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Rupert Murdoch given $27M no-bid contract from state Department of Education
http://www.wirelessgeneration.com/company/about
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We have a long history of using technology to make a meaningful difference in Pre-K-12 education.
Larry Berger and Greg Gunn, who met as Rhodes Scholars, shared a passion for technology and an interest in what it could do for K-12 teachers.They went on to found Wireless Generation, a company that combines a deep understanding of teaching and learning with unparalleled technological expertise and a proven ability to bring innovations to scale.
Headquartered in Brooklyn, NY, we produce a steady stream of educational innovations to help schools in all 50 states improve teaching and learning. We serve more than 200,000 educators and three million students with:
http://dumbonyc.com/2010/11/24/wireless-generation-newscorp/
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Dumbo’s Wireless Generation Acquired by News Corp for $360M
November 24th, 2010
News Corporation yesterday announced an agreement to acquire 90% of Wireless Generation, a privately-held Dumbo-based education technology company for approximately $360 million in cash. News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in a statement that Wireless Generation is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning. As such, it is poised to revolutionize public education for a whole new generation of students. Founders of Wireless Generation, Greg Gunn and Larry Berger established the business in 2000 and has 400 employees (one of Dumbo’s largest employer) and delivers mobile and Web software, data systems and professional services designed to empower teachers.
The NY Times calls the announcement “all the more interesting because just two weeks ago, [New York City’s schools chancellor] Mr. Klein said he would leave the chancellor’s job at the end of the year to become an executive vice president with News Corporation, charged with pursuing business opportunities in the education marketplace.”
This acquisition follows the Drop.io asset acquisition by Facebook last month, and the former Waterfront Media merger with Revolution Health in 2008.
Wireless Generation
55 Washington Street, Suite 900
Brooklyn, NY 11201
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/brooklyn-firm-offers-up-free-online-lesson-plans/68577/
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Brooklyn Firm Offers Up Free Online Lesson Plans for Teachers
By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | December 26, 2007
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/brooklyn-firm-offers-up-free-online-lesson-plans/68577/
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ShareWith American schools spending billions of dollars a year buying textbooks, a Brooklyn-based company is offering a new Web site that gives kindergarten teachers full lesson plans — at no charge.
Heuichul Kim
A Brooklyn Teacher, Dixon Deutsch, uses a lesson from www.Free-Reading.net.
The site adds to several efforts around the country to make curricula more widely available through the Internet. Yale University recently made some of its most popular classes available to audit online for free, and another Web site, Curriki.org, is trying to collect a Web site full of free lesson plans for elementary, middle, and high school students in subjects from math to foreign languages.
But the ambitions of Free-Reading's creators, two Rhodes scholars at a company called Wireless Generation, based in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, make it unique. Larry Berger and Gregory Gunn aim not just to connect reading teachers, but to slash at the heart of a business so formidable in American school spending that Mr. Berger has dubbed it "Big Edu."
"I wouldn't say that this is the death of the textbook," a vice president at Wireless Generation, Andrea Reibel, said. "But this may herald a big change in how high-quality instructional programs are created, distributed, and priced." The idea is that by freeing school districts from all the money they now spend on textbooks, Free-Reading can spark a revolution in how schools serve children, directing resources away from the textbook ideas that have been around for hundreds of years in favor of products now in fashion as the crucial tools for reviving American education. (Not coincidentally, many of these tools — testing and data systems that help teachers customize their instruction to individual children, and on-the-job instruction that teaches them how to do that — are now sold by Wireless Generation.)
So far, Free-Reading's reach is limited. It is not a full literacy curriculum, just a set of "intervention" activities for supplementary use, and it targets only very early readers. But Ms. Reibel said that since its November release, Free-Reading has spread quickly. The site has had 77,000 unique visitors since the summer, 4,400 of them from New York City. Major school districts, including the Boston Public Schools, are testing the site, she said, and the state of Florida may soon add it to a list of approved supplementary reading curricula.
"It's kind of like Wikipedia," a teacher at the Achievement First elementary charter school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, who uses Free-Reading, Dixon Deutsch, said. "Early on, people thought Wikipedia was just another Web site, but now look at it."
The site is popular in Mr. Deutsch's classroom, where struggling students — the school calls them "scholars" — come to get their reading skills spruced up.
"I'm so happy to play Bingo!" a kindergartner named Tyrell squealed, as Mr. Deutsch began a recent lesson he downloaded from Free-Reading. In the game, students use letters to fill out a Bingo board, and instead of calling out the letters, the teacher displays them, forcing students to sound them out themselves.
Tyrell wasn't the only one having a good time. Before any letters had been called, students were already shouting "Bingo," prompting Mr. Deutsch to deliver a mini-lecture reminding them of what the word is supposed to mean.
The teacher said that before Free-Reading, his school's repertoire of lessons to add to basic drills was limited. Some teachers would vary the volumes of their voices when saying word sounds out loud. Mr. Deutsch sometimes would play the commercial word game Boggle.
Free-Reading, whose lessons are monitored by an advisory board that includes several education professors and literacy experts, has changed that.
However, it has not yet saved Achievement First much money, if any. Though the charter school network now pays about $37,000 a year per school for its basic reading curriculum, SRA, it does not pay for a Free-Reading equivalent, Achievement First's director of external relations, Lesley Esters Redwine, said.
Though Ms. Reibel said Wireless Generation could well get into that market, too, Ms. Redwine said Achievement First is not looking to replace SRA, either, citing top-notch results.
Assuming the promise holds, Free-Reading could help the school save in other areas.
After Mr. Deutsch finished his kindergarten lesson, he began talking about his second-graders, who needed help with word comprehension and complex vocabulary. Those are areas Free-Reading does not yet target. So Mr. Deutsch typed SRA's Web address into his Internet browser.
The site had a set of tools. But they had a price tag: For a few months worth of lessons, the cost would be $381.66.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/05/murdoch-wireless-generation-contract-teachers-union_n_919325.html
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Murdoch acquired 90 percent of Wireless Generation for about $360 million last November. At the time of the acquisition, Murdoch said he saw K-12 education as a "$500 billion sector." Murdoch's first general move in the education sector had come just a few weeks earlier, when he tapped Joel Klein, then the chancellor of New York City's schools, to lead his education ventures.
The Wireless Generation contracts were approved while Klein still ran the district, leading to speculation about the chancellor's intentions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Klein
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Joel Irwin Klein (born October 25, 1946) was Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the largest public school system in the United States, serving more than 1.1 million students in more than 1,600 schools. He was succeeded by Cathie Black in January 2011.
Rupert Murdoch and Gordon Brown
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