So I was doing some research this morning on Professor Tom Hatch, who I am looking forward to meeting in a few weeks, and came across the KEEP Toolkit. This toolkit is an outgrowth of the work that Tom and his colleagues have done capturing and archiving the classroom experience for the NCREST and the Quest Project.

Here’s the punchline. In a few months, Yahoo will launch its Yahoo Teachers site w/ the vaunted “Gobbler” feature, which sounds an awful lot like what they have been doing with KEEP Toolkit for some time now.
I am not so sure that gobbling or copying from the Internet is the killer app for teachers, but it is interesting to see the parallels in these two products.

(I originally posted this at the Classroom 2.0 Ning)
I read this post from Ryan Bretag this weekend and thought this group might have some additional insights on the post.

In the post Ryan was asked the following question:

If only one thing ’stuck’ with the teachers this year, what do you hope it to be”?

His answer was (I promise to do more than paraphrase):

The one thing I want to stick this year, my major goal, is fostering the development and implementation of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) for each teacher and administrator.

The form in which he hoped that the PLE took was that of an aggregator/feed reader/feed aggregator. Now I thought this was a cool idea and as a long time user of RSS readers, I absolutely recognize the power of these information organizers. With the advent of start pages, I think aggregators can be even more powerful….however what troubled me (and I commented as much) was that most teachers/administrators would have to be educated on the components that go into using an aggregator. First step is blogs (how do I find good ones? Do I really care? I don’t have enough time to read them?), RSS (What is this?) and finally Aggregators (Sounds boring? Sort of an unwieldy word?) Now there is nothing wrong with educating someone on new things, but with so many issues and so little time, is it reasonable that a large percentage of teachers would get on board with an heretofore unknown tool.

So, my response was (admittedly self-serving, as you’ll soon see) lets build personal learning environments from a common place or unit. PlansForUs, the company I founded, chose the lesson plan as the unit for sharing and building community around. Once teachers are using the community to build lesson plans, you could add other features like aggregators that can benefit from the community’s ability to introduce one another to these new feeds, blogs, and ideas.

That said, I could be barking up the wrong tree, but I figure it’s worth asking a smart group like you….how do you introduce teachers (generating viral growth and wide expansion) to the power of social technologies and Web 2.0? PlansForUs posits that it is through a known unit (the lesson plan) and as a solution to a known problem (generating new lessons) that a community can efficiently solve.

So, as you may imagine I read an awful lot about educational technology. The fact of the matter is there is a lot to read, but I am utterly despondent by the massive administrative clutter that obscures the central issue: teaching kids by engaging them in the classroom. That theme comes up again and again with the teachers I speak with about what matters most to them. This is obscured by certain administrative mandates–but at PlansForUs this is not obscured. We are about simplifying and streamlining collaborative lesson planning.

I found this piece recently entitled “The transformation of educational publishing: the emergence and growth of a teacher-centered, learning-object environment”. It was written in 2002 and is essentially a puff piece for a company called OnCourse. This particular quote got to me:

Provide exchange services–Extensive exchange forums to make collections, supported by turnkey lesson plans, that allow school, district, regional, and national peer sharing across education resources. Exchanges require a quality control review system and an extensive rights management and tracking system (mentioned above) in order to consistently audit usage among all educator/consumers who offer collections across the school network. Exchanges promote a “Build Once–Use Many” environment to create and exchange teacher-created resources contextualized to actual classroom conditions.

Now OnCourse may be a great company and some of the user testaments seem to be really excited about the program. It sounds like a great program in how it synthesizes all of the required formats into a lesson plan. It acknowledges that you do not want to repeat work, but no teaching strategy is universally good. Every strategy is contextualized to a single classroom, not just actual classroom conditions.

Come on. Teaching, while it no doubt has certain requirements, is about connecting ideas to students. In fact a classroom is composed of multiple students with varied learning styles. A lesson planning system, installed by Oracle, costing $20,000-$60,000 a year and consisting of a cascading series of drop down menus does not inspire a student and it certainly will not inspire a teacher.

PlansForUs is a growing community of educators. This community turns a basic web word processor into a powerful idea connector. That’s it. We are not planning to add anything to our product that doesn’t make finding good ideas easier. We do not have a huge number of options. We are an idea exchange tuned to support teachers. Join us and spread the word. There are 3,500,000 K-12 in the US, 8 million K-12 teachers in english speaking countries and 65 million K-12 educators worldwide. There are myriad connections between many of you, PlansForUs is a platform to find them.

PlansForUs aims to get as many of these teachers on board as possible. Does that mean PlansForUs will be immensely successful? Yes it does. But imagine what a positive force we can be if we turn our earnings into funding for teacher driven causes. Teachers change the world. PlansForUs provides an opportunity to aggregate and intensify your world changing voice.

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.

I just read this piece from David Jakes. Here is an excerpt that I found particularly illuminating in light of our efforts at PlansForUs.

Here are my four essential literacies, within the context of today’s networked information world that Web 2.0 supports, that I believe to be essential for kids today.

Be able to connect. Not just to classmates. Not just to the teacher. To authors, to scientists, politicians, and to other teachers and kids, with the understanding that these individuals are important to personal growth, and that you can be just as important in theirs. Use these connections to understand the world view of others, and learn how to forge and develop mutually beneficial relationships that lead to cooperation rather than competition. Use the same connections to distribute you, your creativity, and what you represent beyond the walls of the school. Understand that learning is no longer, or does not have to be, limited by time and space, by brick and mortar, so go global, go 24-7, go 365.

Be able to create. Not posters, not PowerPoints, not some absolutely silly brochure on the tundra, but some serious digital content for posting on the platforms and networks of Web 2.0. Create content and products by mashing up the work of others into something new, and then have the expectation that others will do the same with your content. Create something and make it available for all-and allow the world to recreate it, amplify it.

Be able to communicate. Not by writing for the teacher, but for the world. Not to give a notecard-driven speech in class, but to develop a podcast, screencast, or vodcast for the world to hear or see. Write in a blog and actively contribute to someone else’s perception and thoughts by commenting in theirs. Communicate not for an audience within four walls, but for an audience without walls.

Be able to collaborate. Not only with classmates, but with “classmates” in other states, other provinces, other countries, other continents. Use the power of wikis to collaboratively create content with individuals who have the same interests. Be a life-long contributor.

We can expect some positive change to happen in classrooms as consensus builds around the power of creation through collaboration. This collaboration will only occur if toolsets are developed that amplify a teacher’s efforts, rather than create additional layers of work for teachers. PlansForUs intends to develop at least a portion of this collaborative toolset and we look forward to working with teachers to enhance their teaching lives.

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…

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.

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.