PILOTed

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.

 

Podstock 2011

In case you missed it last year, Podstock is a Kansas education technology event orchestrated by Kevin Honecutt of ESSDACK in Wichita, KS.

 

You can't capture the spirit of Podstock in a post; it's collaborative learning while having fun, hanging out with friends, and passing through chaos. And you certainly can't get a feel for anything but the chaos part from the website: http://podstock.ning.com/.

 

But, here is a taste, a summary of the keynote session I attended on July 22, 2011.

Dean Groom offered a lot to think about. You can also follow his blog and learn more about him at http://deangroom.wordpress.com/.

Let's say you're riding on a bus, you look up, and you see a sign: "Spitting is Prohibited." It makes you think, in what world do we need a sign to tell us that spitting on a bus isn't the correct thing to do?

Most of us do things without waiting or someone to tell us we can or we should, we can figure out what's the right thing to do, and we're generally pretty good at figuring out how to get them done even when there are rules against it. Many of the technologies used in schools today are there because someone (one of us?) has figured out how to get away with it, even if it isn't within the regulations. In communal teaching, teachers also become learners, and students become teachers.

A lot of what we do now in the classroom is like adding a clock onto a toaster. It's pretty straightforward to do it, and it does allow you to make toast AND know what time it is, but why would you ever want to do it?

But it seems that we could be seeing a fundamental shift going on in teaching and learning.

Good classrooms and good learning today are based on communities.

A community has shared values and shared goals, and when you are part of a community, your perception (your reality) gest expanded beyond your wildest ideas. Effective communities offer many rewards for learning, among them fun, knowledge, a sense of belonging, possibly money and/or power, and this is what good games offer as well. While communities may not need signs like "No Spitting" they do require an effort to make sure that values are shared and understood by their members.

Content is becoming less important.

We are starting to differentiate between teaching content and teaching cognition. Is it more important to know the dates of the major battles in the US Civil War, or to understand how certain wars have changed the social network and our collective understanding of human nature and social values?

Ability is becoming more valued.

Age, race, and gender are becoming less important, as we look for accomplishments, knowledge, and skills as criteria for advancement.

Pedagogy is becoming gamified.

Students are spending an average of 2 hours a day playing games. They're learning, and they're learning a different way of how to learn. One can think of an iterated four step process in becoming proficient in a game:

1. Learning the basic rules
2. Exploration and early success with simple tasks
3. Mastering the game
4. Generalizing skills learned to advanced levels and other games

We are learning how to construct learning strategies and projects around these same steps.

Summary

As we get better at modeling classroom learning on these emerging methods, rather than regurgitating Blooms taxonomy, we can conform education to the way kids are learning to learn. In this transition, accepted teaching practice will involve showing kids how we are going to assess them and how they can assess themselves, making sure they know how to learn on their own and learn from and with others, giving kids tasks where the solutions are worth celebrating, providing a sense of adventure, and making learning unpredictable.

There is actually a lot more I could write about in today's sessions, from friends and experts Dean Mantz (on the 21^st Century classroom), Chelsea Whisnant (student ePortfolios), Sharon Ricks (the best educational Apps), and Jill Bromenschenkel and Nancy Mangnum (connections and collaborations between classrooms). But, it's time for the dance.

Related articles

• Skype is connecting teachers and classrooms across the globe (blogs.skype.com)
• Reflections on Teaching and Learning (collaboratoria.wordpress.com)

Edubloggercon at TCEA

Edubloggercon took place the day before the official sessions at TCEA. It’s not about blogging, it’s about spirited discussions on interesting topics.

There were about 200 people attending. In the morning, we all gathered together and voted on the types of topics we wanted to talk about. There were four one-hour time slots, with about four sessions per slot. For each session, one person was volunteered to lead, and those of us interested in the topic peeled off to ask questions and contribute to the discussion.

There should also be an Edubloggercon at ISTE. I found it well worth it.

Rita Oates on Helping Parents cope with their childrens’ web activities

Rita Oates is Vice President, Education Markets for ePals, and a national speaker on digital citizenship.
Parents’ biggest fears from their kids using the Internet are

1. predators
2. that they would borrow their parents’ credit card and make purchases
3. that they would share family information
4. that they would see porn or gruesome pictures
5. that they would share indecent photos
6. that they would be subjected to cyberbullying
7. that the family PC would be infected by viruses

What is interesting is that 30% of all kids end up being cyberbullied at some point, but fewer than 20% of those actually report it. A growing source of cyberbullying is students bullying teachers. A student is 10 times more likely to be cyberbullied than to be contacted by a predator.

Not to excuse the behavior or blame the victim, but statistically, the vast majority of kids who interact with predators are kids who are in danger of other types of risky behaviors, so the solution would seem to be more to coach and counsel the kids than to wall in all kids. Using two analogies:

Don’t ban cars, teach children how to cross the street.

How well did it work for Sleeping Beauty to ban spinning wheels?

For schools, the best scalable strategies are to create a role based infrastructure with separate rights for teachers, parents, students under 13, and students over 13.

Schools do not have to go overboard on protecting students to be CIPA compliant; they do not have to shield students from every conceivable bad connection and web site; they just have to show that they are taking prudent steps.

You can view the complete slides of Rita’s presentation at http://3.ly/parenting.

International Collaboration Websites

I also participated in the session on ways that classrooms could participate in international collaboration. The ability to operate as part of a multinational team and understanding how cultural differences affect perceptions and actions are increasingly important skills.
We came up with a list of applications and web sites that facilitated teachers and classrooms connecting.

iEARN

http://www.iearn.org/
iEARN connects over 30,000 schools with over 130 different projects. Projects include:

• Connecting Math to our lives
• Friends Book, making international friends
• Creating an international magazine
• Sharing local history

The Flat Classroom Project

http://www.flatclassroomproject.org/
The Flat Classroom Project was featured in Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, and started with a collaboration between a class in India and one in Beijing.
Two or more classes work together on a project, using tools like WikiSpaces or Ning. Sample projects include How the World Wide Web has Changed the World, and Connecting the World Online.

Live Mocha

http://www.livemocha.com/
Live Mocha allows people to practice speaking other languages with native speakers. If I am a native English speaker, and I want to practise Spanish, I can connect with someone who speaks Spanish and wants to learn English. We can help coach each other. There are both free and paid versions.

The Global Education Collaborative

http://globaleducation.ning.com/
The GEC is a Ning community around the Global Education Conference. You can connect with others who share interests and information on the globalization of education.

Education Beyond Borders

http://www.educationbeyondborders.org/
This is a teacher organization, looking to connect teachers from around the world to share incites and best practices. For example, their Education Without Borders project assembles a team of educators to provide professional development in a target country based on that countries curriculum.

Connect All Schools

http://www.connectallschools.org/
The goal of Connect All Schools is to connect every school in the US with the outside world by 2016 through introduction of global issues curriculum, new World Languages, online collaboration, youth and teacher exchanges, professional development on international education, video-conferences, etc.

Global Schoolnet

http://www.globalschoolnet.org/index.cfm
GSN helps teachers find collaborative learning partners around the world. Sample projects include:

• CyberFair 2011, where youth conduct research and publish their findings on the web
• Doors to Diplomace, which is sponsored by the US Dept of State for Middle School and High School kids around the world to learn about the importance of international affairs and diplomacy

ePals

http://www.epals.com/
ePals helps teachers find classrooms around the world to connect with their kids, for projects and discussions. National Geographic has helped design and sponsor many of the projects.

Cool Tools Duel

The final session of Edubloggercon was the cool tools duel.
There were two teams, each at a computer and projector. There were ten rounds. In each round the team had to show a cool website or app. The winner of each round was determined by the applause of the other attendees.

I couldn’t keep up with the applications, but one of the other attendees kept notes on the Edubloggercon Wiki. Here are her notes, with a few annotations by me.

myfakewall.com Fake facebook pages can be created. This makes for a great project, “pretend that the founding fathers could use Facebook to communicate with each other, create a Facebook page for Samuel Adams.”

Corkboard.me like Wallwisher

Citrify (photo editing program)

polleverywhere.com online polls, texting polls

snipsnipit.com can snip videos from youtube, teachertube, etc. so that you can share just a portion of the video, instead of making someone watch the whole thing.

quiQR Iphone app that creates and makes QR codes and reads them too.

Spashtop remote turns your ipad into a remote control for your desktop computer $1.99.
You load the desktop app to your computer, and your iPad or phone will find your computer on a network.

360 degree panorama app for iphone lets you take 360 degree or panorama photos. Here is a great exmple of a 360 degree panorama, taken by a friend building snowmen with his kids: http://occip.it/pt3z2o8r

paperrater.com Like turnitin.com but free

awesomehighlighter.com allows you to highlight a web page, and then share your highlights and annotations with others.

8 mm classic camera app $$ 2.00 cool video editing software for the iPhone

Meetingwords.com Create a public pad. Like etherpad.

wiffiti.com for texting or twitter messaging to an address

rockmelt.com is a Chrome based browser that aggregates your social networks.

Jot Not pro 99 cents can scan a wall and sends it to evernote, etc.

pixelpipe app Lets you publish your media via an app

http://www.twitterfall.com/ allow users of Twitter to view upcoming trends and patterns posted by users etc.

Conclusions

I’ll never be able to keep up with all the new websites and applications that are being developed for social networking, smartphones, and education. It was great to talk to others who are also struggling to keep up. Each of us was able to learn from each other.

 

Running on Empty

The Failure to Teach Computer Science in the Digital Age

Image by Lower Columbia College via Flickr

With computing deeply embedded in so many occupations, especially the well paying ones, why is the US moving backwards in deploying Computer Science instruction in schools?

Canegie Mellon University (CMU), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) have just completed a big study on the role of CS in elementary and secondary education, available here.

Only 10 states apply graduation credits for Computer Science classes. Only 14 states incorporate even half the CS standards that the ACM and CSTA recommends; in fact, 14 states do not incorporate even one CS standard into their secondary education standards. And the number of HS students taking AP Computer Science has decreased by 35% over the last five years.

You'd think that the Common Core standards would address these issues, but there is no Computer Science recommendations in the Common Core Standards.

The report maintains that some of the causes are that computer science is regarded as a vocational, rather than academic, course of study, that there is no certification of CS teachers, and that there is general confusion of terms between literacy, use, information technology, and computer science.

The report defines some of the more commonly used terms as follows:

• Technology literacy and fluency: understanding how to use technology including the ability to use technology to express ideas creatively, reformulate knowledge, and synthesize new information and technology.
• Educational technology: integration of technology into teaching to advance student learning across academic disciplines.
• Computing education: broadly used, but most often reflecting educational technology or technology fluency.
• Information technology: use of technology to solve a business or information problem, often involving databases or networks
• Computer Science: the study of computers and algorithmic processes, including concepts, hardware and software, application, and impact on society.

  Image via Wikipedia

The reports goals are pretty straightforward. All HS graduates should be able to:

• Understand the principles and major components of computers
• Create algorithms, including testing and verification
• Create a web page including some scripting
• Understand the concepts of hierarchy and abstraction
• Be able to use the mathematics involved with computers, including binary numbers, sets, and functions

 Isn't this something we should want for the next generation, who will be supporting us in twenty years?

Related articles

• Report finds K-12 computer science education declining (eurekalert.org)
• CSTA resources for CSed Week (computinged.wordpress.com)

Social Networking in Education Businesses

If you are an ed-tech business, and you want to capitalize on social networking, how do you get results?

There are four components to defining your social networking goals: your purpose, your audience, your media, and your metrics.

You need to pick one primary purpose for your social media marketing.

1. Are you looking to boost brand recognition?
2. Do you want to generate leads?
3. Do you want to get feedback?
4. Do you want to generate sales?

If you answered 2 or 4 above, then social networking is not the way to accomplish your goal. While you may end up generating leads through social networking, and you may end up generating sales, direct marketing, including search engine optimization and search engine marketing, is generally much better and more predictable.

Social networking can help you achieve a market leadership position for your brand, and it can provide invaluable feedback on messaging, features, benefits, drawbacks, threats, and impressions.

In looking over your messaging, who is your target audience? Do you want to reach the investment community? Potential partners? State or district administrators? Principals? Teachers? Tech Coordinators?

In terms of media, what social media does your audience use? Do they read blogs, and which ones? Which communities do they belong to? What tweats do they read or send? What do you need to contribute to the community, how often, and how long a ramp up time do you need to become a valued part of the community? Who else could help you along the way, and what will they expect in return?

In considering your metrics, what is your expected return, and how will you measure it? Are there milestones?

Through ABA's experience with communities, texting, networking, and blogs, we have a track record establishing leadership positions and building rapport through social networking. If you want to use social media to build and establish a leadership position for your brand or obtain market feedback, we'd love to talk further.

Summary of 2010 Horizon Report

Each year the Horizon Report, a joint project of the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, reports on current trends in the use of technology in education.

This year's four major trends are

• How technology is changing the role of educators. Now that knowledge is not a scarce commodity, students are more in need of learning how to evaluate sources, make sense of new situations, and demonstrating their competence and accomplishments.
• Any time, any place. With ubiquitous connections, people expect to be able to do whatever they need or want to, whenever they need or want to do it, wherever they happen to be.
• Decentralization. Increasingly, applications are cloud based, support is not local, and the applications work on any connected device.
• Collaboration. Social networking has vastly increased communications, and while education has been slow to follow, increasingly, student work will be collaborative, crossing departments and institutions.

The report admonishes schools for not teaching better digital skills; not the skills involving how to use the technology, but the higher order skills of knowing how to use the technology to think better and achieve better outcomes. This is further exasperated as schools at all levels focus on decreasing costs and on narrowly defined goals like test scores.

The report sees large near term impact from mobile computing, despite concerns about privacy and security, and open content, as schools look to shed costs. As open content gets adopted and mobile devices are improved, the use of e-books will also grow as will the deployment of augmented reality, which overlays digital information over views of the physical world.

The report, available here, also has examples for each of the trends and challenges facing education.

ISTE Entry 2: The Oyster Project

This is the second blog entry from ISTE, about a poster project to study the water conditions in the Arthur Kill in New Jersey. Theproject is being conducted by the John E. Dwyer Technology Academy of Elizabeth, NJ. I talked with Javier Valencia and Jeff Roszkowski who are directing the program. It's a great story, but with one nagging detail, something that actually makes my blood curdle. Let's get that out of the way first.

The reason this is called the Oyster project is that the school's intention is to place Oysters in the estuary, just off Staten Island, to see how they cleaned up the water supply. But, the oyster industry objected, afraid that the high school might sell the oysters and compete with them. They lobbied the state government. We can all predict the result: the high school was prohibited from using planting the oysters. The good news, even about this, is that the school is working on setting up partnerships with schools in Maryland along the Chesapeak bay, where they can follow through on this part of the project.

 In this project, students from teams of 7 students measure 8 different characteristics of the water in three different locations over time. Students needed to understand the significance of oxygen and nitrogen levels, temperature, and turbidity, know why they were being measured and how, and be aware of the environmental implications of variations in the different characteristics. The groups had to learn team dynamics, like how to delegate, how to communicate, how to make decisions, how to follow up, and how to work out disagreements.

This was a joint project of the math, science, and English classes. Students learned the math to analyze the variations over time, and learned how to write up reports and make presentation of their findings. The English teacher commented that the students are writing much better, because they are now writing because they want to, about a topic that they are excited about.

Students uploaded their data to Future City, so that classrooms all over the world can analyze the data, and compare it their own water quality measurements.

In one example, students noticed the turbidity was greater in certain areas than others. They learned to posit theories about why, which factors influenced the turbidity (boating, runoff, rivers). They found a correlation between proximity to drainage pipes and proximity to industrial shipping to turbidity. The interesting factor is that the Arthur Kill Baykeeper had no data, and the information that has been and continues to be gathered by the high schoolers is helping them formulate action plans to clean up the estuary.

This project was partially funded through a grant from Hewlett Packard, which has been showing an enlightened approach to helping education.

Let's hope that this model for integrating 21^st century skills with math, science, and English Language Arts becomes the norm for schools.