16th September 2008

Brightstorm: High school course help on the way

posted in edtech |

My friend Chris Walsh let me know about an imminent public beta for his new company Brightstorm (formerly Big Tree Learning) coming in a couple of weeks. During a two week period, volunteer beta testers will enjoy “free access to all our courses and material” designed to help students do better in high school courses and prepare for college. According to Chris:

Brightstorm is a new online service that helps high school kids do better in school and prepare for college. In the initial launch, Brightstorm is offering a series of engaging online video courses led by rock-star teachers from around the country. Each teacher has a unique style that helps kids understand the most critical concepts in their subject area as they help them tackle the common tasks that kids need to do to succeed in their regular high school courses. Teachers also help kids deepen their understanding so they feel confident and prepared for more advanced courses in both high school and college. Of course, there’s a whole lot more built into the service, but you need to sign-up to see it in action.

We certainly need access to robust, multimedia-enhanced, differentiated digital curriculum in our schools and homes. It makes sense that the providers of those curriculum materials are most likely to be educational entrepreneurs like Chris as well as OER proponents, rather than traditional textbook publishers.

Give Brightstorm a try. I’m curious to check out their available materials, and I’ll report on what I learn.

As a side note, it’s interesting to see that Brightstorm’s homepage is currently set to use a free Google form. :-)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 10:33 pm and is filed under edtech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 2 responses to “Brightstorm: High school course help on the way”

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  1. 1 On September 17th, 2008, Chris Walsh said:

    Thx for the shout-out Wes! We’re excited to launch into Beta. The full vision of where we want to go is still evolving, but we’re excited to get going with this first version. And I really look forward to hearing your thoughts!

    C-Dub

    P.S. Small correction. Our former name was Big Tree Learning. Learning Tree is a great company - but not us. ; )

  2. 2 On September 17th, 2008, Wesley Fryer said:

    Thanks for the correction, Chris - I changed the link in the post to “Big Tree Learning!”