There are plenty of schools out there with green practices among their goals, but a new school opening this fall in Bali will be entrepreneurially green from top to bottom.

The Green School, which will offer preschool through year eight, aims to provide a place where students can become more curious and more passionate about their education and the planet. The school's eight-hectare campus in Sibang Kaja is divided by the Ayung River, on whose western bank are the school's classrooms, libraries, laboratories and kitchens. Aquaculture ponds, organic vegetable gardens, edible mazes and permacultural gardens are interspersed throughout the vast campus, which is built entirely of low-impact and environmentally conscious materials such as bamboo, alang-alang grass and traditional Balinese mud walls. For energy supplies, the school is experimenting with micro-hydro power generation as well as producing methane from cow manure to fuel stoves and developing a gasification unit that will use rice husks and other organic materials to produce electricity. A working organic chocolate factory, large sports fields, gymnasium, high ropes course and a network of bicycle paths are also part of the campus.

The Green School's curriculum, meanwhile, combines demanding academic content taught through a holistic approach that aims to inspire and enhance all of a child’s capacities. The school's Learning Village, for example, gives students a chance to apply lessons to specific disciplines and real business situations, making abstract ideas come to practical life. Students are involved in everything from manufacturing their own chocolate to helping manage the organic fields, bamboo plantations and rice paddies that are integral to the campus. The Green School is open to children from all over the world, with boarding available starting next year for those in seventh grade and up. Villas are available for international families whose children attend the school. Tuition ranges from roughly USD 4,000 to USD 9,000 per year, depending on grade.

It doesn't get much more eco-iconic than a thoroughly green school, and eco-minded consumers with the means to afford it will surely find the Green School compelling. Of course, the concept seems like one that could also work in other parts of the world. One to watch!

Website: www.greenschool.org
Contact: info@greenschool.org

Spotted by: Caramel

There's nothing like a great song to inspire music fans to want to learn to play it themselves, but doing it right is rarely easy. Enter Now Play It, a UK-based site that offers video instruction taught by the artists themselves.

Launched last year, Now Play It aims to get people as close to the artists and songs they love as possible. To do that, it offers downloadable video tutorials on the art and craft of playing hundreds of different songs on guitar, bass, piano or drums, many of them led by the artists who wrote or perform them. Paul McCartney, Blur and KT Tunstall are among the artists currently offering instruction on the site, and users can search for tutorials by artist, song, instrument, difficulty level or tutor. Now Play It's full tutorials, priced at GBP 3.99, are typically split into three parts—lesson, recap and play-through—and are at least 15 minutes long. In-house tutorials follow the same format but with instruction by a Now Play It tutor instead. 'Lite' tutorials, meanwhile, are just two parts—play-through and recap—and are generally between three and six minutes long; pricing is GBP 1.99. Downloads are available in MP4 or Windows Media Video formats.

With Generation C's penchant for content production, Now Play It is sure to find an enthusiastic audience among the many consumers out there seeking to create, to express themselves and to make the music they love their own. Being taught by a well-known artist, meanwhile—even if by video—is sure to give them a heaping helping of status skills and stories to share about the experience. Now Play It currently offers a forum for community discussion, but a logical next step, it seems to us, would be to give consumers a place to show off the results of their instruction with video and recordings of them playing the music they learned—along with opportunities to critique and discuss. If there's anything better than content, it's content plus community! (Related: Music school for generation YouTube.)

Website: www.nowplayit.com
Contact: enquiries@nowplayit.com

Spotted by: Lloyd Salmons

Lifelong learners are always in search of new classes to take, but finding them isn't always easy. TeachStreet is a new website dedicated to helping teachers and students connect.

Seattle-based TeachStreet launched into beta a few weeks ago with more than 25,000 Seattle-area teachers, trainers, tutors, instructors, coaches and classes. Students can search for teachers across more than 500 subjects and filter the results according to map-based location, ratings from other students, teacher availability, promotional pricing and more. The free site can be searched by keyword, or visitors can scroll by subject through TeachStreet’s extensive directory of classes. Classes and teachers currently available on TeachStreet cover popular subjects like tennis, piano and cooking, as well as less common ones like break dancing, surfing and Texas Hold ‘em Poker. For teachers, TeachStreet provides a simple yet powerful way to promote themselves online and manage their learning business. Free online tools for teachers include an online profile builder, search engine optimization, and scheduling and management tools.

“We have heard time and again from adult learners and parents how difficult it is to find relevant and up-to-date information to evaluate teachers," explains TeachStreet founder and CEO Dave Schappell. "At the same time, teachers are craving easy-to-use tools to help market themselves on the Internet, manage their student rosters, and find more prospective students in their neighbourhoods. One of our goals with TeachStreet is to use the latest online technologies to facilitate real-world connections and provide anyone who wants to either learn or teach a new skill with a rich, geographically targeted website that features a city’s best teaching resources.”

TeachStreet is currently ad-supported, but ultimately it plans to roll out premium, fee-based services for teachers as well. It also aims to expand to other US cities in the coming months. One to partner with in a city near you...?

Website: www.teachstreet.com
Contact: www.teachstreet.com/contact-us

Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann

Last summer we wrote about FreeHand Advertising and its initiative to give free, ad-supported notepaper to college students, and now ABS Notebooks is going a step further and handing out whole notebooks instead.

The Shadow Notebook is a five-subject notebook that gets cobranded with participating colleges and universities across the US and distributed by the school at the start of each semester. The university's logo appears on the cover, and pages of school-related maps and information get included within. Thirteen four-colour, full-page advertisements, meanwhile, act as subject dividers in each notebook, giving advertisers the means to engage students while they are a captive audience in the learning environment. Students, naturally, carry the notebooks with them throughout the day over the course of the semester, which from the advertiser's perspective amounts to 96 impressions over a four-month period, ABS says. So far, about 700,000 notebooks have been distributed to college students at campuses nationwide.

College students spend some USD 198 billion per year, according to Harris Interactive, so it's no wonder advertisers are going to new lengths to reach them. We've now seen free photocopies, free printing, free notepaper, free phone calls and now free notebooks—it all goes to show, there's no such thing as too much free love!

Website: www.absnotebooks.com
Contact: info@absnotebooks.com

Our brains resemble our muscles in one key respect: don’t exercise them, and they're likely to lose strength. Conversely, many experts now believe that brains stimulated in a healthy manner can better resist debilitating mental conditions such as Alzheimer’s. Which begs the question: how to keep brains in top shape?

The solution offered by vibrantBrains, a San Francisco start-up, is to create a workout centre for the brain, patterned after a health club. Instead of exercising muscle groups via a series of circuit-training machines, vibrantBrains members hone their mental skills using a variety of computer software programs and other tools, for a monthly membership fee of USD 60. vibrantBrain’s health-club-for-the-mind approach should appeal to the millions of baby boomers who’ve spent their adult lives regularly visiting gyms. As they approach retirement age, they’ll want to maintain their mental agility, too, as attested by sales of Nintendo’s Brain Age, which sold 10 million copies, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

No doubt we’ll see plenty of additional products and services aimed at enhancing baby boomers’ brain power, joining a long list of companies already selling everything from vitamins to training seminars. Still, vibrantBrain’s model is unique. And from a business standpoint, it has a couple of profit-enhancing advantages over the traditional gyms that it’s based on. Space requirements are minimal compared to health clubs, and entrepreneurs won’t have to lease or buy an expensive array of exercise machines.

If the mental health club idea catches on, the real competition eventually may come from traditional health clubs, which could add brain-exercise routines as easily as they’ve added yoga and martial arts instruction. However, even if that happens, there should be plenty of opportunities for start-ups to differentiate themselves—from rehabilitative clinics for the elderly to centers focused on mental and physical exercises for kids.

Website: www.vibrantbrains.com
Contact: info@vibrantbrains.com

Spotted by: Wendy Hoffman