So Clarence Fisher, one of my favorite writers (I am over calling people bloggers), is always tossing compelling ideas against the wall. After my wife turned me onto the idea of creating PlansForUs, the first educational blogger that I stumbled upon was Clarence.

In his latest post he cites Will Richardson’s, “Trapped Between Stories” which talks about the significant societal changes occurring now. Will discusses the book Presence, which states that we are in a transitional period, in light of the transition happening in education.

The post goes on to describe his time at an Institute for the Future workshop where he heard the following quote that really set him, Clarence and ultimately, me off. Tom Carroll states:

Quality teaching today is a collective effort, not an individual accomplishment.

Clarence takes this statement and smartly applies it to the classroom, replacing teaching with learning. Will continues along the theme of reframing how teachers teach. As is my wont, I take this in the direction of solving this dilemma and particularly could PlansForUs be the platform to solve this problem.

I think one the biggest issues with harnessing collective effort is at the input stage. In order to generate collective effort, the collective need to generate a significant amount of inputs. These inputs are then filtered through the group and parsed out to those individuals who can put them to best affect.

Some of the esteemed writers in my blogroll have done amazing jobs contributing. Dan Meyer for one realized that the blog was the most flexible, adaptive medium he had found to share his terrific lesson plans. There are others like him who have contributed great amounts of time and energy to improving the dialogue. There are also many, many lesson plan, curriculum, teaching tactic sites out there that request that individuals submit their lessons to be used by others. What an amazing group of teachers that not only produce great lessons but then go to the trouble of submitting these lessons to a website. A testament to the collaborative nature of teachers.

But, at the end of the day what percentage of teachers does this represent. Could it be 1% of the total k-12 teachers in the US? Maybe, but that doesn’t even come close to matching a typical Pareto Distribution. I want PlansForUs to at least approximate a typical Pareto distribution of those who contribute content and those who utilize the content. A key to shifting this distribution is to MAKE SHARING PLANS/IDEAS EASY.

So how do you do it, well check out how we’re doing it at PlansForUs. We are moving the lesson plan processing experience online, so that a teacher can have a central place to keep all of his documents organized and be able to access those documents anywhere there is Internet access (overtime we will bridge the gap b/t off and online). The key here is that the word processing experience remain the same or equivalent to Word. The beauty being of simulating the Word experience online is that it requires only the click of the share button to share a plan. We have now eliminated a barrier to entry for plans, that being a teacher doesn’t have to go through another step of uploading the plan. This also might encourage teachers to share more of their work, maybe the plan isn’t worth going to the extra step of emailing or uploading it, but it certainly is worth clicking that share button.

The final thought is simplicity. If you read my pseudo-rant yesterday, I really am fed up with the educational software and websites that dominate the digital educational landscape. I mean yes, teachers have a lot of needs and interests and you don’t know which one is going to be the most interesting to them, but come on, edit yourself. Thanks to Steve, I have become a devotee of Agile thinking and have come to realize that editing yourself and focusing on the essentials is the greatest virtue of effective applications. Simplicity is a virtue. I had started writing that older teachers require simplicity, but the reality is, we all require simplicity. I mean the iPod and Google pretty much validate this concept. So PlansForUs aspires in it’s design and it’s focus to be like these icon’s of simplicity.

Join us, critique us, diss us, evangelize us. We are onto something and we are just stubborn and idealistic enough to bring a significant portion of the 65 million teachers worldwide together on a platform for idea sharing. We’ll start with the US and english speaking countries but eventually the world. Tom Carroll is right, however the only way to get there is to break down barriers to participation.

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.

Scared, elated, tense, relaxed, focused, diffused, confident. All of these conflicting emotions course through me on a regular basis. I know that I am supposed to just keep an even keel. No matter, good or bad, it’s all a product of your work level, so keep on working hard, the swings will even themselves out and that’ll be just great. I figure if my dad could do it, with all the pressures of raising a family, then I should be able to do it in my admittedly less pressurized situation. I don’t have a kid, a dog or a mortgage. I do have a beautiful and supportive wife and I owe it to her to keep an even keel and work my butt off to grow PlansForUs.

But the reality is that beneath my veneer of even keelness, I am a roiling cauldron of emotion. Now can I mellow that out by taking a step back, absolutely, but as things happen throughout the day and then replay themselves nightly before I go to bed; I have to admit that starting, launching and growing PlansForUs is an emotional exercise. I have read and heard from others about the emotional rawness of being an entrepreneur, but experiencing it is another thing totally.

To deal with this I have returned the coping strategies that have never failed me, physical activity. In my case basketball, running and soon, bicycling. You can find me almost every night, when I am in the city, around 6 at the Stuyvesant Courts in NYC playing hoops. Sometimes it’s 5 on 5, sometimes 1 on 1 and sometimes it me working on a shot that refuses perfection despite over 20 years of ongoing work. When I am not in the city or when the weather changes, you can find me punishing myself with a run, seeking that ultimate payoff, an endorphin rush. Soon you will find me on a classic Vitus 979 (thanks Uncle David) road bike cruising the roads of the East End and upstate New York. Come Fall, I will explore some longer rides up from the city up the Hudson.

The point of this entry is that I am interested in inviting those of you who are creating something and finding the emotional crucible of creation really intense to join me in some of these endeavors. Perhaps you are a fellow entrepreneur, perhaps you are a teacher embarking on a new experience. If you use physical exercise as an outlet, leave a comment, lets get together and regain our even keel through exercise.

Collaboration is Hard

This is a statement posted by Matt Blumberg of Return Path and dissected in a series (1, 2, 3) of interesting posts on collaboration within the corporate realm. Given PlansForUs’ focus on collaboration within the educational sector I couldn’t help but read these posts thinking about the crossover and issues that are addressed by PlansForUs.

Yes, collaboration is hard, it is messy and difficult to arrange. However, collaboration is the most efficient way forward, particularly for educators seeking ways to engage their students.
To begin, lets start with the Wikipedia defintion of collaboration:

Collaboration is a process defined by the recursive interaction of knowledge and mutual learning between two or more people who are working together, in an intellectual endeavor, toward a common goal which is typically creative in nature. Collaboration does not necessarily require leadership and can even bring better results through de-centralization and egalitarianism.

The most interesting part of this definition is the piece on the effectiveness of collaboration without leadership. This is why collaboration can be messy. Without leadership it is left to the group to self organize and make sense of what is going on. Bees are really good at collaboratively self-organizing because they lack the ego’s that we humans have, consequently they massively collaborate on a regular basis to find the most advantageous site for their hive. Unfortunately for humans massive collaboration does not result in consistently optimal outcomes. Wikipedia is probably our best example of massive collaboration, but even Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to collaboration. However Wikipedia points us to a positive outcome that can arise through collaboration and the methods for achieving that outcome.

Two features of Wikipedia are particularly powerful when it comes to creating a successful collaborative platform, asynchronous data entry and the long tail. Let’s start with the long tail. Start with unique ideas/plans, then form community around these and finally attract the participants that are engaged in solving these unique problems.

The issue that arise in artificial professional learning communities is that the participants are not equally incented to solve a problem. I wrote to some folks in MySpace about this particular drawback when it comes to Professional Learning Communities.The reality is that when you assemble as an artificial learning community to solve problems, you are either solving generalized problems to “appeal to the group” or you are solving a specific problem of one of the dominant group members. In either case you will alienating some portion of the group.

By self-organizing around shared problems, micro-communities are endorsing the utility of collaboration by buying into the learning from collective intelligence.  Micro-define your problem then seek out a group that is trying to solve that same problem or if you are using PlansForUs, that group will find you…at least that’s the goal.

Asynchronous data entry is the second feature of Wikipedia that allows collaboration to scale. Teachers are on different schedules: life, school, work load, all contribute to the time a teacher has to address her classroom strategy for the following day. When a teacher is forced into a schedule that doesn’t take into account these outside limiters the teacher may not be in the mindset to participate collaboratively. Collaboration is rigorous and exhausting and if you are already exhausted or your mind is elsewhere, can you possibly contribute your most beneficial information? I would argue that you can not.

With asynchronous data entry, you can contribute to the conversation when you are ready to contribute to the conversation. Those who have come before you have done the same thing, so the outcome is a richer more nuanced collaborative experience. The consequence of this, is that the collaboration does not happen instantaneously, it is an extended conversation. At PlansForUs, we are aggregating the conversations and then using our software to make sense of the ongoing dialogue over an extended period of time. Your job is to contribute when you can, PlansForUs will harness that contribution to improve the overall collaborative experience.

In part 2 Matt Blumberg lays out exactly why collaboration is hard. In my next piece I will describe how you can overcome these hurdles and specifically how PlansForUs is addressing these hurdles.

So this weekend my wife and I celebrated our 1st anniversary. We celebrated in upstate New York with our parents and it was an altogether awesome weekend. A weekend where we got to reflect on our year as a married couple.

Sunday morning found my father on the porch reading “The Zeus Trip”, by Jennifer Conlin in the NY Times. At the conclusion of the article, he looked up and remarked that lesson plans were everywhere and as such, how could PlansForUs catalogue and organize these ideas from outside the teaching ecosystem.
An interesting question indeed. He’s absolutely right, there are a ton of interesting teaching experiences happening outside of the school system, but how could you incentivize those people to post their ideas, in lesson plan form, at PlansForUs. I am not sure.

However, the other place this article took me seems to be more feasible. Teaching is happening everywhere; what if our teachers began to share life experiences as lesson plans on PlansForUs. What if, rather than a writer for the NY Times, Jennifer was a teacher. How cool would it be for her to construct a lesson plan around her trip through Greece. And how cool would it be for Jennifer to connect to other teachers who had travelled in Greece and collaboratively build an even more detailed and granular lesson plan.

This can happen at PlansForUs. We will be launching user profiles soon. These profiles will be used to connect you with others who share experiences. Perhaps you graduated from the same Masters program, maybe you grew up in the same city, or you connect through a travel experience. Building connections through shared experience and then utilizing those connections to collaboratively build engaging lessons is what the PlansForUs platform is all about.

Please suggest any fields that you would like to see in the user profile. You can leave suggestions in the comments section, we will carefully consider all of your suggestions.

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.

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.

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):