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.

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.
—
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 have been reading about Professor Randy Pausch’s speech since I picked up on the story on Information Arbitrage. Until today, I had not spent the 9:59 to actually watch the speech in its entirety. I am happy to report that I finally did watch the entire speech.

The man and the speech are an inspiration and his legacy will live on through the magic of YouTube and viral distribution. If you do not know about Professor Pausch’s speech here is a quick synopsis of the man, the context and the speech.

The speech is titled How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams and was given September 18 by a beloved Computer Science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. The speech was part of a “Last Lecture” series, where top professors give talks as if it is the last lecture they are going to give, ever. For Professor Pausch this very well be among his last lectures as he is going to die of pancreatic cancer within the next two months.

I hope that you will enjoy and spread Professor Pausch’s amazing speech, the entirety of which can be found here. I have embedded a video which is a compendium of good moments from the speech with commentary from WSJ’s Jeff Zaslow.

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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,

I moved to NYC on September 9, 2001 from Winnetka and was to move into my apartment on the 15th. There are better photos, but this one is my own. It is shot from a friend’s roof on a beautiful night in 2004. You can see the two light towers faintly, but distinctly in the right center of the photo. I think that the light towers are a beautiful tribute.

Over at Confused of Calcutta there was a piece that neatly articulates the power of networked communications. Networked communications associate generate an ongoing profile of usage about an individual which established immediate CONTEXT to any piece of information published.
JP expands beyond just the user association in his description of context benefiting IM conversations:

…one of the subjects we touched on for a while was the power of context. Conversations using social software tend to be wrapped in context, a context that is portable across time and space, with a significant reduction in switching costs as a result…You only have to use a decent “true” group IM application once to know what I mean…Who spoke. Who spoke before. What was said before. In what sequence. On what subject. For how long. Who interrupted. Who was there. Where was all this. When. Why. Everything. Those are some of the things I mean by conversation wrapped in context…

Context is what allows information to find its way to its most beneficial usage. Listservs are great at distributing information, however that information must be culled by every individual to determine its relevance for their particular context. Consider the difference in action steps when the context is wrapped around information. Now a user is either automatically directed to a piece of information that matches their proper context or a user does a quick scan to determine its relevance to their situation.

PlansForUs sits on top of a network of teachers that share information about themselves both explicitly and by their use of PlansForUs. By building and constantly adding information to a users profile we create the mechanism for efficiently delivering the information that matters most to our teachers. While exploration is a fun way to find new ideas when you are trying to write a new plan and you have already worked a 10 hour day, the last thing you really want to do is explore. Wrapping ideas and plans in context is the key to improving the lesson plan creation process for our users.

Thanks to JP for his consistently lucid breakdown of the powers of social software.

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.

Yesterday my wife, a 1st grade teacher, came home exhausted and a bit emotionally overwhelmed. It was her first day of school and her first day as a head teacher. Half way through the day a new child was brought into her classroom. The new child was both hysterical and fundamentally lacking english language skills. While she has been working for 4.5 years in a variety of unique situations this event caught her off guard.
Having just got off the phone with her and hearing her confidence in how the day went, I am thankful for the collaborative environment in which she is teaching and for her own ability to call on her own deep reservoir of teaching skill. It seems that dealing with the unexpected and with characteristics and situations that lie well outside your control is the domain of the teacher.

Perhaps that’s why when I read this at NYC Educator (check out this blog for a unvarnished look into NYC public school teaching) it immediately caught my attention. The poem is entitled:

Tikkun Olam

by Abigail E. Meyers

  Our task begins

with giving order to the chaos created

by poverty, illiteracy, apathy,

the too-cool kids that make bad parents

or good parents with a too-cool world

to fight, exhausted by the battle

with neighbors, government, money,

broken glass, broken hearts, broken homes, broken lives—
this is where we begin.

We step in,

dressed more sharply than we’d like,

speaking more sharply than we’d like,

issuing rules and goals,

shaking our heads, straightening lines,

bleeding our wallets and minds

right from the start

to stanch the flow from our hearts

as long as we can

before this newest collection

of dreamers, criminals, fighters, angels—

children, all—works their way in
before we can begin

to bring them to order

and teach them to teach themselves,

restore them to the restoration

of the universe, raise up a million saviors,

prop them up with stickers and pencils,

form them into wobbly queues, love them, love them.

This is just a remarkable post on the obscene growth of YouTube and the transformative effect of a piece of great content on a platform prepared to catalyze that traffic bump into real value.

I don’t have much to say about this post, except that I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I read this post over the weekend.

Enjoy.

I must admit that this entry is a little disjointed, but read on for a few choice nuggets.

PlansForUs was founded on this statement “Creation through Collaboration”

It is the simple statement that we think encapsulates all that we intend to do at PlansForUs. I was reading a piece by Jay Matthews on the happenings at the KIPP School Summit and was enjoying his description of the collegial and collaborative atmosphere that KIPP was creating between its 57 schools and then was walloped by these excerpts:

…All the speeches, all the panels, all the training sessions were about getting better. The most overcrowded rooms had KIPP teachers running the sessions. It was standing room only at a day-long presentation by the World Class Writing Project…The three instructors gave a sample from a seventh-grade KIPP student’s essay on the Elie Wiesel book “Night”…They compared this to a sample of a private school 9th-grader’s essay on the Robert Frost poem “Design”…They asked the assembled KIPP teachers if the KIPP student was really just two years away from reaching the level of the private school student…But most of the audience agreed that if that was going to happen, they had to do a much better job teaching critical thinking, sophisticated syntax and vocabulary and all the other tools their student would need.

So that is the setup. You can read the article to catch the details, but suffice to say the talented KIPP 7th grader has a long way to go to be as prepared as that private school 9th grader. However, the really interesting part comes here:

Unafraid of stomping on KIPP icons, Witney gave a short sample lesson that was almost a parody of KIPP’s fondness for movement and excitement in learning…Then Dolan taught the same lesson in a less physical, more nuanced way, and many in the room indicated he was showing them the way they all had to go.

KIPP has made a name for itself by outperforming many of its peer schools through its rigorous curriculum and according to this piece, refusal to accept that best practices are indeed best practices. The luxury that KIPP has is that it is a self-contained organization of 57 schools that can bounce ideas off of itself at the KIPP Summit.

We have a number of KIPP teachers in PlansForUs and I look forward to seeing their work on PlansForUs. However, I also want PlansForUs to be like a Digital KIPP Summit for those teachers who don’t have access to KIPP’s organization. Every one of you is having an impact on students everyday. Sometimes you teach a lousy lesson that doesn’t connect and students are bored…and you learn from that experience and tweak your lesson to improve it. Some of you are riding a string of great lessons that are really engaging your students; seems like Dan Meyer is having a great run. The point is everyone of you is contributing, but unlike the structure of KIPP, you are not able to collaborate and learn from one another. PlansForUs, admittedly still a few features short of replicating the KIPP experience digitally, is focused on enabling to simply share information and plans that through the power of social networking and community connectivity can approximate these summits.

Summit’s are great, but we are very busy people and can only go to summit’s once or twice a year. Digital Summit’s are accessible to you whenever you are ready, so join PlansForUs, write your lesson here (good, bad or indifferent) and let the community come together and learn from one another.

For those of you with really heavily formatted lessons, we will continue to improve our word processing capability, but please share your ideas, since humans are really efficient at scanning text (see Google).

The answer to what digital collaboration looks like…PlansForUs.