There was an interesting piece from Liz Gannes over at GigaOm this past Thursday. It was entitled “When Social Web Tools Get Creative.” What fascinated me about the post was that it took social networks in a new direction. No longer were the explicit social aspects of the network the key attribute, instead the piece described how a network’s members could refine a product online through network collaboration.

But these social, accessible, dare-I-say-web-2.0 tools can be brought to another level to enable you to make something you can bring back to your offline life. Then they’re not just social, but collaboratively creative.

What about teachers? Teachers don’t teach online; they must transfer a digital good into a physical lesson plan. Perhaps, by utilizing a social network that was integrated with a lesson plan builder teachers could build better lesson plans and expand their range of classroom experiences.

At PlansForUs we are building the toolset to help teachers refine their lesson plans through the participation of a social network of teachers. Those tools that are built with a layer of social networking resting on top of their core utility will continue to grow, particularly in vertical markets. PlansForUs intends to apply this layer of utility onto lesson plan building for the tens of millions of teachers worldwide.

Speak to you soon.

Nicole, my fiance and member of the Resource Department at Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, brought home a letter she had received during her latest weekly staff meeting. It was from Susan Carter, a high school teacher in California for 33 years, who was spreading the word about a teacher’s inability to receive social security in some states simply because he or she was a teacher.

When my husband died in April of 2006, I contacted Social Security to find out how to proceed to obtain his social security. My husband contributed to SSI for forty years. The woman with whom I spoke told me I would be receiving fourteen hundred plus dollars a month. As we spoke, I shared with her that I was a teacher. She said, “You’re a teacher?” When I responded in the affirmative she told me I would be getting nothing.

Apparently, there are two federal laws that make this possible: 1) the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and 2) the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) under Title II of the Social Security Act. Mrs. Carter is trying to bring attention to this unbelievable situation by spreading the word about it to anybody and everybody she can. Her letter, the one Nicole brought home, was sent to the National Education Association (NEA), so, rather than doing an injustice to her work and effort by paraphrasing the letter, please take the time to read it yourself. As you will see, she already has Senator Dianne Feinstein and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s support but needs more.

After you read what she has to say, and if you feel the same as she, please take the time to place a phone call and show your support. Call Senator Baucus (D-Montana), Finance Committee chair at 202-224-2651 or Senator Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Finance Committee at 202-224-3744 and tell them you support S.206.

It started with a discussion between my wife and I on how to improve communication and collaboration between teachers. My wife asked the question, “How do I get feedback on my lesson plans and find new ideas if I am solely responsible for coming up with lessons?” We continued our discussion and delved deeper into the daily life of a teacher. This led to further discussions with other teachers, young and old, from private and public schools.

All of these discussions pointed to a problem; teachers are not getting enough peer support to create the best classroom environments for their students. Teachers must constantly evaluate the best way to teach their class based on the classroom’s makeup; limiting their access to good ideas and lesson plans, limits their ability to be effective teachers. I thought that collaborative technologies like wikis, social networks and online word processing could fill this gap. With this as a start, I began to research what a solution might look like and to build a team that could execute the solution.

Which leads us to PlansForUs. With PlansForUs, a teacher is not alone. As a member of PlansForUs, a teacher’s ideas are no longer on an island; they are part of an interconnected world. A teacher from Nebraska will share her ideas and plans with a teacher from New York, who might connect to a teacher in Canada who shares an idea with a teacher in India. No longer constrained by geography, PlansForUs can facilitate a community that connects, shares, collaborates and builds a global community of teachers impacting the lives of children both in and beyond their own classrooms. PlansForUs is where ideas and teaching converge to the benefit of teachers and their students.

In our research, we have acutely observed the success of Wikipedia, read what people like JP Rangaswami are saying about the power of collaboration and openness to positively impact the world, and internalized the writings of Clarence Fisher, Jeff Utecht, Sheryl Nussbaum and other educational bloggers who are bringing technology and collaborative learning into the classroom. These influences shape how we have built PlansForUs, and we hope to build deeper connections with these individuals and organizations as we evolve our service.

We are about serving teachers. We are humbled by the collective intelligence of our future users and, therefore, embrace the community of teachers as our guide to building PlansForUs. We accept the challenge that their embrace of PlansForUs will result in a unique relationship that can change the world for the better.

Speak to you soon.