BIGGER BETTER BETAS: Remember Jennie Dougherty, the marvelously high energy Boston-based teacher who started BetaClassroom, a blog about betas? She's going mainstream. Jennie has teamed up with Beth Rabbitt, a doctoral Fellow at Harvard's Ed Innovation Lab and Ben Berte, co-founder of Socrative, to create a new nonprofit, edUpgrade. They're creating a suite of betas and making those available to teachers in exchange for feedback. At first, feedback will happen behind closed doors; later in public. The team also hopes to raise funds to host a "lending library" of hardware that they can make available to their star reviewers. Eleven clever startups are part of the initial beta crowd. The edUpgrade team is still honing the criteria for future betas; broadly speaking they're looking for teacher facing tools from companies that genuinely want feedback. More than 150 teachers joined Betaclassroom last year; more are signing up now. (You can follow the project at #edupgrade). And want to become edUpgrade's new best friend? Drop a note to beth@edupgrade.org if you know a developer who wants to help spiff up edUpgrade's website.
