It appears that students are still top of mind for the two most influential technologists and philanthropists of our time. Last week, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $12 million to code.org. Said Gates: “The role of philanthropy here is not to be the primary funder, but rather to fund pilots, to fund new ideas, to let people — it’s always the educators coming up with the ideas — to let them try them out and see what really works super well and get those to scale.” And in a letter posted last week to, yes Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg detailed the plans of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: “One challenge we've seen in education is that there are many brilliant teachers and school leaders who create new kinds of schools based on new models of learning — but those schools usually only serve hundreds of students, while most children still do not have access to them…Our hope is that technology can help with this scaling challenge.” It’s certainly big talk but if anyone can back it up it would be these two! —Kevin Hogan, Content Director
