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Who are the biggest edtech influencers in the world? The Edvocate editorial team has exhaustively researched the movers and shakers of edtech and selected 20 global influencers. To frame our methodology, we decided to define edtech influencer broadly. On this list, you will find administrators, bloggers, journalists, policymakers, researchers, innovators, businessmen, activists, etc. who are transforming the edtech space as we know it.
The influencers that we chose are all active in the area of edtech, doing something influential in 2018, well-known throughout the edtech landscape, and making an impact globally. We are excited to witness how these influencers continue to change the world this year, and we are anxious to see who will stand on the shoulders of these giants, and as a result, make our list next year. Without further ado, here is The Edvocate’s 2018 EdTech 20: A Ranking of 20 Global Edtech Influencers.
Daniel Hamburger, CEO of Renaissance
What His Current Focus Is: Daniel is focused on building an organization that delivers powerful student growth data and insights. He believes actionable data is key to personalized learning, and this data is at the heart of Renaissance solutions. Educators can use assessments to understand what each student has mastered, and then place students into the right level of instructional curriculum. Renaissance is also increasing equity and access through its recent acquisition of myON, a provider of digital literacy solutions. By adding myON, Renaissance provides students with unlimited access to more than 13,000 digital books.
How He’s Transforming the EdTech Space: Daniel and team have launched Renaissance Flow 360, a solution that drives personalized learning by bridging assessment to instruction. It improves learning outcomes for every student, and provides centralized data on student mastery across multiple educational resources, including the top educational vendors.
What His Background Is: Daniel has nearly 20 years of experience in education. Prior to joining Renaissance in 2017, he was CEO of Adtalem Global Education (formerly DeVry Education), a global provider of educational services. He led Adtalem from 2006 through 2016 and drove its transformation from a domestic, single university to an industry-leading institution serving students around the world and across multiple disciplines.
What May Surprise You About Him: Daniel was brought up in a family that highly valued education, especially varied educational experiences. In fact, their rule was, “You can go to any college you want, as long as it’s Michigan.”
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmhamburger18/
Email: Daniel.Hamburger@renaissance.com
Todd Brekhus, President of myON at Renaissance Learning
What His Current Focus Is: Todd believes that literacy, student choice, and personalized learning are the three keys to transforming learning for all students. myON’s expansive digital content library and literacy tools, paired with Renaissance’s complementary reading practice and assessment offerings, enables the company to deliver a comprehensive, innovative suite of reading solutions to educators and students worldwide. Todd and his team work to inspire the love of reading and learning by leveling the playing field with unlimited access to books. He is a lifelong advocate of reading and literacy.
How He’s Transforming the EdTech Space: Through myON’s literacy ecosystem, Todd and his team offer more than 4 million students instant and unlimited access to more than 13,000 enhanced digital books and daily news articles, real-time assessments, and close reading tools.
What His Background Is: As the President of myON at Renaissance Learning, Todd is focused on product development and providing educators tools to create a personalized learning environment. Before joining the edtech business community, he spent eight years in education as a teacher, department chair, and technology director. He has led successful edtech companies including Capstone Digital, PLATO Learning, Learning Elements, and MCI WorldCom, where he helped develop and implement the Marco Polo program.
What May Surprise You About Him: In high school, Todd was a competitive slalom ski racer.
Twitter: @ToddBrekhus
Email: tbrekhus@myon.com
Chris Twyman, Co-Founder & CEO of BoomWriter Media
What His Current Focus Is: Chris’s passion is to make sure that edtech doesn’t widen the achievement gap. As an entrepreneur in the education industry, either you target your product at the schools that can afford to pay or you make sure everyone can use it and find a way to fund the business. The latter is a much bigger challenge than the former, but that is the mission of BoomWriter. If it is successful, it will narrow the achievement gap. Chris’s investors understand this mission, and everyone sleeps more soundly because of that.
How He’s Transforming the EdTech Space: Many kids don’t like writing, but they do like using their imaginations. BoomWriter allows students to inject imagination into their writing, making it super engaging. Engaged kids produce better work, and better writing impacts all other areas of education.
What His Background Is: Chris has always worked in the technology space. From his start in the UK through to living in Boston, he has worked at large software companies like Sybase, Computer Associates, and Tibco. Before founding BoomWriter, Chris was the founder and CEO of an HR technology start-up. Somewhere in there, he also squeezed in an MBA and is a partner in a small VC fund based in Miami.
What May Surprise You About Him: He has run the Boston Marathon twice and is a paid-up member of the Bigfoot Research Organization.
Twitter: @BoomWriter_
Email: chris@boomwriter.media
Chaks Appalabattula, Founder & CEO of Bloomz, Inc.
What His Current Focus Is: Chaks is focused on continuing the fast growth of the Bloomz app, an easy-to-use parent-teacher communication tool for today’s parents, who are used to communicating through their smartphones. Bloomz has a familiar social media interface that encourages parents to participate in their child’s learning and connect with their teacher through a secure platform. With the launch of their school-wide offering, Chaks has also created a powerful premium subscription for school administrators that includes useful data analytics, premium access for all their members, and unlimited membership and storage.
How He’s Transforming the EdTech Space: Chaks has helped bring Bloomz to more than 39,000 schools around the world by combining a social networking experience with a comprehensive set of tools—messaging and media sharing, calendar, signups, and student behavior tracking—in one friendly, easy-to-use app.
What His Background Is: Before creating Bloomz, Chaks applied his computer science and engineering education at companies such as Microsoft, AskMe, and most recently as the vice president of product and partnerships at GlobalScholar, where he focused on building an end-to-end learning platform to connect teachers, students, and administrators. He founded Bloomz, Inc. in January 2014 and serves as the Founder and CEO.
What May Surprise You About Him: Chaks created Bloomz after he and his wife both fell ill and had communication difficulties with his children’s teachers.
Twitter: @achaks
Email: Chaks@bloomz.com
Co-founder and chief scientist at KinderLab Robotics, Inc., and a professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and the Computer Science Department at Tufts University, where she directs the DevTech research group.
What Her Current Focus Is: Dr. Bers is focused on innovative learning technologies to promote positive youth development. Her research focuses on how technology, such as robotics and programming languages, promotes new ways of thinking and learning in early childhood. With Dr. Bers’ approach, introducing computational thinking in early childhood, students learn to be creators and collaborators with technology and with each other. Her most recent book explores coding as a “new language”, and how it can be presented in a playful context, merging STEM/STEAM and coding with social-emotional learning.
How She’s Transforming the EdTech Space: Dr. Bers developed the KIBO robot kit for children 4–7, which is programmed with wooden blocks without keyboards or screens, and is used in 52 countries. She also co-developed the free ScratchJr programming language with over 9.5M downloads.
What Her Background Is: Dr. Bers did her undergraduate at Buenos Aires University, and received a Master’s degree from Boston University and a Master of Science and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory, where she studied under Dr. Seymour Papert, world-renowned pioneer in developing the first programming language for children, LOGO. She has received prestigious awards, has written four books, and in 2014 did a TEDx talk titled “Young programmers – think playgrounds, not playpens.”
What May Surprise You About Her: Dr. Bers is from Argentina, has three children, speaks four languages, dances tango, and has worked all over the world.
Twitter: @marinabers
Email: Marina.Bers@tufts.edu
To view the full list click here.