Just wanted to let our loyal readers know that Brian, Steve and I are working our butts off to get PlansForUs up on May 1.

Looking forward to working with all the teachers out there to build the best possilbe platform for teacher collaboration.

Talk to you soon.

What started with the intent of being a comment to Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s post on “It Is Still About the Learning…” has now turned into a full post of my own. The numerous blog posts and comments that Sheryl highlighted got me thinking and wondering whether teachers are more apprehensive toward technology than any other group of professionals? And, if so, why? I think there are two aspects to this topic: 1) teachers using technology for their own use and 2) teachers incorporating technology into the course material they teach. Number 2, although not always, could be a natural progression from number 1.

Problems with the adoption of a new product or new piece of technology are not unique to the teaching community. From my experience, a majority of people feel as though they lack the necessary and desired amount of time it takes to become comfortable with a new technology. It was a common complaint that I heard while working with support teams for a couple different credit card processing companies in the past (and these were teams of people dealing with complex software everyday). However, I think, as a software developer, that the technology needs to be more intuitive - especially in the education industry. It is completely unrealistic to place software in the hands of a teacher and expect them (during their off hours) to figure out how to derive value from its use unless it is intuitive enough to require nominal to no training. That same software should also have a clear, positive result from its use - that is, it should either produce enjoyment from its use or produce a higher quality of work in the same or less amount of time.

I had the unfortunate experience of watching my fiance go through a 3 day training seminar on how to use a new IEP management system her school was deploying this past fall. She and her fellow resource teachers were instructed on which error messages they should ignore and how to properly interpret the different status messages. This was absurd! And, it’s no wonder that some of the teachers refuse to use it. Technology must serve a visible purpose if you ever expect non-techies (for the lack of a better word) to naturally adopt to it. When easy-to-use, productive technology becomes the norm rather than the exception, you will see more teachers willingly (and eagerly) use and promote it. Once this happens, it becomes a natural progression for technology to be incorporated into the daily lessons they teach.

There are early adopters in all aspects of life, and the active teachers in the blogosphere are those people. They are more willing to deal with buggy software; more willing to spend a weekend learning how to install widgets on their blog; more willing to read a manual and figure something out on their own. This, in my opinion, is as much related to one’s personality as it is to the generation in which you were raised. Rather than focusing a school’s hopes and efforts on new teachers or on mid-career teachers, why not place it in the teachers who have shown a propensity for being an early adopter? Why not place it in the teachers who are highly respected by their peers and tend to have their actions followed? These are the people who will help force the technology to evolve into a usable tool for the rest of the teaching community. These are the people who will push the envelope and help create a more effective and efficient educational system. These are the people that PlansForUs would love to talk to while we try our best to release an intuitive, easy-to-use, productive utility for the teaching community.

Let me know if you think I am way off base here. Not being a teacher, and not working on a daily basis in a school setting, it’s quite possible that there is a dynamic to the situation that I’m just not aware of…

Had to share this.

This evening right before we dug into some delicious hamburgers, my wife and I worked on a lesson plan together. She is teaching her 1st graders units of measurement. It is amazing to see her break down concepts that are seemingly elemental into their own elemental parts. I was so pleased to be consulted on this lesson and hope she will continue to ask for my thoughts. Our collaboration resulted in what we hope is a great plan, I can’t wait to hear the feedback tomorrow.

Thanks for the opportunity to help tonight G.

Just imagine 10 million teachers collaborating around the world on lesson plans.
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What do you think of for-profit philanthropy?

PlansForUs has a mission of increasing the impact teachers have on their students. We believe that we can partly achieve this by building tools at PlansForUs that increase the flow of ideas between teachers. The impact of this free flow of ideas will be that appropriate classroom strategies will find the the teachers that need them. PlansForUs is a knowledge organization and collaboration tool that will create new intellectual partnerships that may not have existed without PlansForUs.

Sorry for the plug, but it helps to talk about what we are up to. Anyway back to for profit philanthropy and fulfilling our mission.

What about those schools that lack the resources for a teacher to fully realize his or her lesson plan and curriculum. What about those teachers who are losing the interest of their students because they are limited in their ability to create valuable out of classroom experiences. What of those classrooms that don’t have enough books or a staff that has been worn down by years of administrative neglect. In order to achieve our mission we are going to need to broaden our scope. That’s why we will seek to create relationships with teacher focused non-profits that we admire, like DonorsChoose and Teach for America.

These relationships might integrate these organizations directly into our website. A DonorsChoose submission widget on every user account page or a special section of the website dedicated to the teachers and alumni of Teach for America. Combine this with significant financial commitments from PlansForUs and you establish an ecosystem of good for teachers. An ecosystem that allows us to achieve our mission.

Speak to you soon.

In our ongoing effort to put the best foot forward and think deeply about our business, we have decided to rewrite our business plan. We recognize that we will have to improve the organization of our plan if we are to be successful in raising future rounds of funding. Additionally, since our first meeting with a group of test teachers, our plan has evolved.

In order to organize properly we have turned to Brad Feld. Brad writes an amazing blog about venture capital, that is both an interesting read and an invaluable resource to entrepreneurs. There is one particular post that we have gone back to in an effort to address the important questions that a company should seek to answer in their business plan.

Using this post as a guide, we have begun to recompose our original business plan and during this process we (or at this point, I) have been challenged by the question of customer acquisition costs. Because we are building a tool that relies upon word of mouth, PR, product advocacy to grow the PlansForUs user base we figure that customer acquisition costs will be determined by the human resources expended marketing through word of mouth, PR, and product development. The problem is, we are unclear as to what the formula looks like for computing valid customer acquistion cost assumptions. If you happen to have any thoughts on how we might put a value on our customer acquisition efforts or have read something, please leave a comment or send me a link in del.icio.us (username: tylerfonda).

Anyway, thought I would share some of the thinking from the business formation end. We are working hard to launch PlansForUs and hope to have something for our teachers to work with near the end of April. Till then, we will continue to write and share this process with you.

Speak to you soon.

A little extra help can go a long ways, and, if you are a teacher, I’m sure you’ve seen this first hand. Well, with the relaunch of the TutorLinker.com service, the search for this help may have just become easier. The service allows you to search by an address for available tutors within your area. Each tutor will be highlighted on a map and, after clicking to view the tutor’s profile, you will be able to see the subjects they cover and the price they charge per hour.

The TutorLinker.com website is your classic, Web 2.0 site. Using the Google Maps API to create a mash-up of tutors and maps and a nice influx of AJAX, they’ve created a great looking website that is easy to navigate. However, the site lacks the ability to rate tutors and leave comments for the rest of the community to see. In my opinion, this greatly diminishes the usefulness of their service. If I have no way to know the quality of work provided by the tutor, I might as well not even know about the tutor.

With a few extra features, TutorLinker.com could become a great resource for teachers, students and parents to leverage. It will be interesting to see how quickly they can grow their base of tutors to adequately cover the nation and make the service applicable to all. This is a common hurdle that all social sites, including PlansForUs, has to overcome. We, for sure, will be keeping an eye on their site to see how they do and wish them well in their efforts.

Will we lose the collected wisdom of retiring teachers?

Many teachers will be retiring over the next 10 years. In fact, of the ~4 million teachers teaching now, nearly half are over the age of 50. Check out the National Center for Education Statistics for this info and a mountain of other interesting stats; I can assure you, the PlansForUs team is combing through these stats right now. While the impact, as Brett Pawlowski points out, of the changing demographics of teaching will be significant, the PlansForUs team is concerned about losing the amazing accumulation of knowledge that is bound up in our retiring teachers.

PlansForUs is the solution for capturing this knowledge. At PlansForUs, the knowledge becomes evergreen the minute that the ideas, lesson plans and feedback are entered into the system. While styles of teaching evolve, the essential knowledge gained through 30 years of experience is captured and passed on to generations to come. (If any teachers need help moving this knowledge from their hard drives, either computer or brain, please contact us, we would love to help you make this content available.)

PlansForUs is the place for teachers to come, to plan, to learn and to share their collective experience. It is a place where an idea can impact a classroom a world away or a door away. Education is our most important cultural asset, lets make sure that nothing is lost in this demographic transformation occurring in teaching.

Speak to you soon.