ISKME Receives Matching Grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Incubate Big Ideas In Beta Initiative

Today, ISKME's Big Ideas Fest got a shot in the arm from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a $50,000 matching grant to incubate our new program, Big Ideas in Beta, which launched at this year’s Big Ideas Fest, Dec. 4-7 in Half Moon Bay. Big Ideas Fest, a three-day immersion into collaboration and design with a focus on modeling cutting edge thinking in K-20 education, encourages participants to collaborate in what are called Action Collabs, where they develop solutions to meet one of three educational challenges facing the U.S. today. Individual teams design and prototype a solution to one of these challenges, which range from achieving universal literacy and math competency, to open education, to developing tools for assessing learning.

With combined funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation matching grant and the other donors that will step up to fund these innovative solutions to major challenges in education, we will be able to support the development of three ideas generated at this year's event. During the course of the year, ISKME will facilitate additional design workshops, and provide access to networks, services and other resources to help incubate the three ideas selected as part of our new Big Ideas in Beta initiative. All Action Collab participants who are interested in these ideas are invited to participate. At the end of the year, those participating in the Big Ideas in Beta projects will present their solutions at Big Ideas Fest 2012, which could be in the form of prototyped technologies, products, campaigns, or innovations, that have the potential to transform and disrupt teaching and learning as we know it today.