To all the loyal readers of the PlansForUsBlog, please check out the new design we have for PlansForUs. For the past month or so, Steve has been thinking about a site design that is simple and that will establish a jumping off point for ongoing improvements. We have also been working on improving our message. The result of this work, is the new design you see at PlansForUs.

Let us know what you think.

Good morning. So this week PlansForUs is experimenting with MySpace. While we are well aware that MySpace lacks the tech street cred of Facebook, it has a lot of members. In fact, today I joined a group of 2,000 some educators on MySpace.

I will be watching how this MySpace networking experiment goes very closely.

So we are heading into the weekend with a lot of exciting things to come for next week. Principally, Steve has been working hard on a redesign of the site that we hope to launch on Monday. This redesign will be a nice step forward, I’ll blog about the new stuff next week.

To complete the marketing series here are the final three

7. How-To Stories and Advice

Terry was perplexed. How to teach her first graders units of measurement. Lucky for Terry, PlansForUs has a plan from gretchen that worked great for teaching this concept. By reading the plan, checking the rating and reputation and reading the comments, Terry felt this plan would be a slam dunk. With a few changes to fit her classrooms context Terry was on her way to a great teaching moment.

PlansForUs is simple. Find inspiration, create and share. These three stages take a teacher from a problem to a solution, quick.

8. Glitz and Glam

Paris, Britney and Lindsay are not teachers and are not members of PlansForUs.

I know, PlansForUs struggles a little bit when it comes to the glitz and glam factors. That said, we can’t wait to have Golden Apple winners as members of PlansForUs.

9. Seasonal/event-related

The school year is started and there is one place where teachers are collaborating to build new and engaging learning experiences. PlansForUs, see you there.

Join us teachers. PlansForUs is launching in time for the 2007-2008 school year, join up and be a part of the community that understands that teachers working together are the most powerful force for change and success that we know. Creation through collaboration comes alive at PlansForUs.

As indicated in the last post there are 9 interesting marketing pitches. At this point we have only gotten through 3 pitches. I happen to think they are among the strongest, despite that perception, I will soldier on.

4. Contrarian/Counterintuitve/Challenging Assumptions

Relying upon yourself does not produce the most engaging lesson plans. Relying upon what has only been done before does not produce the most engaging lesson plans. Using Microsoft Word limits your ability to seamlessly integrate new ideas into your plans. Change to PlansForUs, there is strength in numbers.

While that statement is not radically contrarian it does challenge that one can rely solely upon what has come before. It also challenges the conceit of being intellectually self-sufficient.

5. Anxieties

-Without collaboration can I possibly be teaching my students the full story.

-Is this plan any good, I mean I just found it on a website.

-I am running out of time and still have no idea how to teach this concept

These are fears that teachers have expressed to me and are at the source of the problem that we are trying to solve. I “like” these because they are real and not just stuff to sow FUD.

6. Personalities and Personal Stories

PlansForUs started on a saturday morning walk through the West Village with my wife. We talked about the difficulty of working in schools where collaboration was not an essential part of teacher interaction. Over breakfast we talked about this problems and outlined some solutions on a napkin. That single conversation lead to a platform where millions of collaborative conversations are happening everyday. Creation through collaboration on PlansForUs is changing the lives of children every single day.

One of the aspects of PlansForUs that we value most highly is our close relationship to teachers. Exemplified most directly by the fact that our wives, mothers and fathers are teachers. Telling this story about the founding of PlansForUs speaks both to our connection to teaching as well as our dedication to finding a solution.

The final installment of this riveting series is coming tomorrow. All I am saying is Paris, Britney and Lindsay.

Let’s be clear-a great product makes the marketing of that product a whole lot easier and we are working our butts off to evolve PlansForUs into a great product-or as we like to think of it-a great platform for idea exchange and use.

However, I should recognize that the story that we use to describe what PlansForUs is doing will be essential to the successful expansion of our business. Thanks to Lois Kelly, the author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing I have a framework to explore how to market PlansForUs. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki and Joshua Porter for bringing this to my attention.

Without further ado, here’s how I might position PlansForUs. I would of course love to hear your opinion on the relative success of each of these positions.

1. Aspirations and Beliefs

PlansForUs is a platform for improving education by empowering teachers with engaging teaching ideas and methods from their peers.

We aspire to have an impact on the education of our future generations, not just on the lives of teachers. The world is getting more competitive and great education is the key to the success of students, workers and countries around the world. The PlansForUs platform is the means for teachers to exchange the ideas that create powerful, engaging learning experiences. You can see that we are definitely exploring this theme with the content on our homepage.

2. David vs Goliath

PlansForUs does not impose artificial, bureaucratic limits on ideas. We believe that it is the teachers, not the administrators that should define and lead the educational experience. PlansForUs is an exchange for ideas and is totally focused on aiding teachers.

In this case, teachers are the David’s in a world of administrative Goliath’s (NCLB, state testing, rankings, static administrations, etc). PlansForUs is the teacher’s slingshot. As a company, we are certainly David’s in the face of the Google’s, Yahoo’s and Blackboard’s of the world, but this positioning is nascent till we gain additional traction.

3. Avalanche about to roll

The rapid development of technology and the fact that 40% of teachers are retiring in the next 7 years has created an enormous challenge for teachers educating our future generations. A challenge, that if not met properly could cause enormous hardship for our teachers and their students. PlansForUs is the tool for capturing the knowledge that we are losing, as well as the rapidly accumulating information that is constantly entering learning networks.

This position ties different generations of teachers together to a common cause, that being to maintain what we know while simultaneously growing the knowledge base in the face of profound technological and global change. I like this theme a lot, except for the fact that there is not quite as much immediacy as I would like. This theme underpins a lot of what we do, but may not resonate to those who are making a decision of whether or not to sign up for PlansForUs.

More to come in future posts. I am of course interested in how to make these statements stronger and look forward to your comments.

Well it is a hot day in NYC today and I am inside with the A/C on.
Regardless, I have spent the day thinking about how to engage our Delta Region Teach for America friends and how to engage the educational bloggers who have been such a great source of insight for the PlansForUs team and me.

Back tomorrow with something more substantive.

I started reading Ben Wilkoff’s blog Discourse about Discourse recently. Ben has been honored by Yahoo as one of the most connected teachers out there. His understanding of how technology should be put to use in the classroom is articulated in a series entitled the Ripe Environment. The core thought behind this series is that technology is worthless without usage, so lets stop talking about technology implementation and start using technology (in his more eloquent words):

The simultaneous personal and public experience of using all of the tools at the teacher’s disposal to tear down walls, collaborate with each another, and question the traditional role of technology in the classroom.

The corollary to this point is that the tools need to be accessible to teachers across a wide range of technical knowledge. So make it easy and we can really get somewhere.

The first unit in the Ripe Environment series is on Connection. This is where it really starts to align with PlansForUs. Here, according to Ben, are the three types of connection that create thee most value: The 1:1, The autograph (aka 1:many), The frame (aka many:many).

Like Ben, the PlansForUs team agrees that successful implementations require that a tool satisfies each of these connections within the application. Simplicity + mult-tier connections is a recipe for success.

Enjoy Ben’s series, it is superb.

This morning I linked my way over to a piece by Clay Shirky entitled Andrew Keen: Rescuing ‘Luddite’ from the Luddites, which I found thought provoking from both a societal perspective and a PlansForUs perspective.

First, an admission. I never knew who the Luddites were, despite the fact that I liberally used the word in many of my college papers and most likely when trying to impress my elders (seems my contemporaries are never to impressed with my vocabulary). So, finding the history of the Luddite movement was really informative.

Now to the meat. Andrew Keen has written a book The Cult of the Amateur which has really stirred up the new media folks. His claim, most simply, is that today’s Internet is killing culture. Clay Shirky has a nuanced response which you can read, but like Nicholas Carr, I thought this quote was the most interesting:

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

I think this is a pretty great direction for society. Yes, it is confusing. Yes, it is cacophonous and sometimes difficult to filter the signal from the noise. But the beauty of the situation is that people are finding personal, unique signals amidst the noise. The consequence of so much unique/personal signal being identified and revealed is that our knowledge base is growing at an exponential rate. So keep the editors out of this, our world is growing more complex by the day and simplifying and professionally editing just hides the full reality of things.

So what does that statement mean for PlansForUs. It means, that the platform of idea exchange that we are building for teachers is full of great ideas for each of your unique teaching situations. There are no universals, just unique ways to connect your students to the knowledge that you share with them everyday.
Keep on signing up teachers, this is going to be awesome.

So I spent the morning messing around with Facebook and LinkedIn with the goal of understanding how to use these two tools to further the PlansForUs goals. To that end I asked a bunch of people to be my friend. It is sort of an artificial experience, requesting friendship, but it seems to be an interesting way to keep in touch. In a world where our attention is constantly being requested, I guess that these networks play a role in keeping us connected.

Beyond exploring, I did create a “PlansForUs-What’s Right, What’s Wrong” group in Facebook. I hope that this group will become an outlet for teachers to reflect their PlansForUs experience both to the team and their fellow PlansForUs users. If you are a Facebook user defintely join the group. That said, the Facebook demographic biases towards our younger so I would love to do something to engage those teachers who aren’t social networked up the wazoo. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, feel free to check out my profiles and if you so choose, request a friend.

This week the PlansForUs team began marketing our collaborative lesson planning tool to teachers. We have been working over the past few months to put together the back end tools that will enable us to grow as seamlessly as possible. It also means that we can focus on delivering cool tools to help you build better lesson plans.
The next month and a half is a great time to explore PlansForUs and tell us how it can be improved so that when school starts PlansForUs is rockin and rollin. Things are going to be happening quickly here at PlansForUs; we hope that you enjoy the ride.

The PlansForUs team

At PlansForUs our focus is upon releasing ideas and teaching strategies from a single school or mind and moving it onto a platform where the idea can be edited and remixed to fit a particular context.

So what would my wife’s Neighborhood Study look like if it were done in Baton Rouge, Juneau or Normal, IL? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to see what it looks like. You can find her plans and others by creating an account at PlansForus.

I have been listening to the Books and really enjoying their music. If you like Architecture in Helsinki, Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, then this may be a band to add to your playlist. I have downloaded the songs: Tokyo, Smells Like Content and That Right Ain’t Shi, thus far and will be adding some more to my collection.
If you decide to check them out I hope that you enjoy as much as I am.

Today PlansForUs took another step towards our goal. That step was that I am now workig full time on PlansForUs. It is an exciting step for our team as it solidifies our commitment to executing on our vision and making a positive impact on the teaching community and on the classrooms where they change the lives of students everyday.

One of the new features that I added was a personal Twitter widget. My thoughts are to use this twitter account to let you know what I am up to and where I might be. I think it would be great to meet the users of PlansForUs, so stop by and introduce yourself and tell me what you think of PlansForUs. I look pretty much like my Meez (see below):