Articles Posted in Education Technology

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Success SignWhen educators choose new classroom materials their first challenge is to sift through dozens of options and narrow the search down to four to five options. In other words before they say “yes” to one solution they need to find reasons to say “no” to a host of other options.

Prior to Common Core the most significant filter was “alignment to state standards.” If a company couldn’t provide a correlation that showed substantial or complete compliance with a particular state’s requirements it never got past the first meeting. No one really used the correlations once the product was purchased, but it was a useful filter to help narrow the field of choices.

In the last six months I have noticed a significant shift in this process. Most districts now require some flavor of “technology” in any curriculum resource they purchase. Like standards correlations they don’t particularly care what it is – but they won’t consider products that don’t have a technology component.

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Deadrising_boxartMy 17 year old son is in the other room using a kayak paddle with chain saws attached at either end to slice zombies in half. I’m sitting here minding my own business when out of the blue he says “Dad, this game is great for teaching time management skills.”

In Dead Rising you have 72 hours in a zombie infested town to build a bike, rescue your daughter, and escape the military. Along the way anything you find can be weaponized against the slow moving brain noshers. Shovels, gasoline, saw blades, pitchforks, shotguns, drills, buckets, are among the things that can be combined in new and amazing ways. Yes, even a stuffed moose head.

Call me a proud papa – this concept was coming from a teen who is wrestling with time management (i.e. he gets A’s when does the damn work which isn’t often enough). The fact that he was metacogizant of this while playing astounded and pleased me.

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Home Ebook CoverThe role of textbooks in a rapidly digitizing world is an open question. The publishing industry needs to develop a new paradigm for commercially produced instructional materials or it faces extinction.

These and many more questions haunt the dreams of educational publishing professionals.

Now, thanks to the folks at Nature (a division of MacMillan) and their new eTextbook Principles of Biology, I glimpse a promising path forward. As is so often the case with paradigm shifts once it “clicks” in your head it is so simple that you wonder that you didn’t get it earlier.

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Free RocksThe International Reading Association’s annual conference has been steadily declining in attendance (and thus importance to vendors) for several years now. From a draw of 20,000 attendees the show now attracts less than 8,000. From a content standpoint it remains a top drawer event. That isn’t the focus of this piece. I’m making a more mercenary assessment of the event from a marketing perspective.

Reading Language Arts remains the single biggest segment of instructional materials spending (over 60%). Exploring why the show at the heart of the education market is getting smaller should reveal some telling lessons for vendors evaluating how they go to market these days.

This year’s exhibit traffic was considerably better than last year’s, but the show floor was still a shadow of its former glory. Vendor booths barely filled 70% of the exhibit hall and other than a couple of the major publishers (notably Scholastic) most companies were taking less space than they did even 2-3 years ago.

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IMG_4955.jpgI’ll be reviewing the findings of the white paper I wrote for SIIA on Best Practices for Implementing Games & Simulations in the Classroom today at 4 ET (corrected). The webinar and the paper are free.

We interviewed teachers, administrators, and vendors who have successfully implemented edugames and distilled the lessons they learned about how to sell the idea, how to prepare, and classroom management issues. It is a very practical hands on look at this arena and has implications for educators and people designing edugames.

The webinar is part of EdWeb’s lively Game Based Learning Community (500+ members). It is the first in a series of webinars with luminaries like Jim Bower, Chris Dede, and Dan Norton.

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bookres-lamp-20110216-094132What is good product development? The answer is deceptively simple to answer and devilishly difficult to pull off. Basically people want three things – better, faster, cheaper. All the complicated analysis in the world boils down to these three fundamentals. Get them right and your odds of success go way up.

You need to nail at least two of them, preferably all three. You need hard evidence to prove you are doing them – and the definition of success must be from the customer’s perspective.

While it is easy to see how this plays out in technology (better/cheaper = iPad 1 vs laptop, better/faster = iPad2 vs iPad 1, cheaper/faster = Netbooks vs. iPad) it is more difficult to suss out what this means in education.

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NFImageImportWhat are the missing skills needed in education publishing to create 21st Century products for 21st Century learners? I penned a thought experiment for EdNet on this topic.

Education Publishing’s Own 21st Century Skills Gap – Change Begins At-Home Edition

Fun Architects, Content Marines, Talent Wranglers, and Shibboleth Hunters all get shout outs.

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778689_grillA fresh batch of piping hot links that may be of interest to those in educational materials.

Are game mechanics the key to great social media marketing? The following link weaves some fascinating connections between the world of gaming and the world of encouraging people to try new things (the essence of marketing).

Everything I ever learned about marketing I learned from Dungeons and Dragons by Ian Lurie at Conversation Marketing.

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Do you have a bright idea for new education business? Today’s guest post is from the team over at the Zell/Lurie Institute’s Social Media Fund. Note that the deadline for submission is February 18th – shake out those fingers and warm up the keyboard.

By Darrin Nagengast

SvF_logo.jpgThe Social Venture Fund at the University of Michigan is one of the world’s first student-run venture capital firms focused on supporting social entrepreneurs. We’ve been covered in the Wall Street Journal and Businessweek and are currently looking to make an investment of up to $250,000in a groundbreaking social enterprise.

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