What it’s essential to know concerning the newest acquisitions and the rebrand from Kidblog to Fanschool:
- Kidblog, the Minneapolis-based Ok-12 pupil portfolio and publishing platform, has acquired two Minneapolis instructional know-how corporations
- Fanschool, an academic platform with a sports activities fantasy strategy
- InsertLearning, a Google Chrome extension that transforms the content material of any net web page into interactive classes
- The mixed group will probably be often known as Fanschool
- Fanschool founder Eric Nelson and InsertLearning founder Ben Pedersen will be part of the manager management staff of the brand new group.
- Nelson will concentrate on “strategic partnerships with college districts and non-profit organizations”
- Pedersen to function Chief Expertise Officer
- Kidblog Co-Founder and CEO Matt Hardy will proceed to function CEO
The Quote: Matt Hardy, CEO of Fanschool
“America’s faculties are lastly at a tipping level the place ubiquitous on-line entry and 1: 1 gadgets create the muse for technology-enabled studying experiences. Conventional studying administration techniques (LMS) have made massive guarantees that they haven’t stored: college students don’t have any energy in class. Reasonably, student-centeredness is the muse for reworking training to be really personalised, genuine, and interesting for all stakeholders. “
We interviewed Eric Nelson final 12 months about his fantasy sports activities studying strategy. See an excerpt beneath and skim the total article right here.
As a lot Of different issues proper now, the short-term way forward for sports activities is up within the air. Whereas it is a protected wager that hundreds of followers will not be making it to stadiums anytime quickly, the pause button that is been hit so viciously by COVID-19 has additionally thrown a viral key in fantasy sports activities. Baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer … it is extremely seemingly that you possibly can not obsessively learn spreadsheets or give you a concise title to your staff.
However the world, whether or not we prefer it or not, will not be going wherever anytime quickly. For Eric Nelson, founding father of FANschool, that is an excellent factor.
“Principally, we’re the one fantasy sports activities sort video games that aren’t canceled,” he mentioned.

Eric Nelson
Gamifying and stimulating the curiosity of a rising thoughts concerning the world, FANschool takes the pitfalls of fantasy sports activities – the dramatic draft course of, rivalries, agony and ecstasy of competitors – and applies them to an instructional endeavor. As an alternative of operating backs or middle fielders, FANschool gamers choose nations, states, members of Congress, and others for video games of improbable geopolitics.
For Nelson, a former Forest Lake social research instructor, the thought of merging fantasy sports activities and studying got here from realizing that regardless of all of the know-how obtainable within the classroom, academics have been nonetheless primarily accountable for ship content material on to college students. Reasonably than packaging training in pop quizzes or handouts, Nelson needed to offer college students possession of what they have been studying whereas simplifying typically advanced data within the course of.
“That has all the time been the premise of design,” he mentioned. “Take the metrics of the world and make them as simple to know because the batting common.”
Learn the total article.