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Back now at 8:36 with Education Nation Today this morning:
How technology is leading to a new kind of learning.
NBC's Craig Melvin is here with a look
at the classroom of the future.
Hey, Craig, good morning.
David, good morning to you.
Savannah, good morning to you as well.
From textbooks to tablets.
Have you ever wondered what our classrooms
will look like ten, twenty, even fifty years from now?
Well, some innovative thinkers
are unlocking new and powerful ways to teach our kids,
changing the way we look at our education system
in the process.
The numbers alone are staggering.
The thing about the education system is -
- it's a very impersonal system,
it's a factory model.
One student drops out of high school every 26 seconds.
Roughly 30 percent of kids each year
will not graduate from high school.
That's 1.3 million in all
falling through the cracks of our education system.
Worldwide, the numbers grow exponentially.
A whopping eighty percent of kids
will not get a high school diploma.
Experts say each of those kids is a lost opportunity.
How many DaVincis and Einsteins
and Marie Curies and Michael Jordans
are we losing every generation,
because we are just not giving them the opportunities
that some of us have.
But what if that could be changed?
What if an Internet connection was the difference
in getting a world-class education?
Today, education is having that 'Internet moment.;
And a chosen few are taking some bold steps forward.
I'm Jose Ferreira, the founder and CEO of Knewton.
We're trying to revolutionize education across the globe.
Knewton is an adaptive learning platform
that personalizes education
based on each kid's strengths and weaknesses.
In essence, students go at their own pace
and the software continously adapts
to their learning style.
If you learn math best,
with medium difficulty practice questions, we know that.
If you learn Science best in 24-minute bite sizes,
we know that.
Everybody has a learning experience that is unique to them.
Ferreira started the company in 2008
using his credit card.
Since then, Knewton has grown by leaps and bounds.
They currently reach almost 5 million students –
and that number is growing.
We want to end the access problem for education.
We want every kid – whether you're in the inner city,
or in the developing world – we want you to have
the best possible education you can get.
My name is Sal Khan,
and I'm the founder of the Khan Academy.
In 2004, Sal Khan was tutoring his cousins remotely
from his then home in Boston.
The lessons started over the phone
until a friend suggested he upload his
educational videos to YouTube.
And I immediately said, "No.Videos and YouTube –
that's for cats playing piano – not serious mathematics."
But I gave it a shot.
And those videos took on a life of their own.
Those videos became the cornerstone of Khan Academy –
a virtual library of. now, more than four thousand tutorials –
covering everything from basic math
to college level chemistry.
Our goal over the next five, ten, fifty, five hundred years,
is to go from the six million students
that we're serving every month now
to sixty million – six hundred million students.
One of those students recently sent Khan a video message
from the unlikeliest of places – an orphanage -- in Mongolia.
Hey Sal. Your lessons are so interesting and funny.
Make more lessons.
That by itself is pretty mind-blowing for us.
This idea that, the work that we get to do
can reach people as far away
as an orphanage in Mongolia.
Two companies led by two visionaries
both using the reach of technology
to reimagine the future of education.
And now, Knewton recently partnered with
education publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
As a result, more kids will have access
to their adaptive learning platform.
And we should note: Khan Academy's mission statement,
"Changing education for the better, by providing
a free world-class education for anyone anywhere."
that means all of their tutorial videos are free of charge.
SAVANNAH: That's pretty cool.
Great stuff. Great model.
Thank you.
I'm looking forward to you dance in a few minutes, too.
Oh, well. You never know.