Articles Posted in Education Technology

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FETC 2010 provided an opportunity to assess the health of the Education Technology market. In today’s guest blog my friend Mike Baum shares his take on the highlights and lowlights of this year’s trade show

By Mike Baum

4161149378_3b38d9668bComing to Orlando from Wisconsin in January, I expect warmer weather. I didn’t expect 50 degrees to be greeted as a warming trend. And when I saw the conference center adjacent to my hotel was hosting a national beekeeping convention with the alarming title “Keeping the Hive Alive,” I began to watch out for falling metaphors.

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fail-owned-out-of-business-hiring-employment-failThe tribe gathered, bad coffee was drunk, stale muffins were eaten, and we shared insights and guesses about where education technology and publishing are headed in era of tight budgets and ARRA munificence. It was a typical first week of December in New York.

Here is the first of my overviews of what happened during the week. Subsequently I’ll dig into the AEP CEO Roundtable, the MDR Christmas Party, and the AEP Hall of Fame Breakfast.

SIIA Education Technology Business Forum – Tuesday Dec. 1

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1029083_reaching_1The education publishing tribe’s annual gathering is in New York this week. Today kicks off with the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum (sold out) at the Princeton Club followed by the AEP CEO Roundtable (2 seats left) and the MDR/Peter Li Christmas Party tomorrow (by invitation), and the AEP Hall of Fame Breakfast on Thursday.

This annual trek is an important part of the culture of our industry and if you have not participated I encourage you to make time next year. I love me some social media – but there is no replacement for looking people in the eye, handshakes, and hugs for old friends. 95% of communication is non-verbal after all.

Over the next few days I’ll be putting up a few posts about the events this week. My intention is not to provide general reporting, but to drill in on a few things I find interesting. We’ll see how that goes.

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NFImageImportliteracy n. The condition or quality of being literate, especially the ability to read and write.

Surpise! It turns out that the generation in school today is writing more and reading more. Several recent reports provide evidence to support this startling claim. The internet – a time pig that has consumed us with new ways of doing things – has wings.

This trend is global – according to the CIA literacy rates went from 50-60% in the 1970’s to over 80% by 2005. Teens are leading the way. TV is for geezers.

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By Guest Blogger Randy Wilhelm – CEO of netTrekker

DSC_5684One of the most obvious ways to engage students is to give them access INSIDE of school to all of the amazing Web 2.0 tools that engage them OUTSIDE of school. Who hasn’t tried to get through to his 15 year old with an iPod cranked in his ears and a cell phone glued to his hands?

But as students’ familiarity with and reliance on the Web 2.0 technologies grows, schools are still fighting the battle of how to incorporate these engaging tools while keeping kids safe and protecting them from inappropriate content and online activities.

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image001Clive Thompson over at Wired has a great short essay on the modern revival of the written word in the age of social media. He cites work done at Stanford that shows that todays students are writing more than their parents – in fact 38% of their writing is has nothing to do with school. Better yet – they are writing for an audience – or at least an audience wider than a single Professor.

Here are a couple of key quotes (emphasis added):

…young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.

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iStock_000006814674LargeStudent Information Systems (SIS) and Data Warehouses (DWS) are the bedrock enterprise software systems in K12 school districts. The K12 Decision Support Systems Market Report is now available. The 118 page report is based on a survey of over 300 district level IT Directors.

ARRA Accountability Market Intelligence

Given the strong emphasis in ARRA on data-driven decision making (D3M) and accountability auditing, the information in this study will provide valuable insight into a market with an urgent and well funded need. The report is a map of territory that has been uncharted.

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1019383_white_chess_army_3Interactive Whiteboards (IWB) are all the rage in education right now. Market penetration is about 15% of classrooms and climbing like a rocket. Is it time for publishers to jump on this bandwagon? If so, which digital whiteboard is right for you?

I spent the better part of my time at the National Education Computing Conference (#NECC09) in Washington DC this week attending presentations put on by Smart Technologies and Promethean. My goal was to evaluate whether PCI Education should embrace these tools as part of our publishing plan.

The Good

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384574407_2b4b7295ea_oHow can technology and innovation reshape education? Union Square Ventures put on Hacking Education – a conference that brought educators and entrepreneurs together to hash this out. Unfortunately they didn’t have any practitioners from the education technology and publishing industries there. After reviewing the well written summary of the discussion I put together the following extended comment to add the perspective of someone who was there, did that, and got the t-shirts.

As someone who has spent the last 18 years in the Education Technology and Instructional Materials businesses I feel the commentary misses the mark from a business perspective. This isn’t a critique of what was was covered – many of the participants are people I admire and cite frequently – Danah Boyd, Fred Wilson, Katie Salen, Steven Johnson , NT Etuk etc. It is meant to talk specifically about the business challenges of translating these great ideas into practice.

It might be tempting to dismiss folks who have been in the trenches as old school – people who “don’t get it” – but some of us are not clinging to old paradigms but working hard to create new ones. Experience may blind us to new possibilities – but it may also guide you around some of the land mines many of us have already stepped on.

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Serendipitously the New York Times published a front page article yesterday about “The Story of Stuff”, a short movie about man’s impact on the environment. It makes the point I was after in Sunday’s post about the power of story-line in instructional materials. The movie has gone viral globally (7 million views) because it encapsulates the lesson in a broader narrative that kids (and grown ups) can connect to their own lives.

Some quotes from the article that support the contention that we can use stories more effectively in instruction and that we can trust kids to make up their own minds when given a chance to.

“…many educators say the video is a boon to teachers as they struggle to address the gap in what textbooks say about the environment and what science has revealed in recent years.”

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