The Education Business Blog

What do large school districts need from ed-tech providers? Michael Casserly Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools spoke at the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference this week in San Francisco. The speech was direct, honest, and well balanced in tackling some difficult issues like NCLB.

Towards the close of the speech he made the following 10 requests of the Ed-Tech community. I've added my perspective from the industry's side of the conversation.

1. Provide tools that build academic vocabulary and develop high order thinking skills. I found this an interesting request given that all the major publishers and several mid and small sized publishers have materials that do all of these things. Either we are not meeting the real need with our products or we are not getting the word out effectively. This should give all of these providers cause to reflect on their offerings and their go-to-market strategies.

2. Provide targeted intervention materials for Special Education (SPED) and English Language Learners (ELL) - specifically age appropriate materials targeting different ability levels. This is a similar problem to issue #1, there are a fair number of existing resources in the market already, but most of them are print based. One area where technology could make a huge difference is flexibly scaling basal textbook content to the student's ability level. Doing this with print presents two intractable problems - the sheer number of variations needed is prohibitively expensive and the stigma associated with the lower level books causes kids to resist using them. On-line everyone is in the same application and the number of variations is limited only by the sophistication of the software engine.

3. Develop virtual environments to stimulate inquiry based learning when the real materials would be too expensive or dangerous. This is an exciting area with a lot of activity. My article in Cable in the Classroom covered this very ground. Virtual worlds do present a challenge in districts with high poverty around equity of access to technology. The path of least resistance here may be cell phone based interfaces similar to what is happening in Japan and Europe.

4. More group learning resources using technology. Honestly - I was writing like crazy and missed the substance of this request. If you were there and recall please explain in the comments. [Update: see Charlene Blohm's take on this in comments.]

5. Clarity from publishers on what our materials do and don't do. There is a feeling that technology vendors have either over-promised or omitted important product shortcomings. Fair enough. The temptation is always there for vendors to do this - but in the conversation economy it can be deadly. Trust is the coin of the realm. Sales Management has a responsibility to set the right tone of integrity and honesty.

6. Provide clear alignments to standards in a deep and meaningful way. They would also like to know where we don't meet the standards - don't force them to figure it out on their own. Vendors might be more inclined to do this if we feel that it is more than a check-off item. The cost of doing correlations and maintaining them is significant and yet from what we can tell once they are submitted they are never used again. We do this little Morris Dance around the standards and then districts buy the book with the prettiest cover.

7. Stick by them - they are in it for the long haul and they need business partners to trudge that road with them. This is a legitimate request but a hard one to implement due to the management turmoil many large districts suffer from on an ongoing basis. It can take years to position a sale in a large district only to see it derailed by a reorganization or funding re-allocation. Only the largest publishers can make this kind of sustained commitment which limits the range of innovative solutions that the large districts see.

8. Longitudinal follow up with effective professional development. He also requested that we bundle PD into the cost of the products - if PD is an add-on option there is the temptation to skimp in this area. This request is consistent with the thesis that we are going to see a Negroponte switch to districts paying for PD and getting the materials for free. Of course, the easiest way for districts to insure that this happens is to issue their RFPs with PD bundled in. Until that happens vendors who are competing on price are going to leave it out. Amplifying this temptation is the fact that PD is frequently the item with the lowest contribution margin at publishers and ed-tech vendors.

9. We should resist customizing our products for one district - too many districts have had been left behind on legacy code as a result of this. I'm really not sure that the vendors are at fault on this one. This usually happens when a large district flexes their market power by demanding special attention. I've known vendors who have walked on these deals because they see the problems down the road, but there is almost always someone willing to bid it exactly the way the district requested it. See my comment below on how the Council itself could play a positive role in these situations.

10. Provide software tools that help them use data more effectively. This includes longitudinal tracking systems, dashboards, and benchmarks. This is an area where lots of companies are doing important work. Student Information Systems, Data Warehouses, Assessment Reporting Systems, and Learning Management Systems are complex software systems that are evolving rapidly. This is also one of the areas where technology, used effectively, can provide real tools for change.***

On top of all this he added a bonus request. He asked that vendors resist selling products when the district wants to use them in an inappropriate way (wrong age level, insufficient infrastructure, etc.). This is related to item 9 above. If a vendor feels they are being pressured to do something like this it is hard to push back, particularly in a competitive situation. Responsible vendors will walk away - but there will always be someone who will make the promise to win the business. I think there is an opportunity for the Council to be of service in this area. If the responsible vendors felt they had place they could go before these deals were sealed it might make a difference. The Council could put a word in with the district that they were headed in a risky direction.

Large Districts (and States) need to resist the temptation to use their market power in ways that ultimately hurt their own interests. There are perfectly legitimate uses for that market power so I'm not advocating unilateral disarmament - just suggesting that some restraint is needed on both sides. Districts shouldn't make unreasonable demands and vendors shouldn't make unrealistic commitments.

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***I'm working on the Data Driven Decision Making Report that will be released in the next few weeks. It is an in-depth look at the SIS and Data Warehouse market and is a follow on to the 2003 report. If you would like more information please use the contact us link and reference the report.

Don't miss Gary Stager's scathing take down of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) over at the Huffington Post.

He cites a recent review by the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences that stated:

“The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level.”

From there he goes on to compare it to the Iraq War and Katrina. Ouch!

"The failure of Reading First represents more than a course correction for a well-intentioned attempt to benefit the nation's children. Reading First was rife with politics, contempt for professional educators and conflicts of interest from the outset. It is particularly ironic that an administration insistent that every classroom practice must adhere to "scientifically-based research," to the exclusion of research it did not like, continues to insist that Reading First should be the law of the land, despite its own evidence to the contrary."

The Huffington Post is a left leaning blog, so it isn't a surprise to see this there. But this isn't just a "I beg to differ" post, the tone is absolutely acid towards those who continue to push the program out of ideology despite data that clearly shows it isn't working.

Expect to see more of this as the Bush term winds down and we head into reauthorization of the act.

What this may mean - if people are emboldened to take NCLB on like this it may be a bigger battle than many have been anticipating.

Link to the DOE report is here.

NY Times Article on the DOE Report is here.

By Randy Wilhelm, CEO Thinkronize - Guest Blogger

Did George Washington's dog play multiplication math games with Abraham Lincoln's animals during the Civil War?

I would guess the answer is a resounding no. However, a new Index reveals the most popular keywords that K-12 students are searching for on the Internet. It includes these terms in the top 15. netTrekker d.i.’s quarterly “Top 15 In-School Search Index” for spring 2008 will be announced on Wednesday, with Games coming in at #1, Dogs at #2 and George Washington, at #5.

Search engines like Google™ and Yahoo® frequently pull together lists of the most popular keyword queries, underscoring our nation’s interests and fixations and showcasing trends and patterns. This index, however, offers a different view—a real-time school-based mirror of what our children are searching for—both for academic purposes and out of genuine curiosity.

With five school age kids of my own, an academically curious wife and wireless-device-addicted me, I think our humble family averages about 50 searches a day. And, as my sons are crazy about electronic games and occasionally pine for another dog – I can certainly understand the top results of the netTrekker d.i. ranking. Although it would have been heartening to see more academic search terms in the top 5, it is comforting to know that kids will be kids, whether at school or at home.

Every day, across the nation, our digitally native students are punching search terms into their school’s Internet browsers. Now, with this first-ever quarterly index, we have new insight into what our nation’s students are learning about, care about and want to know more about.

Following are the top 15 most active keyword searches in schools for the spring quarter, from February through April, 2008:

Rank Keyword
1 Games
2 Dogs
3 Animals
4 Civil War
5 George Washington
6 Holocaust
7 Abraham Lincoln
8 Multiplication
9 Math Games
10 Weather
11 Frogs
12 Fractions
13 Planets
14 Sharks
15 Plants

About Thinkronize - They are the creators of netTrekker d.i. the #1 K-12 safe search engine.
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Lee's Comment

For publishers, teachers, and students who are building on-line activities this index will be a great asset. By using these popular search terms as starting points for long-tail keyword phrase mining you will be able to find phrases that are easy to rank high on.

The Dig function in Wordze is one place this would be invaluable. For example - if you start with "George Washington" you can find 3094 phrases that are possibly related. While George Washington" would be extremely difficult to rank for (30,000+ searches a month and 18,700,000 pages) "George Washington Biography" has much less competition (3,899 searches a month and 440,000 pages). Quantitatively this means the second phrase has 10% of the search volume but only 2% of the competition. With web savvy writing you could create content that would surface at the top of that list much more easily than plain "george washington."

Big kudos and thanks to nettrekker for creating this index.

The reaction of many parents and educators to the idea of playing games in school is horror. School is supposed to be serious hard work. What these people don't know is that in modern video games doing tasks repetitively to slowly build skills and status is the norm not the exception. These games are all about "hard" play.

Gamers have a term for this - grinding. Grinding is spending two months getting your mining skills up so that you can make a special suit of armor for your friends. Grinding is repeatedly doing some menial chore for a faction so you can earn status with them and get access to skills they can teach you.

Educators also have a term of art for this kind of activity - they call it building fluency. We learn most of the hardest skills in life through a slow process of accretion that amounts to building fluency. According to reading experts a child needs to read several million words in order to become a fluent reader.

Accelerated Reader is essentially a game about reading that is a long steady grind. Like a game you get rapid feedback, frequent promotions, and status from completing the tasks. It didn't get to be "the world's most widely used reading software" by mistake.

But the concept of fluency goes far beyond reading. Learning to play an instrument, writing, using a knife, flirting, skateboarding and thousands of other human activities all share the need to grind it out over time to develop that effortless fluency that is the mark of an expert.

This raises the question of why a child would engage in the grind to fluency? My theory, based on gamer culture, is that it is a critical part of building identity. Players will do routine and menial tasks over and over again to build the story line of their character in the game. It is a fundamental building block of identity - if it was easy there would be no status associated with becoming fluent.

How does this apply to school? Many (not all) low performing students don't have a story thread in their lives that helps motivate them to grind in school (doing homework). Students who are high achievers generally have a story line that is central to their identity that gives the grind meaning and a purpose. Without that story line much school work is just tedium.

If this is true (a big if) what is role of publishers in helping educators and parents guide students to the stories that will motivate them? I believe our role is to bring new tools and approaches to bear that have more story embedded in them, stories that students can appropriate and make their own as they build their identity.

If you want clues on how to do that - you only need to head down to your local Game Stop.

Information overload is one of the defining trends of the last 10 years. The explosion of email, social media, and cellular technologies have created 24/7 leashes that drown us in information.

As publishers (and citizens) we have a responsibility to help today's kids build good information habits in this new world.

I've written elsewhere about how our old behavior patterns make this worse than it needs to be. The question for today is - are you managing your information diet or is the information managing you?

When you sit down to your Cheerios tomorrow morning will you read the paper or will you read a book? In the paper you HOPE to learn something - anything really. If you have picked out a book you INTEND to learn something - something specific you can use.

It is the same 30 minutes a day but at the end of a month the newspaper reader will have garnered some gossip and a few insights along with recycled conventional wisdom on the editorial pages. The book reader will have challenged their thinking in some very specific ways that will help them grow, learn, and help others.

There is a place for randomness in your information diet - but with so much information at our fingertips today this can be a much smaller portion of our information diet than it used to be.

This is one small example of what the "low information diet" looks like. For those of us in the education publishing world we really have to start thinking about how we build these new skills into our products. This is doubly hard for us because most of us are built our habits in the old paradigm.

Try not reading the newspaper for the next two weeks and substituting something you have been wanting to learn but putting off. Check in with yourself at the end of the experiment and see how it went.

PS - Go ahead - read the funnies and do the crossword.

Blog years and dog years have a lot in common. They go fast, take constant care and feeding, and bring companionship and warmth into your life. Dogs force you to get up and move your body, blogs force you to get out and work your mind.

Social media are reshaping the business landscape and I've never found a better way of learning something than just wading in and messing with it. Under the tutelage of my blogfather Richard Carey and the folks at Justia I launched this site last May.

So what have I learned?

1. It works. 11,528 people interacting with my ideas has helped my business immensely (see stats below). As Jim Bower over at Numdeon is fond of saying - "it isn't about eyeballs, it is about eyeballs connected to brains." Half of my clients come from web referrals and the trend-line is up. It is far better than advertising and its "free." At April's rate there will be 24,000+ visits in the coming year.

2. Writing for a public sharpens your thinking in all contexts. Personally this has been the most rewarding part of blogging. It has forced me to organize and articulate my thoughts on key issues that affect our industry. It is far different than internal corporate writing, blog articles stand or fall on their own merits.

3. Focus = Traction. To succeed a blog has to have a clearly defined audience. I always try to bring my posts back to what the topic means for the companies that serve the education market. If you search on "education business consultant" or "K12 education marketing consultant" this blog is #1 or #2 in Google. That happens because Google rewards sustained focus and original content.

4. Networking is part of the job. Blogging is all about a conversation - know who your peers are and engage with them. Read about related industries and bring the insight back to ours. I use my blog roundups to share things other bloggers are saying that I think are relevant. Some of the most popular posts on the site also came from guest bloggers (thanks Randy, NT, and Paul).

5. Mix up depth and breadth to keep it interesting. People like the depth a 4-5 part series can bring to a topic, but for everyday browsing they also like short pieces that engage their interest.

6. Make it personal. This medium is all about being genuine. Speak your mind, share your story, and be real. Every few months I post what I'm listening to on my iPod - and I get a lot of positive feedback about it even though it isn't on topic. I also enjoy putting in human interest pieces and humor - but that is also part of my personality.

7. Key words matter - a lot. Learning to write blog posts is an art - and doing it well without it looking artificially structured to parse in a search engine isn't always easy. Knowing what words to use and where to use them in your articles is a skill you need to master.

8. Links and visual cues bring a post alive. Having quality links to support your arguments (or provide alternative viewpoints) adds credibility. Picking a graphic that amplifies the message also helps a lot. There are tons of free or near free images out there today so you have no excuse.

9. Good tools make it easier. I use Ecto to draft posts - it allows me to work off-line and is seamlessly integrated with iPhoto and Amazon. Movable Type isn't as user friendly as I'd like it to be - Ecto makes up for that and then some.

10. Patience. Gaining traction takes time - there is no short cut around this. It takes about 20 posts before the search engines take you seriously - with the 10's of thousands of new blogs started every day this is just common sense. But even after you have build a corpus of posts it takes time for people to discover you and become regulars. Don't be discouraged early on.

My thanks go out to those who helped me get started on this path and to the many readers who have provided feedback and encouragement as this adventure has unfolded.

The most popular posts from the last year:

1. Education Publishing - A Wave of Change Sweeps Over the Industry (multi part series)
2. Information Overload (how to build materials for the 21st century - multi-part series)
3. Teachers and the Internet - Five Things You Should Know
4. Lifelong Learning - Retired Construction Worker Deciphers Stonehenge Construction
5. Where is the Wii for Education?
6. Textbooks vs. Education Technology - Clash of Paradigms
7. Target Market Selection
8. The Future of Education Publishing - Panel Report from the Education Industry Investment Forum
9. Ethics Video Game - Using Frankenstein to Teach Ethics?
10. Are We Producing New Education Entrepreneurs

Some stats from the last year.

11,528 visits - This does not include RSS. Not having Feedburner set up from the get go was a mistake. We are putting it in place now.

19,740 page views. This might seem low, but since the landing page is the blog this makes sense. Most people go there, read the latest posts, and move on. Again - without Feedburner this the low end.

1:38 minutes is the average time on the site. This means 314 hours of people interacting with my ideas (or 40 eight hour days). This is a highly leveraged use of my time. Consider these alternatives

• At 7 minutes prep and talk time per call (assuming you got through on the first call) this would take 168 eight hour days.
• To get this kind of engagement via direct mail with a 1.5% response rate it would take 768,000 mail pieces.
• To reach this number of people by speaking at conferences with an average room count of 100 it would take 115 presentations.
• You get the idea.
• Actual time on task - 2-3 hours a week (or 16 eight hour days a year).

122 countries. 71% are from the US. Others in the top 10 are Canada, UK, India, Australia, Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany, and China. I love going into the mapview in Google Analytics to see where people have come from. It took me forever to hit all 50 states - Montana and Delaware were the hold outs! Globally Tibet, Cambodia, the Stans, Syria, Central Africa, Greenland, Guyana, and Uruguay are still terra incognita for this blog.

95% of readers were on a high speed connection. I no longer worry about putting video and other high bandwidth links in my posts. I'm toying with doing some v-casts as well.

79% of users were on Windows, 20% on Macs 1 % on Linux. 7 People came in on a phone and 1 came from a Playstation (WTF?). Why the oversampling of Macs? It probably has something to do with Education being the target market.

5% of users were on 800x600 screens. It looks like we could have comfortably designed for a minimum of 1024x768 and hit 95% of the users.