PILOTed

Notes from SIIA's 2012 Ed Tech Industry Summit

 “The education system in the US is a national disgrace.”

So began the opening keynote address by Cengage CEO Ron Dunn at the SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit on May 7.

Massachusetts is currently the number one state in student achievement in the US. But, if it were a country, it would be just 17^th in the world. What does that say about the other 49 states?

Dunn noted that there has been a lot of noise about education reform, and there is a lot of stupid money coming into education, but these are not getting to the root of the problem. Our goals should be to help teachers teach and students learn, not to reduce costs or make backpacks lighter. Dunn went on to comment that inadequate professional development around education technology has been the biggest impediment to change, and that our focus is often distracted.

In the second day’s keynote, Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna described how Idaho is transforming education with the recent passage of the Students Come First laws. He observed that it’s not just one thing, reform has to be comprehensive involving compensation and tenure, managing technology, changing teaching paradigms, giving parents greater voice and choice, and putting the children first.

The first hurdle was pushing the reforms through the legislature. When the education and political leadership looked at all the changes they felt needed to be done, they concluded that they would face just as much opposition if they tried to do part of the reforms or all of them, so they did not compromise on the breadth of the reforms they pushed through the legislature. In fact, they faced so much opposition that they received personal threats along with having their tires slashed. There was so much pressure that any time the legislators went home for the weekend, Luna knew that he would need to recount votes and re-innoculate the swing legislators.

The legislation passed. Tenure has been replaced with a different due-process system for new teachers. Teacher compensation has been raised, and is dependent on a combination of student test scores, parent evaluations, and school administration evaluations. Parents have more choices, students can opt to take individual courses from different schools or providers. All students need to take at least two online HS courses to graduate. And technology and PD are built into school financing so they can’t be singled out for reductions when budgets get tight.

Luna says it’s now up to them to implement. We can’t hide behind excuses that other countries don’t have our diversity or poverty. They may not have our exact problems, but all the countries ahead of us have their own hurdles to overcome, and they have made a commitment to educate all their children. Luna’s goal is not just for Idaho to become first in the US, it’s for Idaho’s students to become global leaders in student achievement and employability.

Since teachers are the number one factor in schools driving student performance, the ability to develop and keep good teachers is going to be critical to Idaho’s success. One small indication of success is that since passage of Students Come First, the number of teachers who have left Idaho to teach in other states has decreased by half.

With a general election coming up this November, Luna is hopeful that interim results will convince voters to stay the course.

In a panel of effectively communicating the power of education technology, Matt Cohen, Tom Whitby, and Frank Catalano pointed out that because there is so little education reporting in the general press, bad reporting gets magnified and distorts what is actually happening. Reporters don’t go into schools and they don’t talk to teachers; they talk with vendors, government officials, and politicians. As a result, persistent myths that get passed on as facts damage efforts to improve schools.

In addition to poor reporting, the trio noted three obstacles to improving teacher and student effectiveness. First, there have been so many different education reforms, many teachers feel that if they just ignore any attempt to change the way they teach, it will eventually go away. Second, if you take bad practice in the classroom and make it digital, it’s still bad practice. Effective change is effectuated through superior leadership that can overcome these and other obstacles. Third, the only tech professional development that most teachers get is one to two days at the beginning of the school year; that’s not enough to modify behavior or impart competence. Technology has to be made part of every teacher’s workday for it to hold up to its promise.

Bob Resnick of Education Market Research showed the growth of K12 education purchases has been increasing by 4.2% per year since 2004, to $18.3 Billion, despite education cutbacks. Comparing 2010 to 2009, digital products were up 17.9%, while the total market increased by about 4%. His data shows that student enrollment is likely to increase at the same time per pupil expenditures are increasing. The fastest growing segments (2010 over 2009 sales) are

• Reading and Math interventions (50% increase in sales)
• Online digital content (35% increase in sales)
• Assessment (35% increase in sales)
• Instructional software (25% increase in sales)
• Interactive Whiteboards (23% increase in sales)

While sales of some traditional materials are decreasing:

• Library books and services (17% decrease in sales)
• Teacher resource materiuals (13% decrease in sales)
• Guided leveled readers (10% decrease in sales

Resnick’s survey indicates the growth of interactive white boards, with an installed base in 2010 of 1.5 million units, or an average of 20 IWBs per school. Most teachers say that that they primarily use IWB resources that come “from their own imagination and ingenuity.” Resnick commented that the next wave of content development will be for IWB use and for 1 to 1 classrooms.

Resnick’s data points out the shift from print to digital occurring at all levels of education. Cengage’s Dunn, Idaho’s Luna, and panelists Whitby, Cohen, and Catalano demonstrated the complexity of education issues and the need to focus on student learning as the end result. Luna’s statewide initiative in education reform shows how difficult it can be to effectuate systemic change, and is an interesting experiment in top-down education reform. (Of course, that’s easy for me to say, I’m in NY, and it’s not my salary being affected.) Maybe, ten years from now, we will no longer start education conferences by pronouncing that the US education system is a national disgrace.

 

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Slides and links from the SIIA Social Media Marketing Presentation

Here are the slides from our presentation on May 7, 2012 at the SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit. I was lucky to share the podium with

• Glen McCandless of Focus Marketing
• Charlene Blohm of C. Blohm & Associates
• Ileana Rowe of Corporate Growth, and
• Brandi Brown of ETA Hand2Mind

Each of us had a different perspective on social media, so I know that I learned a lot from them.

Social Media Marketing Full Presentation

View more presentations from mweisburgh.

And here are the Diigo links on social media, plus a few more, that the panelists put together:

http://www.diigo.com/user/mweisburgh/socialmedia

 

Our thoughts from Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference 2012

Sloan’s Blended Learning Conference was held April 23-4, 2012 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is primarily a postsecondary conference, although there were a few sessions on K12 blended learning implementation. K12 often follows where higher education leads, so if you are primarily interested in K12 education, this might be a glimpse into your future as well.

Blended learning methodology graphic (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Blended learning is expanding, in types as well as numbers.  The face to face component might occur incidentally once or twice, or might meet as often as twice a week.  The drivers for expansion are both monetary and pedagogical, although, as you’ll see below, there are certainly obstacles and wrong turns in its implementation.   We think it’s important to note that this conference dealt with Higher Ed as it functions today, and did not provide a glimpse of future changes we might see there.  Perhaps that will be more apparent at the Innovations Conference Sloan runs in the summer. 

Cost drivers for blended learning

To the extent that money drives educational decisions, blended learning may be the most viable solution to two problems.

There seems to be a growing national shortage of classroom space, and no money to build more. Institutions are thus pressuring instructors to reduce seat time requirements for their course. In fact, the original definition of blended learning stated that 30 to 70% of class time be replaced by online activities. 

There are only two ways to substantially adapt to the huge cuts in state spending for higher education: raise tuition (the prime reason tuition rates have increased dramatically over the last 10 years), or increase efficiencies (larger classes, more classes per instructor, use of more adjunct faculty). Blended learning is looked on as a way to allow an instructor to teach larger classes and also potentially reach a larger audience, since there is a lower requirement to be in the same classroom. Changes in financial aid have also made it possible to spend less “seat” time to accomplish learning.

Improved pedagogy for blended learning

While these economic factors are probably driving the institutions to expand blended learning, there is a potential for more effective teaching as well. In fact, many students seem to prefer blended to online or face to face classes, and some studies indicate greater effectiveness of blended over either of the other two methods. After all, how engaged is a student in the back row of a 400 person class listening to a lecture?

Some of the enhancements that are now available include:

• Heterogeneous groups: Greater diversity often results in greater learning. One example is small groups consisting of students from different campuses who are taking the same course and who then work together in project or problem based learning. Students can form, or be placed in, asynchronous study groups as well, jointly taking notes on readings and lectures or commenting on each other’s’ summaries. (A session on long-term group project management proved most informative and is described later.)
• Peer review: giving students the ability to see and then review (using some rubric) the works of other students increases their awareness of good work while also potentially reducing the workload of the instructor.  Peer evaluation, which is related, also emulates the real-world work environment and has proven valuable.
• Gamification: converting reading, research, or assessment assignments into game-like activities can increase student engagement. For example, a research project can be made into a treasure hunt, or quizzes can be converted into games.  This design change really enhances elements of interactivity beyond what’s accomplished in traditional instruction.
• Flexibility and time shifting: In addition to making class lectures available online, tests can be scheduled not at a particular moment, but at the point the individual students feels competent.
• Assessment: Some schools are experimenting with letting students retake tests until they are satisfied with the results, converting assessments of learning into assessment as learning.  Testing can also emulate real world work scenarios by allowing resources to be used in test taking environments, testing not only what the student knows, but how well they can solve problems using the right tools.

The general practice for creating blended courses is for the individual instructors to determine how to incorporate online resources and tools into their classes: which resources to use and how much seat time to reduce. Schools support the instructors through training, use of graduate students for design and development, and school guidelines for look and feel. Experienced companies such as Erudient (Erudient is a client of ours) are available to assist with design, development, support, and resource selection.

Hurdles and some solutions for blended learning

The end goal of education is still to increase student knowledge, skill, and expertise. Some clumsy attempts at blended learning are to put PowerPoint slides online along with some narration, reduce face to face by one class a week, and call the course “blended”. This conference was to dispense with those types of efforts, and many sessions at the conference dealt with some of the problems in implementation blended classes and the ways that the speaker used in overcoming them.

One problem is students who sign up for hybrid or online classes, and then are not prepared for the differences between instructor directed classes and the self-motivation and organization required online. One suggestion was to have successful students make videos of how they successfully completed the course to be shown at the beginning of courses. Other instructors pointed out the importance of early warning systems to monitor when students start falling behind and then immediate engagement with those students.

For group work, many pointed out that you can’t just assign remote students into a group and then expect them to productively accomplish something. Students need time to form, which can be provided by icebreaking or get-acquainted activities. One school requires groups to record their online interactions so that, if there are disagreements among group members about certain participants not contributing, the school can monitor what actually happened.

Similarly, some faculty are used to traditional settings and haven’t managed the nuanced differences such as building the community of learners, structuring activities and projects in a way to help students manage the time to complete long term projects.  One particular session covered techniques to help students by building team activities including peer evaluations and assigning a grade to completing a task. Milestones ensured that students move through the activity without creating bottlenecks or problems for one another.  Peer evaluation on the various iterations of the project ensure that by the time the end is reached, the final output is already in good shape.  While this technique is used in writing all the time, a group activity in a blended scenario requires real project management planning and skills.

One interesting use of blended learning in K12 is the WCATY (Wisconsin Center for Academically Talented Youth) Academy, which is a middle school. This group serves about a third of the districts in the state, with about 1300 students a year. Their goal is to make students responsible for their own learning and understand their own learning processed by digging deeply into one topic. For example, a  course on the French Revolution is called “Off with their Heads” and starts with a virtual tour of the Versailles palace. A course on meeting up with aliens actually teaches communications techniques. WCATY teachers focus on learning, and assessing learning, through storytelling, with a combination of virtual and face to face activities for students.

Another session was presented on blended learning in a studio course, and the research showed clearly that while the activity was accomplished by individual students, group evaluations and expert feedback were critical to the final result and greatly enhanced the learning of both the students evaluated and the students evaluating.  To learn more and to see the research, including some of the best use of graphics in a research paper, contact Mahmoud Reza Saghafi at saghafi@student.qut.edu.au, (Queensland University of Technology.)

One of the financial goals for institutions to implement blended learning is to increase class size, which can cause a cascade of issues. Aisha Jackson, Amanda McAndrew, Jackie Moriyama, and Viktoriya Oliynyk of the University of Colorado at Boulder maintain a website of mostly free tools to help with these large classes, and which can also help with face to face large classes: http://bit.ly/largecourseinfo

In conclusion

Blended Learning can be a magic button; reducing the costs of education while also enhancing learning. There are many resistors and still some hurdles to overcome to successful implementation, but, as one participant pointed out, if the lecture format for classes were introduced as a new technology today, it would like be universally panned.

This conference would not have been possible without the energy and organization of Tanya Joosten and the folks at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We would like to put a plug in for Dr. Joosten’s book Social Media for Educators as a big thank you for your successful efforts.

 

Related articles

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The Basics of Selling EdTech into the New York City Dept of Education

On March 12, 2012, Farimah Schuerman, Joyce Whitby, and Allegra Toback Simon explained the basics of how to get your education products into the NYC Public Schools. Getting a vendor number, having your products listed, and actually selling in the NYC public school system is an enigma for many of us. Their webinar clarified the procedures, and discussed some of the tricks used by veterans.

Below is the video of that webinar along with the approximate timing, hh:mm, of each section, and below that are links to the key documents.

 

• How to get into the system so you can be considered as a vendor. 8:15
• The four (plus two) ways to doing business with the NYCDOE 9:35
• How to use the vendor portal: 13:30
• How to submit a product 15:00
• How to upload a catalog 16:15
• How to create a vendor report: 19:00
• How to create a purchase order report: 20:00
• How to administer your vendor account: 21:00
• Looking at NYC DOE bids and RFP’s: 21:30
• NYC DOE Help: 23:00
• Getting paid: 25:30
• Is software different from books and other products 26:40
• Getting on bids: 28:00

In addition, the following documents are available from the presentation.

• Slides from the presentation
• How to manage your catalog: Catalog Management Tool Reference Guide
• NYC Dept of Education 2012 Procurement Policies

We want to thank the SIIA Education Division for making this webcast possible, and the DOLS network, which even though it excludes men, still manages to accomplish great things.

 

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Key Takeaways from the SIIA Ed Tech Government Forum

Here is a summary of the SIIA’s Ed Tech Government Forum in Washington, DC on March 7-8, 2012. If the presentations are not online, they shortly will be at http://www.siia.net/etgf/2012/presentations.asp

In the meantime, first my conclusions, and then a summary of each of the sessions:

Final conclusions

Total funding in education is not likely to increase over the next two to three years.

The Obama administration won quite a few battles with relatively little money by creating the Race To the Top competitions, although these victories are  a little mitigated by the fact that we will not know whether these made education more effective or whether the changes are permanent for at least the next three years.

While the jury is out on whether Common Core and Common Assessment will really transform education, it is clear that states and the federal government are convinced that Open Educational Resources and increased use of technology and online instruction are critical to reducing education costs. It’s probably not a good time to invest in the commercial textbook publishers, but there are clearly going to be some winners in online instruction.

From Jorea Marple, State Superintendent of Schools, West Virginia

Education has both an economic and cultural purpose: to prepare kids for jobs in a constantly changing economy, and to understand and participate in our culture. We’re not going to get there by just concentrating on reading and math.

These are only achievable if every citizen is convinced that public education is a moral imperative for each and every person, and personalized learning for each child. It’s our responsibility to communicate that imperative to everyone else, and live it for ourselves.

To advance educational goals, we need high expectations of what children should know, high expectations of how they should behave, and clear communication to the children about what we expect from them. And we also need to make sure there are good teachers, and give the teachers the flexibility to be innovative.

Funding for technology is continuing to decline. We all need to get the following messages across:

1. it is essential to have technology for children
2. to personalize learning across larger classes, you have to have technology

Implementation of the Common Core State Standards & Assessments

States may start reconsidering their commitment to the common core when it becomes clear the size of investment needed in technology, professional development, staff, curriculum, and time.

In order to implement the common assessments, due in the next two years, we lack about $2 Billion in technology in schools, but technology funding has continued to decline.

States that have pledged commitment to teacher evaluation and Common Core because they have received Race to the Top money or have received exemptions from No Child Left Behind may find themselves locked into a path they will not have the resources to complete. No one knows how this is going to play out, some combination of increased taxes, federal relaxation of the requirements, and states unilaterally changing courses, possibly with federal clawbacks.

The New Normal: Doing more with less through Technology and eLearning

There is a productivity discussion that is just starting to take place in education. Up until recently, technology was an additive cost; building, teachers, and curriculum costs were fixed. Now, technology is being looked at as a mechanism to reduce costs in addition to improve results.

Technology Adoption (Photo credit: Veribatim)

One computer per student, when it works, changes the whole culture of a school: teachers collaborate and students are given increased choice. For this to work, it takes leadership to convince the community to provide not just the technology, but the resources for ongoing teacher Professional Development, and time for teachers to collaborate and plan.

A recent study by the Fordham Institute found that online classes are less expensive than hybrid (or blended learning), and hybrid classes are less expensive than brick and mortar ones. The cost of content is higher, but the cost of instruction and infrastructure are lower.

If the publishing industry doesn’t want the federal and state government to create their own content, they have to devise a better way to measure and qualify commercial education content. If publisher content can’t demonstrably be linked to better results, then Open Educational Resources (OER) are going to replace it. With OER, there may be profitable opportunities for packaging, implementation, support, maintenance, and customization.

Education Policy, Pundits, and Predictions

The main legacy of the $100 billion of ARRA education funds from 2009 is that it primarily allowed districts to keep some teachers when state and local funding was decimated. The unintended consequence is that it also kicked the difficult conversations about pensions and employment flexibility down the road by three years.

The federal government is able to effectively fund innovation in some areas, like medicine and defense, and we should learn how to do it better in education.

The Race to the Top (RTTT) competitions unfroze policies that had been stagnant for decades, but it remains to be seen what the final results will be, we don’t know if the new policies are more effective, and we don’t know if states will stick with them as the road gets more difficult. There is an argument about whether the biggest changes in education have been due to RTTT or to Republicans winning state elections, and being willing to challenge traditionally Democratic sacred cows.

We need ways to give states and districts some latitude to try and implement innovations, but still have accountability for chronic poor results.

State of the States

States have20-30%  less money to put into education than they did in 2008, and that money is not coming back.

Because Congress is locked down, changes to education are going to happen at the state level, not the national level.

Teacher accountability has become a permanent part of education, because the teacher is the single most important variable affecting education in the schools. But we also need to have a debate on what is the school’s educational responsibility, and who pays, if the child is not getting an adequate home environment.

From Kaya Henderson, Chancellor, Washington DC Public Schools

The role of technology is to allow teachers to reach across a broad spectrum students with limited resources.

DC has 18 different pilots going on with different techniques and technologies. The district intends to scale the ones that work, and stop the ones that don’t. Even though some will not work, you need the courage to try to change, a tolerance for some failure, and systems to manage and screen pilots.

School budgets only fund schools to continue to do what they are doing, an effective leader also has to find ways to pay for reform.

The DC union teacher contract allows the district to pay more than surrounding districts, private schools, or charters, and it also allows them to screen, hire, retain, and incent good teachers.

Race To The Top and other State Education Initiatives

Too many publishers have come to states claiming they provide state-localized content, when the only customization has been a search and replace of TN for FL. Commercial textbook publishers face a credibility problem with the state departments of education.

FJG Race to the top of Vermont, not really the right RTTT, but the bicycle makes my wife happy (Photo credit: pdbreen)

Common Core (CC) is the biggest thing to happen this decade; it is fundamentally narrower and deeper than the state standards. Any vendor who says it’s content is aligned to the CC will automatically engender suspicion: the same materials can’t be aligned to both the CC and to state standards.

Implementing the CC is incredibly complex, and as we get closer to the deadlines, the state conversations have moved from, “look at all the cool things we can do with individual learning” to “what do we have to focus on to meet our deadlines.”

States and districts put most of their attention on improving the lowest performing schools.

Districts and states are not requiring proof of effectiveness from OER materials, but do require it for vendor supplied content. This is just a fact of life, and it’s up to the vendors to show increased effectiveness if they expect to continue to sell materials to states of districts.

Personalized College: Technology Based Innovation and Policy Considerations

States used to fund close to 80% of the costs of a Community College education, and it is now down to about 50%, with the family picking up the difference.

Postsecondary institutions are looking for online courses to reduce costs, but also make education more accessible and, where possible, improve results.

Online classes can be more competency based; students can “test out” of material they already know, and take extra time with material they find difficult.

There are 4 criteria for judging a good Community College:

1. do most students complete their degrees
2. do the students learn
3. can they find decent paying jobs
4. is there equity

State data systems are making these questions easier to answer, and as they get the results of the data, colleges are adjusting their practices.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

States are creating some curricular resources, primarily a function of trying to save money. This is a growing trend, as OER resources move from supplemental nice to haves to OERs being used as critical content. The education people are hoping that the money saved will stay in education, so that it can be re-employed for other priorities, and not cut. So far, limited studies have shown no decrement in student outcomes from OER resources. In Utah, 1/3 of all students will be using at least one OER textbook in the 2012-13 school year.

The US Dept of Labor and US Dept of Education are funding $2 billion for Community Colleges to create OER curriculum in science and job readiness. The expectation is that this curriculum will reduce costs and also meet needs for new content that are not being met by commercial publishers.

 

 

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TCEA 2012 Recap

Texas, as the rest of the country, is in the midst of an education revolution. Tight budgets, cognitive research, and new technologies are forcing wholesale changes for students, teachers, and administrators. This was the backdrop of our trip to the Texas Computer Education Association conference the week of February 6, 2012.

We definitely noticed that attendance was down. Vendors commented that traffic was down, but that gave them more time to have deeper conversations, so the net effect was increased opportunity.

Almost by definition, if you are attending an ed tech event, you are interested in learning more and using technology, so the crowd was not necessarily representative of educators as a whole. That said, educators were looking for technology that allowed them to engage students, teach deeper, teach more in less time, and handle larger classes. Spending priorities on content seemed to be ELA first, Special Education second, ELL third, and if there were still funds available, Math. But the number one spending priority was on finding ways to use money to keep staff and avert layoffs at districts of all sizes.

We got the chance to listen to schools rave about three of our clients: Atomic Learning, HELP Math, and School Improvement Network, so that was gratifying. You always want to hear how your products are helping teachers teach better, and turning a failing student into a star.

And I was able to attend Edubloggercon, which will be called SocialEdCon at ISTE this summer. This is always a highlight for me, because the talks are unrehearsed, and the ideas free-flowing from the presenters and the audience.

For those interested in (usually free) interesting applications discussed at presentations, below are my highlights of the sessions I attended.

Kevin Honeycutt on Art and Music in Education

If you’ve never had the chance to hear or see Kevin, you’re missing something from your life. He connects education philosophy, technical savvy, empathy, first-hand experience with the effects of bullying, art, and humor in all of his presentations.

His main point in this session was that we are at the beginning of a major jobs war. Globally, there are 3 billion people vying for 1 billion good jobs. The winners are going to be inventors and innovators; yet we are cutting all the opportunities for individual expression and creativity from schools. What are some quick tips on tapping and expanding kids’ creativity?

1. Give a school event where the price of admission is student content, like a dance but only allow students to come if they have written a song (which really isn’t that hard given applications like PocketGuitar and GarageBand)
2. Give every teacher $20 on iTunes and let them find their own applications to use in class, but also make them share what they’ve done in some type of forum like a PLC.
3. Make sure the local press reports on student created content, so the parents demand more of it.
4. Put iPads in special education, and let those kids create content that the whole community hears about, so other parents demand that their own kids get the same opportunity
5. Make it safe for kids to try new things. If they are using a new music application, let them use headphones so no one hears their mistakes until they feel comfortable to go pubic.

Motivating the technologically unmotivated teacher

The most common excuses are that they have no time, and the way they have always done it works. Here are the ways the group came up with for trying to overcome them:

1. In tech PD, take 45 minutes and give the teacher one thing that will work in his or her classroom instead of trying to cram more into a session.
2. Find ways to publicly applaud successes. For example a tech laggard, when applauded for some tech accomplishment on the district website will be more likely to try something else.
3. Do an unconference with teachers on PD day. Have the teachers come up with their own 30-45 minute topics, and find a person who is willing to lead the session.
4. Find teachers who are willing to be the experts, you can’t just rely on the tech team.
5. Do a collaborative session with the teachers, and then use this as a model for the teachers to do collaboration with their students instead of sit and git.
6. Use Google docs or Evernote for collaborative note taking on PD sessions.
7. Plant some folks in tech PD sessions who will be enthusiastic
8. Use a parking lot to note issues that should not immediately be resolved, so you can stay on target.

Virtual Field Trips

Dwight Goodwin is another person you should go out of your way to see. He keeps his presentations at http://classroomnext.blogspot.com/ where he has presentations on iPads in the Classroom, Google Earth for Social Studies, Websites that work well with Interactive White Boards, and Virtual Field Trips.

There are generally four different routes for Virtual Field Trips. You can often find an expert in the field who will be happy to share his or her expertise with a class. Many museums have virtual field trips. Many historical places like Jamestown, Vicksburg, and Williamsburg have virtual field trips, and there are many trips using Google Earth.

One good source for finding trips and experts is CILC. I also maintain my own Diigo list of virtual field trips. Skype has a new educator’s site which has tips and possible collaborations. There is a web site devoted to Google Earth Literature Trips. The Google Art Project has interactive tours of many of the world’s top art museums.

Five Lovely Tools

Gail Lovely presented five new useful tools.

SoapBox creates a back channel without requiring email addresses of names (unless you want to). For example, you can set up so students can anonymously can indicate if they are confused, so a teacher can decide to speed up or slow down. Later, you can pull off the questions and answers to use for student notes.

iPiccy is an online photo editor, also not requiring logins or email addresses. You upload your picture, and can apply special effects like “teeth whitening”, “eyelash”, or “thinnify”, and then pull your picture back down.

Qrvoice creates a QR code that plays text to speech. If you were creating a school tour, you could have students or parents listen to explanations on their smart phones. TagMyDoc allows you to upload a document and create a QR code to access and share it.

Myna is an online sound editor, allowing you to record sounds along different tracks, put in license free music tracks, and download the sound file for use in a presentation, animation, or video.

TitanPad lets multiple people work on the same document simultaneously, without requiring logins. It also allows the document owner to create “return to” points so nothing gets accidently overwritten.

 

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New Report on the K12 Learning Management System (LMS) market

Tying together data, learning standards, and digital content is becoming one of the next hurdles or opportunities for K12 Education, with Student Information Systems (SIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS) jockeying for school and district leadership.

Simba Technologies has recently announced their PreK-12 Learning Management Systems: A Market Overview, and here are some observations from their analysis.

Image by cindiann via Flickr

The ideal system would allow teachers and students to sign in to the LMS from anywhere, and get access to all their district resources (intranet, hosting, social networking, storage, applications, content, portfolios, grades, assignments, etc.) with no further logins. This is complicated because of the wide range of resources available, along with diversity of functions that different districts, schools, and teachers deploy.

Despite these obstacles, something like 75% of all districts have implemented some type of learning management system. Some districts are attracted to simple “LMS Lite” alternatives of tools that are really designed for other purposes but can perform some LMS features, while other are looking to deploy more robust systems. Tools in the specialty category include Renaissance Place from Renaissance Learning for K12 content, and PD 360 from School Improvement Network for Professional Development.

The choice for broad powerful systems is primarily driven by a focus on management and organizational functions. Federal and state policies and regulations are key drivers of these comprehensive systems, with the need for the aggregation and disaggregation of data, along with the movement toward digital assessments and personalized instruction which are embedded in the Common Core standards. Over half of districts surveyed by Simba have policies moving their districts in this direction.

Interestingly, the features deemed least important by district personnel were collaborative and presentation tools.

While Blackboard commands more than 50% of the higher education LMS market, Simba’s report indicated that in K12, the big three (Blackboard, Pearson Learning Studio, and Moodle) account for 30% of the market. The total market, though, is not huge yet. Simba projects that sales of LMS’s in K12 will reach about $375 million in two years.

This is just a few of the findings of the report, which “examines the role of Learning Management Systems (LMSs), which already are beginning to reshape the delivery, management, and administration of educational content in the U.S. PreK-12 sector, enabling cost-savings, convenience, new more personalized pedagogical models, and new opportunities for system and content providers.”

You can order the PreK-12 Learning Management Systems: A Market Overview by following the link or calling 240-747-3091.

 

Related articles

• Angel is Going Away? (elearningcentralia.wordpress.com)
• Will Social Media Replace LMSs in Higher Education? (carolhbates.com)
• OpenClass: Google Launches a Free LMS (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
• Acquisition of Wimba and Elluminate by Blackboard (PilotEd)
• The Ed Tech Market (PilotEd)
• Freeing the LMS (downes.ca)

Ed Tech Business Forum 2011

The SIIA’s 2011 Ed Tech Business Forum, on November 29, 2011 in New York City, reflected the conflicted nature of the education environment, primarily in the US, but also globally.

Michael Moe noted that we are preparing kids to solve problems we don’t even know about usingtechnology that hasn’t been invented while workig in jobs that don’t exist yet. While education is a significant portion of our economy, at almost 9% of GDP, it’s barely noticed by the financial markets, just less than 1% of total Venture Capital investments, and 0.2% of the capital markets.

But this seems to be changing. There were $9 billion of investment and M&A transactions last year in education. Investors are starting to recognize that education demand, coupled with innovation, are starting to create scalable opportunities. The scalable disruptors that are most appealing for ed-tech investors include:

1. Schools that prepare students to participate in the new economy

   Image by Gates Foundation via Flickr

2. Tailored adaptive learning, that gets more useful with every student click
3. Education platforms that provide engagement to students and are mediums for other educational offerings
4. Edu analytics that provide assessment, the currency of the knowledge economy
5. Partnerships, where companies partner with institutions so each can focus on its core competence

These have attracted private equity and venture capital firms, which, if they prove prescient, will eventually lead to an increased presence in the capital markets.

John Richards showed one reason why education has been less than a rounding error on the financial landscape. Reporting on the SIIA survey of ed-tech market trends, he divided ed-tech companies into four groups by annual revenue: under $5 million, $5 million to $20 million, $20 million to $100 million, and over $100 million. At investment conferences, micro cap  companies generally start at $400 million of revenues.

Farimah Schuerman pointed out that a recent SIIA survey of educators found high agreement that educators’ most common concerns were around

1. Aging equipment and funding to replace it; educators wanted access the right equipment and training on how to apply it
2. Alignment of pedagogy and materials to the common core standards and forthcoming assessments
3. Finding appropriate e-content and fitting it into learning activities, and the content needed to be accessible, editable and either cheap or free

She also highlighted the growing interest by educators in tablets, bring your own device, and online classes for students as areas where ed-tech firms could supply needed resources.

Richard Sims dashed water on the rosy investment picture painted by Moe. While federal funds for education may remain steady for the next few years (barring budget deals or changes in administration), state and local funding, which is about 90% of K12 funding, is under siege, and will not recover to pre-recession levels until 2017. With real estate taxes starting to nosedive, we can expect a 10% decrease in total education funding over the next two years. The good news is that there is some job growth, but a) it is slow job growth and not likely to reach the number of 2007 jobs until past 2017, b) half of the job growth is in the lowest paying jobs (while half is in the highest skilled highest paying jobs, and virtually no growth in the middle pay jobs), and c) states are focusing on cutting state income taxes, which is the revenue source quickest to rebound based on job growth.

Of course, not all boats will sink in the lowering tide; companies need to uncover market niches with good growth possibilities in states where employment and tax receipts are rebounding fastest.

Bob Wise pointed out that the issue is not so much the gross amount of education spending, it’s how you can demonstrate that technology can leverage the effectiveness of educators. In other markets, technology reduced costs. In education technology has always been an expense; if you kept the educator/student ratio constant, adding new technology just increased the cost of education. With demands to do more with less, with the role of teachers changing, with increases in blended learning, and with the goal of ensuring that every child has access to technology that allows him or her to progress at his or her own rate, we have a real potential to transform the education landscape. Wise reiterated Clay Christianson’s prediction that by 2020, 50% of courses will be online.

You can view many of the presentations here: http://hosted.mediasite.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=47878f99-468d-4989-9941-2977d011e425

Is this the worst time to be in education in recent memory? Are we on the brink of an education rebirth? Do we have an education crisis? Is it an exciting time for innovation in education?

Yes.

 Also, one more note. We've been featured in PhD in Education as one of the top 50 education blogs: http://www.phdineducation.org/50-incredible-sites-to-find-new-and-inventive-teaching-methods.html

 

Related articles

• BMO Back to School 2011 (academicbiz.typepad.com)
• Supporting Technology Entrepreneurs in Georgia (academicvc.com)
• Reasons to Invest in Education (speedofcreativity.org)
• What are the main areas of technology lead disruption of K-12 Education in America? (compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com)

BMO Back to School 2011

The BMO Back to School Education Conference was held on Thursday, September 15, and there was a ton of information. With three concurrent presentations, it wasn’t possible to follow everything, but here is a distillation of some of the points made by the CEOs running leading publishers, charter schools, and for-profit colleges.

General Observations from Farimah Schuerman

The conference expanded its program this year to include more general and informational panels. As usual, Higher Ed had the lead role, but not as much as in past years, and with a much sharper and defensive tone. The For-Profit Higher Ed sector has been under a lot of pressure, with some organizations seeing declining enrollments, and facing increased scrutiny from Congress, the Dept of Education, the press, and the states. In Postsecondary, the core technology segments (LMS, SIS, course tools) are pretty mature, and newcomers aspire to be absorbed.

 

Image by York College of PA via Flickr

There seemed to be a lot more Private Equity activity than Venture Capital, and there seemed to be a number of folks managing private wealth (possible Angel Investors) who were investigating but not yet investing. Of course, these may reflect more the people we know and work with, since we gleaned this information from our conversations.

 

There was more interest in K12 than in the past. The acquisitions from Pearson and News Corp seemed to have spurred some real interest, and possible transactions involving McGraw-Hill wove their way into conversations.

There is lots of room for innovative, specialized applications. Textbooks and instructional materials are in upheaval still, with rental, online, and freemium instructional materials vying for market share, and new online channels competing against the existing sales forces.

A few companies talked about their success this year, in that they maintained revenue levels. This leads one to believe that not slipping is cause for pride in this difficult market. Companies seem to be looking for new positioning and expanding their market niche in order to access other revenue opportunities and not give up ground.

Difficult economic conditions call for creativity (which is both true and a blatant self plug for Academic Business Advisors).

Ronald Klausner, CEO, Cambium Learning

Education is a $4.6 Billion industry. The current twin concerns are to reduce costs and increase effectiveness. With teachers accounting for half of all spending, districts and states are looking for tools to reduce the number of teachers and make the surviving teachers more effective. In addition, there is going to be a big shortage of teachers, with 1/3 of all new teachers leaving the profession in their first three years, and 1/3 of existing teachers expecting to retire in the next five years.

Special education accounts for ¼ of all spending, with 1/8 of the students; it’s the area where schools have the most latitude to spend. About 2/3 of all districts have either already deployed or are in the process of implementing RTI (Response to Intervention) programs.

Cambium Learning itself is a $200M company with 140 sales reps. Their strategy for new products is a combination of acquisitions and looking for academics who have had success with specific student populations, and then to productize and monetize those practices.

Kevin Modany, Chairman, ITT Educational Services

We need to better define the outcomes we want from education. Reducing dropouts or student default rates are not outcomes. Do we want schools to increase employment, increase salaries, get students started on good careers? Then we need to measure those outcomes and adjust our practices.

Folks with skills get the jobs, and we need to get the story out about how for-profit schools are giving kids skills to help them get meaningful employment.

Richard Barth, CEO, KIPP Foundation

 

Two lessons learned: 1) once parents see that their kids can learn more, they will demand more from both the charters and the public schools, 2) you can’t just come up with a good system and expect it to work, you need to work to continuously improve it based on student outcomes and feedback.

 

The margin for error in a for-profit is tiny; for-profit schools are held to a different standard from non-profit or public schools. One reason is that the reporting on education is not good, usually the education reporter is a starter position, and another is that you get more readership with a story bashing for-profit education than one showing good things happening. There is a strong recognition that charter schools provide a way to move the needle for all schools.

We need to have a national assessment. Absent a national test, where you are educated will determine what you know, and will perpetuate inequalities. We know that a Kipp child education in Louisiana learns what one in NYC learns. But when you look at state test scores, even though a public school student in Louisiana may pass that state test, he or she cannot hold a candle to one who passes the NY State test.

Michael Connelly, CEO, Mosaica Education

Not a single parent has ever raised the issue with him about whether his schools were for-profit or not. The question of for-profit or public seem more a concern for unions and politicians.

Andrew Fitzmaurice, CEO, Nord Anglia Education

Parents aren’t as concerned about whether you are for-profit or not, they are more concerned about getting the best possible outcome for their particular child.

Private pay, premium schools is a lot easier environment than government pay or charter, there are fewer regulations. They can do things like have classes in Warsaw working with classrooms in North America or the Middle East working together, which would be more difficult if they had to meet very specific standards.

There are still restrictions. In China, every student has to have 5 hours of Mandarin a week. In Abu Dhabi, every student needs to take 5 hours of Islamic studies a week. Some parents don’t seem to understand that you need to follow local laws.

Chris Whittle, CEO, Avenues

Over regulation can really impede education. For example, certain countries do not allow nationals to attend foreign owned schools, even though they have a shortage of schools.

It takes about three years to start a school from scratch.

Mac Gamse, CEO, Meritas

All schools have to use technology. Technology can personalize the education for our kids, and it can reduce the administrative tasks of teachers so they can spend more time and effort teaching. We have a unit on uses of water, where we have students in Manhatten, Montreal, and the deserts of Mexico providing completely different insights into water management.

Mark Dreyfus, President, ECPI University

With the new for-profit regulations, schools are starting to realize that they can no longer grow by increasing tuition. Tuition is going to have to follow the types of jobs you are training for, and there will be a reward for the schools who can deliver jobs effectively and efficiently.

For example, we will still provide some soft skills where they are needed to complete a degree, but we won’t be able to offer anything that is not needed.

Our management is focused on installing local controls, instead of thinking about improving instruction.

Tim Foster, Executive Chairman, Concorde Career Colleges

The new for-profit regulations is going to put a lot more cost discipline into the sector.

These particular regulations are not particularly onerous, but the fact that there is now a thermometer that has been installed means that the metrics can be changed by a strike of a pen. That’s a good amount of uncertainty and hinders our ability to plan.

Duncan Anderson, CEO, Education Affiliates

The regulations, because they are going to focus schools on costs and very specific measurable outcomes, are going to have the unintended consequence of driving less education. If something is not necessary for a degree or a job, it’s going to be eliminated.

A positive by-product is that we are getting a lot better at our processes. We audit every single placement, we record every conversation and review them daily. But it still keeps you up at night knowing that there are 400 people talking to students every day, and you don’t fully know that every one is in compliance.

 

Related articles

• Proposed Government Regulations on For-Profit Schools to Benefit Students (prweb.com)
• Kipp (socyberty.com)
• NewSchools CEO Ted Mitchell: My Best Idea For K-12 Education (forbes.com)

The New Internet Marketing

This is article is primarily for those who are running Ed Tech companies, want to, or are interested in marketing. If you are putting most of your Internet dollars into lead generation and advertising, you are barking up the wrong tree.

Marketing is the use of communications channels to drive sales.

In their free book, The Zero Moment of Truth, Google quotes Bob Thacker of Gravitytank:

Engagement with the customer today isn’t just pouring a message down on their head and hoping they get wet.

It really is understanding that you must be present in a conversation when they want to have it, not when you want to.

The old marketing model consisted of three steps:

1. Stimulus: something prompts a person to want to purchase a product or service; this could be an advertisement, an email, or a piece of direct mail. Its primary purpose was to generate leads, which could then be converted into sales.
2. Shelf: the person goes to wherever he or she goes to purchase the product or service, finds it, and makes the purchase. The purpose of marketing was to make it attractive for the person to buy; product packaging plays a major role, as do brochures and sales aids.
3. Experience: customers use the product or service; it works; and they are happy. They become loyal customers, and hopefully recommend the product to others through word of mouth.

Proctor and Gamble, probably the giant of consumer marketing, called the second and third stages (Shelf and Experience) the moments of truth. Specifically, finding the product and going through the purchase process is the first moment of truth (FMOT), and using the product and enjoying it is the second moment of truth (SMOT). If either of these fail, the brand has lost a customer. And, the moments of truth generally lead to word of mouth, so failure often has even larger repercussions.

What has changed today?

1. Stimulus: the person still might get prompted by an advertisement, and this might be on the web or through some other means.
2. Online Research: Instead of going out to buy, approximately 84% of potential buyers do research on the web, looking for reviews, comments, or sending out inquiries on social networks.
3. Shelf: based on information the person selects the outlet or store and product.
4. Experience: the person uses the product or service, and whether it works or not, they become part of the word of mouth network, whether live or online.

This new step, online research, is becoming known as the zero moment of truth or ZMOT.

Online advertising is relatively ineffective as a stimulus for action (it was 8^th; the first four were ads on television, mail, articles in newspapers or magazines, and ads in newspapers or magazines).

However, with 84% of potential buyers doing research, online search was the most likely place to research products (the next three were: talking with acquaintances, looking at the product in a store, and online comparison shopping).

What do potential buyers look for online?

• More information about the product
• Similar products that might also meet the need
• Experiences others have had with the product and the other solutions; their SMOT becomes potential buyers' ZMOT
• Offers, discounts, and coupons

What they want to know is:

• How can I save money?
• How can I save time?
• How can I improve my life, job, or results?

And they want to hear it from people who are just like them. Superintendents want to hear what other administrators say, teachers want to learn from other teachers, parents of elementary school students want to hear what other elementary school parents have to say.

Not only are they going to look for this information on your website, they are going to use general search, paid search, blogs, youtube, and social network sites to find similar people who have written, blogged, commented, tweeted, or made videos about the products and services they are interested in.

If potential buyers can find satisfying information about your product at the ZMOT, you'll likely get the sales, if not, you've lost it.

How do you find out if your ed tech company is competing well in the ZMOT?

• Does your site come up in the top third of the first page as you start typing your company name or product into a search engine?
• When you type in searches based on the problems you solve, what comes up about your product?
• What comes up when you type in a search for "[your product name] review" or "best [your category]”?
• What questions do people ask about your product or category, how easy is it to find your answers to those questions?
• What do people most want to know when they are considering purchasing products in your category? How does your product come up when they ask those questions on search engines? Do you have landing pages that pose and answer those questions?
• Where can people find how to videos about your product(s), and how easy are they to find?
• Are most people staying on your website for at least a few pages, or do you have a high bounce rate?
• What happens when someone with a mobile phone lands on your website; how is their experience?

Yes, ed tech companies still need to concern themselves with lead generation, sales, and customer satisfaction. But the social web has opened up a fourth front, the ability of potential buyers to easily research products, and the ability of customers to easily participate in product conversations. If your company can effectively market in this new environment, it should be poised for growth.