. We hope that seasoned social and traditional entrepreneurs, business people, nonprofit and foundation leaders come together on the competition website to comment, question and encourage students learning to launch a new venture. Collaboration and inspiration can unleash a tremendous creativity that has the chance to benefits us all! Join the community to be inspired.

Past Winners

The competition is in its forth year. The prize money has gone to some remarkable student ideas. The 2009 grand prize winner, Gardens for Health, is dedicated to enabling people living with HIV/AIDS to improve their nutrition, health and treatment adherence through sustainable agriculture. The team, made up of graduates of Yale and Brown University, is currently working in Rwanda in partnership with cooperatives of people living with HIV/AIDS.

“Winning the Dell Social Innovation Competition was a critical moment for Gardens for Health--not only will the resources allow us to drastically expand our impact in Rwanda, but also the legitimacy that comes with the competition will allow us to effectively leverage those resources. In Rwanda, we will be able to provide agricultural inputs and technical assistance to nearly 4,000 HIV-positive individuals and their families for the upcoming growing season,” said Emma Clippenger, Gardens for Health team member.

Other ideas encouraged by the competition include, Embrace, a $25 infant incubator for developing nations, and I Need A Pencil, Harvard student Jason Shah’s free SAT prep website for underserved high school students without access to expensive tutoring services to boost their chances to enter college.

Husk Power Systems, winner in 2008, was named Social Entrepreneurs of the Year in 2008 by FastCompany. The University of Virginia team created proprietary technology that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity. Their innovation provides power to tens of thousands of rural Indians in a financially sustainable, scalable, environmentally friendly, and profitable manner.

You can see all past winners here.

Have your own world-changing idea? We encourage you to share it by entering the Dell Social Innovation Competition by March 1, 2010. We look forward to your ingenious ideas and wish you all the best of luck! http://www.dellsocialinnovationcompetition.com

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