Sneaky marketplace

Seems like there is a sneaky bit of marketing going on with social media sites and educational technology companies. If I’m not mistaken, more and more colleagues are being asked to do ‘positive promotion’ (yes, I’m being diplomatic with my chosen language here) when using social media in exchange for badges of notification, beta-testing of software or free CPD. This isn’t new in itself; the most prominent example of this is the Apple ATI event where training takes place and  you and your school are marketed at – not so bad as you wouldn’t attend the event if your school wasn’t thinking of investing in equipment. A spin off of this is the Apple Distinguished Educator badge (ADE) that started in the States as a notifier for internal school CPD knowledge and peer sharing.

Being an ADE involves 4 primary roles – advocate, advisor, author and ambassador. Each is connected to our relationship with Apple and the devices we use in our teaching and learning.
Advocate – passionate users of Apple technologies and able to present to others how to use these tools in education
Advisor – feedback to Apple how these technologies influence education
Author – publish examples of work using Apple technologies for others to learn from and use
Ambassador – build global communities to “expand the walls of the classroom”

Usually mac fans (I am one) are pretty evangelical about the kit anyway so its not such a stretch to be an Advocate. When does this come down to sales and renewed contracts though? In my experience of running ATI events there is an element of bums on seats and if there isn’t the interest then your badge can be transferred to a rival organisation… you shouldn’t need the badge to be able to run a free CPD event. But then. you don’t get access to gratis kit and or beta software either.

Other companies are following suite in this way (Microsoft Accreditation obviously, AutoDesk, Google Teacher Academy amongst others). What is developing now is the way the advocation is being pursued using social media sites in very subtle ways (owing much to Internet marketing techniques) and not obviously positive promotion either. Some examples: the hashtag for ukedchat is attached to social media discussions on Twitter for UK Education. On one occasion the discussion was moderated by a company offering educational awards and the subject was: Educational Awards! So blatant a promotion (even if not intended) that there was cyber-outrage…

Where does this stop? Google Teacher Academy ‘graduates’ discussing how useful Picasa is at opportune moments? It is neither the most user friendly or cheapest online photo storage service so should be discussed in the context of other services surely… maybe I’m reading too much into this trend of product placement but if it isn’t with us now it certainly will be soon…

Extract from sales banter:

Do you know where to find your target market?

Do you know what your message is?

Many people jump into social media marketing without any kind of action plan. They jump on the bandwagon and start Tweeting their message to anyone who will listen, hoping that it will land on captive ears. And, they turn off many potential friends and ambassadors in the process.

Now consider this in terms of your social media discussions of products and services – as tweeting teachers you are a potential market to be (subtly) exploited! Nuff’ said.

Interesting presentation on social media

Why Social Media

 

View more presentations from Leslie Bradshaw.

This presentation interested me in terms of it’s style as well as content. There is also a utopian positivism about the benefits of access to social media in the workplace. This is yet to be realised in many educational settings. Also, Leslie’s presentation has inspired me to look at social media with a more critical eye.

Prezi – used well

“Teaching outside the Box” Prezi

I spent a couple of hours learning to use Prezi to make a more visually exciting presentation a few months ago. I found it hard to get right, but once mastered not too bad. Ok, the main idea was to avoid a PowerPoint style bullet listed pages and inspire the audience with more creative structures of presentation. When done well, as the example above, Prezi adds more than just style to a presentation. After all, it isn’t as labour intensive as Flash!

Issues I did experience were that even when familiar with the content, during a presentation it was easy to get lost and have to back track to another part of the ‘show’. I ended up printing out slides using PowerPoint (!!!) through screen shots of Prezi. When other people had to present the same show they had no idea how to navigate around and again needed the slide print outs!

Is Prezi any good? Yes, for making easy multimedia in the style of Flash and not so linear as PowerPoint. No, if you have to present (or someone else does) to 120 people once a day for a week. Instead, post online and send them a link! Prezi – time to add a voiceover and video capture feature – maybe people would pay a premium for these features?

How will e-learning improve the way I teach?

A fairly recent DfES Report (2003) concluded that the benefits of e-leaning tools were to enable experimental pedagogy in the classroom. Is that really why edtech teachers want to try new Web 2.0 type tools? Is there a myriad of reasons for using emerging technologies – beneficial to the teacher and learner and most of all to the teaching and learning that takes place. Secondly, I wanted to know how e-learning tools improve the way that teachers teach. So I set a little poll for the 500 or so teachers in my PLN on Twitter.

I picked out the top benefits to teaching I could think of and included a space for teachers to add their own reasons. Crucially, I included a more than one answer too as something requested from a previous poll I tried.

This accounted for just 5% of the vote and actually includes one of the main responses. Interestingly, 24/7 availability was important to one of the respondents.

More or less an even split between engaging and inspiring and including more than one of the other answers. There are many benefits of e-learning tools; not just to try new methods of teaching but also to inspire our learners showing that we can also push ourselves out of our comfort zones as they do daily. Some great debate started too!

Fascinating reading! Thanks to everyone who took part.

Posterous for Learning & Teaching

 

Check out my Posterous blog web site – this has got to be the easiest method to read/write the web ever – EVER. No kidding; all you have to do is make sure you have an online email client (gmail preferred) and send emails plus attachments. That’s it – the web site is written by ever email posting you make.

I have now taken 3 sessions of science, maths and GTP teachers through the basics of Posterous and added a bit of value in terms of additional web 2.0 tools like Wallwisher and Voicethread. Ok, it’s note everyone’s taste – I accept that but I can certainly vouch for student responses. Try setting a read and discover homework on a topic of your choosing. Will you expect 3 or 5 bullets of info back? Maybe half a page with an illustration? Then try showing your students a Posterous blog and tell them you want a weekly posting with an image or Powerpoint embedded and ok try Voicethread or Wallwisher too. Guaranteed engagement!

The key to using tools like these is the emphasis on the learning rather than just the teaching – ok, not Masters level writing but certainly enthusiasm beyond that for the topic you love.

Web 2.0 for Teachers

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?id=2539863&doc=2539863

This presentation is a collaborative effort using resources from the web – feel free to reuse but please respect CC-NC-SA creative commons copyright.

Principally maths teachers from across Doncaster’s 16 high schools attended a half day workshop (The Maths User Group or MUG). Web 2.0 technologies were explored and discussed and will now proceed as part of group practice.

To follow the group on Twitter: @mugdoncaster and tag #mugdsclc.

‘Listmania’ of web 2.0 tools for teaching

There are loads of e-lists of the best, most useful etc web 2.0 tools for teaching and the trouble is, they get so outdated sooo quickly! I had a page on my blog dedicated to top tools and had to stop adding to it as things disappeared from the net or got renamed or something even better came along.

The gloriously named Sacredcowdung.com kept a really good list for a few years. They seemed to have passed on the privilege to another directory.

Onlinedegree.net have a good top 100 list that seems quite current and useful. The page says it was written in 2009 – let’s see if they update it regularly.

The best lists appear on Jane Hart’s web site as there are a Top 100 annual list, Tools of Learning Pros and personal Top 10s contributed by visitors to the site. I’m sure someone has sifted through all this stuff and separated each tool by usefulness to each subject? Maybe not…

My list of top 10 tools is:

Damo’s Top 10 Tools as at 16 May 2009

1. Jing

2. Evernote

3. Delicious

4. Apple Garageband

5. Xmind

6. Adobe Photoshop

7. Ecomschool.co.uk

8. Firefox

9. Twitter

10. Google Earth

On the whole quite web 2.0? Photoshop is too good to replace but I suppose a web 2.0 version is Sumopaint which does a similar job for free. Ecomschool is based on open source and god old Garageband isn’t really replaced by Mypodcast.com although that too is quite similar in output.

Glogster – graphic blog posters

Presenting Glogster, a great web 2.0 style tool that is free to use, intuitive and highly creative.  What is it? Basically a multimedia poster maker that allows the addition of images, text, shapes and colour with audio and video. How to use? Have an idea for your poster (sketch it out if you need to) but then collect multimedia, links to web sites and even sounds and You Tube video addresses. The interface is simple and lets you add what you need and then resize and drag around the workspace as you see fit. Once happy with your design, you publish and get a link or embed code for broadcasting via a blog or web site. Having recently taught a unit of GCSE Graphics based around Photoshop, I look at this and see the potential for a full on WEb 2.0 approach. Yes it allows online comment and feedback and some aspects of the social networking web. I would suggest some improvements though – what about comment moderation (Blogger has had this for years) and even the option to disassociate from social networks? These minor changes would make Glogster highly usable in UK schools.

Professional Social Networking tools

There are hundreds of web 2.0 social network tools out there and the image left shows just a few. What about using them for professional networking? I am currently looking at Plaxo, LinkedIn and to my horror, Facebook.

Is it possible that any of these can be used without entering into nonsense about what music you’re listening to and what you’re drinking?!! Not to mention the dreaded Mob Wars – a time waster or a social tool? The jury is out.

One good thing is the ability to reconnect with old friends – everyone seems to be on at least one SN tool. The problem is that we’re not all on the same one, yet.

Clustr Maps for visitor logging

Clustr.com offer free web maps that work with MySpace as well as websites and some blogs. The world map displays red dots as to where visitors are situated with size of dot representing no. of visitors. A visual statistics tool that has a kid-friendly option too. Click here for an example map.