This is the letter to PlansForUs Members…As for my blogging, please head over to www.youmeandmyapi.com where I will change gears and get cranking in April.
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Dear PlansForUs Members,

We started PlansForUs in November of 2006 with the idea that a platform for sharing knowledge and expediting collaboration between teachers would be the tool for solving the problem of teachers not having enough time to find and develop engaging lessons. We received plenty of great feedback, the most fundamentally correct and challenging being, PlansForUs is only useful if it doesn’t take any more of my precious time to use. This was our fundamental flaw, PlansForUs made an assumption around sharing content and while that assumption has borne out magnificently well for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and others, teachers are uniquely challenged to find the time to contribute. Unfortunately, I did not give my team enough of a runway to iterate our initial design and concept to solve this fundamental flaw in a way that would truly reflect your needs. As a result we did not generate the organic community growth needed to maintain the company.

Everyday I hear the stories of a teacher’s (my wife) triumphs and difficulties. Each time I hear a story I wish that I could capture it as a digital vignette to be shared so that other teachers could use these experiences to contextualize and solve their own challenges. The fact that teachers cannot actively engage and benefit from one another’s experiences is a huge frustration. My hope is that as more entrepreneurs build solutions to the challenges faced by educators, that they maintain a laser focus on business models that leverage and capitalize on a vibrant, participatory community of teachers. It is essential to focus on the teacher, so that we can outflank the traditional bureaucratic monetization routes that have crippled the integration of technology that actually benefits student education and teacher’s lives.

In the 21st century, no group of people is more important than teachers and I thank you for giving me an opportunity to build something to help you in your daily lives. While our team didn’t pull it off this time, please know that we will not forget your needs and we’ll work hard in the intervening years to muster the resources to pull it off on the next go around. As for the present, on March 31st we will shut the site down. I am considering hosting a Ning based social network in its place, but given the social network overload out there, I will only do so if there is sufficient demand from you.

Best Regards,

Tyler Fonda

Back in August a guy named Charlie O’Donnell tested an interesting tactic for garnering attention and feedback on a business that he was starting called Path101. At the time I wrote a quick blog entry admiring the tactic. The tactic, defined as Anti-Stealth, has been an unqualified success for Charlie as he generated significant interest in his business, found a technical partner, refined his presentation and successfully raised an angel round of funding. A consequence of this tactic has been an ongoing discussion within the NYC entrepreneur community about the business effect of this tactic.

Steve and I have always maintained an anti-stealth bias due to our shared belief in the effectiveness of agile development. Our first act of anti-stealth was launching PlansForUs as soon as we had a working set of tools, exposing ourselves as quickly as possible to feedback. Given that our target market, K12 teachers, has a reputation for a lack of tech awareness this was a risk…but it has paid dividends as we embark on our second iteration with a much better understanding of how teachers might interact and use a tool like PlansForUs. With our second iteration underway, a growing user base and a need to increase our development cycles we need to find our seed-stage financing. This leads us to our second act of Anti-Stealth; revealing our investor presentation to readers of this blog…I know the anticipation is building.

By revealing our investor presentation, we also want to better understand a fundamental question of the anti-stealth tactic, if you do not have 1,000+ readers on your blog would it still work as well?

I have 13 subscribers to my blog, went to Colgate, New Trier HS (Winnetka, IL) and play hoops at Stuy Town. Those are a few of my primary networks, so lets find out if this blog can spread the word on PlansForUs beyond these networks. I promise to give full disclosure on how this plays out. So with the lead of Charlie’s anti-stealth movement and our own agile leanings we offer you our investor presentation (slightly modified).

| View | Upload your own

As for anti-stealth, we will continue to play around with this concept as an outgrowth of our convictions that agile development is the most efficient path towards success.

Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines and a generally amazing entrepreneur and leader, founded his company on the basis of amazing customer service. He was often quoted as saying that Southwest was not in the airline business, but rather in the customer service business. Interestingly enough, Southwest has continually lived up to this mission and it can be attributed in large part to their unique corporate hierarchy. That hierarchy states that employees come first, customers come second and shareholders come third. The effects of this are described by Herb in this interview:

…if you treat your employees right, they’re happy and proud and participative with respect to what they’re doing. They manifest that attitude to your customers and your customers come back. And what’s business all about but having your customers come back, which makes the shareholders happy?

So…what if we look at the K-12 education system through the same lens. What would the hierarchy be?

Teachers first

Students second

Parents/Government third

I think that it is counter-intuitive to think that any group but the child/student should be in the first position, however that could be just our problem. PlansForUs is utterly focused on the teacher, because it is the teacher that is on the front lines interfacing with the customer. Providing the teacher with the flexible tools to do their job best should be the focus of any administration or government. We tend to focus on the systems that prevent teachers from failing and have the effect of dis-incenting their own customer service/teaching impulse.

Southwest would not have grown had it imposed rigid systems on its employees. By empowering employees, Southwest created a company that solved problems at the edge and then redistributed that new knowledge to all others within the system. That is how we can reform education, that’s how we can help our students. It is not about centralized systems, but rather empowered employees, solving problems at the edge and redistributing those solutions to all who can benefit.

PlansForUs is not the solution, but we are part of a broader solution that recognizes the impact of empowered teachers on education.

I am going to be working on this thought over the weekend, but I wanted to share it with you, my loyal readers, to get your thoughts. I am interested in knowing what the layers of needs would compose the PlansForUs Hierarchy of Teacher’s Needs. I began to ponder this on my walk home after a thought provoking discussion with Tom Hatch of Columbia Teachers College that I was privileged to have this week.

The fact is that there may be a myriad of different Hierarchy of Needs due to the variety of  educational contexts that teacher are faced with on a daily basis. Having said that, I want to be crass and un-nuanced and try to come up with a few generalizations. I am particularly interested in your own theories of what these needs may be.

Now, should you choose not to participate, fear not, as I will provide my theory to you regardless of your participation. Below you will find Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (image is from WikiMedia); have a great weekend and I look forward to your thoughts. (FYI-I did a Google search on”Maslow’s Hierarchy of Teacher’s Needs” and came up with nothing…we’re breaking new ground here folks)

With the Christmas season fast approaching I have a feeling that the barrage of catalogs that are headed to my apartment is not going to abate. My wife and I don’t mind the Patagonia catalog, but beyond that singular great piece of cataloging, the rest are annoying and an environmental drain. In addition, one of the benefits of living in NYC is that you have all the shopping you could want without the catalogs, so I want to stop getting so many stinking catalogs. I have looked into the Direct Marketing Associations website, but the process seemed annoying and I think it cost me money….which is ridiculous.

So I was excited to see that there is a new website out there, Catalog Choice, devoted to ending this mountain of catalogs filling our tiny mailbox. I have signed up and will report back on the success of this service in curtailing our catalog problem. (It would be kind of funny, if this site were just the Direct Marketing Association harvesting email addresses. If that is the case at least spam doesn’t have such a major environmental impact and my gmail is pretty good at protecting me).

By the way, if you haven’t listened to the National yet, make it a priority. You can most likely find them among my Last.FM selections.

We are working with a user interface expert to improve your lesson plan sharing experience. Please have a read of the note below. If you are interested, either leave a comment and I will have Jackie get in touch with you or shoot me an email and I will have Jackie get in touch. Thanks.
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My name is Jackie and I am currently looking for teachers to interview for a project I am working on. I basically want to understand how teachers go about creating lesson plans and how they might use an online lesson planning tool we are currently designing. The interview will last approximately an hour, ideally at your apartment if possible (otherwise we can find another place to meet in the city). If selected, you will be rewarded a $5 Amazon.com gift certificate for your time.
We are hoping to conduct the interview either sometime this weekend, next saturday, or during the evenings of next week. (9/29 - 10/6).

Let me know if this is something you’d be interested in. If so, please answer the following questions:
Name
Email or phone number to contact you at
What days AND times are you available? (9/29 - 10/6)
Grade(s) and subject(s) you teach
Type of school (public or private)
Do you create lesson plans?
If so, how much interest do you have in creating and sharing lesson plans online? (very interested, somewhat interested, not interested at all)
How long have you been teaching?
What is your age range? (under 25, 26-30, 31-35, 36-40, 40+)

Thanks!

Jackie

I was just was turned onto the blog “Bionic Teaching” and I think it is great. I found the post  “Magic Bullets Don’t Exist” particularly interesting. In the post Tom Woodward works to dispel the myth that Technology is the panacea for what ails education in a point by point disputation of a TechLearning post.
The essential fact is that teaching is the key. Supporting teachers with professional development and lesson plans that indicate how to integrate technology into a lesson are the key to bringing technology into the classroom.

As a result PlansForUs is focused on integrating with a teachers lesson plan development workflow. The technology that sits behind this workflow is what improves the lesson planning experience. Teachers write lessons, PlansForUs expands the way that a teacher can access new ideas for that lesson.

It is about teaching, not technology. That is something that must be remembered if technology is ever to break out of its edutech echo chamber and into the mainstream. Thanks to Tom for elucidating this important distinction, I look forward to reading more.

I have been delinquent in my blogging this past week. For that I apologize, it is not that I don’t have a ton of stuff that I want to share, it’s just that I have been putting off blogging to focus on some business related items like: tidying up our executive summary, putting together a better looking presentation and improving my financial projections. I also traveled to Chicago to see my parents, watch the Cubs and Bears and to meet with a VC friend of the family.

Here are a few entries that I hope to complete this week:

• Are you surprised? Clarence is Already There
• Organize through networks, not Hierarchy
• Signal vs Noise in Teaching

Lately I have learned a ton reading Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, am looking forward to the Okkervil River show on Friday and enjoyed way too many combos, italian beefs and hot dogs while in Chicago (Go Cubs!!)

Finally, I read something over at Bokardo that reinforced my ambition to improve the visualizing of information and process at PlansForUs. This quote in particular caught my attention:

…show people images or sequences that represent ideas. I’m constantly advocating for a “How it works” section on web applications. Is it because the thing is complicated or there are too many steps to understand? No, not usually. Given enough time most folks can figure out anything. But as a rule we just don’t have time. What visuals do is take abstract thoughts (the words we use to describe the app) and make them concrete in a visualization…instantly.

Given the constraints on teacher’s time, we need to nail the visual presentation at PlansForUs.

In conclusion, if any of you are going to the Okkervil River show at Webster Hall, just tap me on the shoulder and let me know how we can improve PlansForUs. I look identical to my Meez, tall, glasses and shock of blond hair and I would love to hear your thoughts.

So as some of you may know Yahoo has been working on a tool for teachers for a little bit now. As many more of you know Yahoo is a big, heavy duty, Internet company whose homepage delivers a ridiculous amount of traffic to those sites and links that have the good fortune of being on that page.

Yahoo presented its Yahoo Teachers tool at the recent TechCrunch40 and according to the folks of TechCrunch it was a pretty neat product for teachers. They even introduced a new feature called Gobbler which sucks content from the web into your lesson plan.

The net net for PlansForUs is that we took notice, but the proof is in the pudding, and that pudding won’t come out till 4th quarter or early 2008. I also still wonder why everyone wants to add so much stuff on to these apps. I think that simplicity may still rule the day, at least that’s Google’s lesson to us. The net net for teachers is that this is great as building lessons efficiently and increasing the fun your students are having in the classroom is great. Competition also brings out the best in everyone, so expect PlansForUs to continue to work our butts off to make you love us more than Yahoo.
Back to work.

Just wanted to share a note with my loyal readers that I sent out to all of the PlansForUs users last night and this morning. We started this company knowing that our only chance of success was to build a great application that teachers loved. The question is how do you do that in a vacuum. So we put it all out there, warts and all so that we can learn, communicate and improve. So what if you know that we have problems, we aren’t a very big team and the only way we are going to solve them is if we tap into other brains and experiences.

We are thankful for the outpouring of support from our users and look forward to continuing to build PlansForUs into the ultimate platform for idea sharing, building and teaching. The note is after the jump: (more…)

Anita Roddick the founder of The Body Shop passed away on September 10th and while I can’t say that I was a heavy user of Body Shop products, I was very aware of the Body Shop’s brand positioning. Body Shop was the first that I can remember, I am 28, practitioner and marketer of environmentally and socially conscious corporate practices. What I was not aware of till this morning, was that the Body Shop’s conscious was founded on 5 points that guided Anita Roddick’s development of the Body Shop into a billion dollar brand.

1. Take your business personally: Business has, traditionally, addressed the world with profits in mind, which is to say: impersonally. We can no longer afford this. More than any other generation – [today’s] business people are in a position to lead in making the world a better place. We must take more responsibility, which is to say, take it personally.

2. Be daring. Be first. Be different: Or no one will notice.

3. Be good.: Because you can.

4. Business is not beyond morality. Business is no longer a cold-hearted, objective, pseudo-scientific project to manipulate customers…it can’t be that anymore. The future of the world depends on us doing business with heart. Without ‘heart’ the creativitiy of the human spirit dwindles, too.

5. Business is like activism: It is a way of saying what kind of world you want to live in. Protest is not enough. You need a vision.

If you had come up to me on the street yesterday and asked me the maxims that drive PlansForUs, I probably would have given you a long winded answer that eventually would have described how these 5 points describe our business goals and vision. But now here they are, encapsulated in 5 neatly numbered sections that can serve to elucidate the goals ahead for PlansForUs. I will work on building out how PlansForUs achieves each of these points in blog entries to come. For now, enjoy the visionary genius of Anita Roddick,

It is a miserably humid day in NYC. Luckily for me, my apartment stays relatively cool without the need for A/C. Thanks to a low floor and high ceilings, I think I will manage to get through today

Onto more pertinent matters. I read Gary Stager’s piece on the declining costs of laptops vs the stagnant costs of school supplies. Gary highlighted the fact that these cost curves are getting perilously close to meeting. Gary was asking why we are wasting resources on traditional learning implements, when the ultimate learning implement, an Internet connected laptop is only a fraction more expensive.

It is a powerful question and one worth pondering….however I think the answer is in the comments to his post. In particular, the infrastructure for adopting such a change is not really in place. That infrastructure is both technical and human. This infrastructure excuse is miserable as it is cuts the legs out from so many great proposals, but it is ultimately a powerful reason for saying no.

Infrastructure is the key to all things and it is a process that is long and drawn out. However, sometimes an event can trigger explosive growth and change. That trigger must be an economic opportunity where private resources come into play. What is that trigger in education?

1. The massive demographic shift- In California the shortage of teachers will be particularly acute, though I have looked at the stats from the Bureau of Labor Stats and it looks like nationally we are going to lose about 1/3 of our teachers to retirement in the next 7 years.

What Does This Mean?

It means that there are a lot of teacher openings to be filled by recent graduates or job transfers. The infrastructure of the human component just changed and they need help to be the best teachers they can be. Will the private sector fulfill this need by financing laptops for every child and a deep interconnectivity between classrooms and teachers?

2. What about broadband speeds and costs- According to this there are a whole lot of people in this world with faster broadband than the US and at a fraction of the cost. The Internet and Green Energy seem to be the long term impactful technologies to our world, so if the US is falling behind on our Internet what is the effect on our ability to grow our economy.

What Does This Mean?

Seems to me that if the US Government wakes up to the fact that our telecom/cable monopolies are derailing our ability to grow the economy, there is going to be a movement to solve the problem. That movement will probably be a big free market push to wire us up, or more than likely wireless us up. With a deep national investment both financially and psychically in changing our high speed Internet fortunes I would bet that our schools will be direct recipients of this high speed technology largesse. Now we have the infrastructure where laptops make sense in school.

I guess my question is, in 5 years will students be doing their back-to-school shopping at Apple and Best Buy or at Staples ?

Another food for thought: How many of you use listservs to find teaching ideas? What is the biggest downside to these listservs? Ryan Bretag wrote a response (it’s at the bottom) to my comment on why teachers might be resistant to adopting aggregators as their first foray into the wonders of Web 2.0. In his response he mentioned that a combination of Ning networks and Listservs may already be the tools that teachers need to find valuable teaching resources.

Just a quick update on the PlansForUs business. We have been really excited about our growth so far. In fact the internal target that we set for number of users going into September was surpassed by nearly 3 times. However, we still have our issues and we continue to receive and prioritize the feedback of our users. For those who have provided feedback, thank you. While you may not necessarily see your feedback on the site yet, rest assured that it is in our development queue and Steve is hammering on it.

This discussion of growth and incorporating user feedback brings us to a post from On-Startup’s which I just reread depicting two go-to-market strategies. Take a look below and take a wild guess as to which one PlansForUs has adopted.

The “Big Bang” Strategy

1. Have idea
2. Raise Capital
3. Code like crazy in “super stealth mode”
4. Hire VP of Marketing to plan big launch
5. Hire PR agency to launch
6. Launch!
7. Success!(?)

Sony, Microsoft and many others seem to use this strategy to marginal effect.

The “We’re Only as Smart as our Users” Strategy

1. Have idea
2. Bootstrap / Beg / Borrow
3. Tell the World
4. Release product to the unsuspecting
5. Get feedback
6. Iterate, iterate, iterate!
7. Success!

PlansForUs would add the following caveats. The 3 B’s in Step 2 endure for awhile. We’re hoping that we can curtail step 2 after the first “iterate” in Step 6 (investors we’ll be talking soon) and we actually flip flopped steps 3 and 4. We released the product to the unsuspecting and are using the product and some elegant 8 sentence pitches to tell the world.

Well I guess I answered my own question, sorry to ruin the fun. We of course are working hard to get to that step 7. As always let us know about how we can improve.

Welcome back to school teachers. Have a great year. I had the pleasure of helping my wife get her class set for the year and was totally floored at the amount of time and effort that goes into just setting up a classroom for the year.

Anyway have a great year and please join PlansForUs and benefit from creation through collaboration.

(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.