Generation YES will be there in full force with a booth (#855) and other events. If you will be in Denver, we hope you will come by and say hello!

Pre-conference event - The Constructivist Celebration, Sunday June 27
Held once again the day before ISTE starts, this is a day-long workshop focusing on creativity and computing. For a very reasonable $60, you will receive free creativity software worth hundreds of dollars from the world’s best school-tool companies, breakfast, snacks and lunch, and a full-day workshop led by Gary Stager and other members of the Constructivist Consortium. Added bonuses: a free just-released “ImagineIt2″ DVD and a TechYES mini-kit. It’s always a sell-out, but right now there are still a few spaces left to join in the fun, so register today – you won’t regret it!

Sessions

• Dennis Harper – Establishing Student Technology Leaders Programs for Districts, States, and Nations Wednesday, 6/30/2010, 8:30am-9:30am, CCC 605.  Discover how districts, states, and nations can establish effective student technology leaders organizations that meet integration, infrastructure support, and technology literacy goals.
• Sylvia Martinez – Tinkering Toward Technology Literacy Wednesday, 6/30/2010, 10:30am-11:30am, CCC 605. Combine tinkering and technology and you have a time-honored tradition that allows imagination and creativity to lead the way to technology literacy.

Events in the Generation YES booth #855

• Adora Svitak (12 year old author, blogger, and the youngest person to be invited to speak at TED) will be sharing her ideas for education from a youth’s point of view.
• We will be sharing a new technology literacy study by a well-known researcher making the case for project-based technology literacy assessment. (more about this soon)
• GenYES and TechYES teachers and students from nearby schools will be in the booth sharing their projects and tech integration tips.

Plus… we will be printing handy business cards for any teacher who forgot theirs at home!

Hope to see you there!

Sylvia

The conference is a combination of asynchronous and synchronous events, and everything will be archived so you can check back in at any time. I was honored to be asked to participate and I’ll be presenting a session live.

Student Leadership ‐ Building Authentic 21st Century Skills
Date: February 27, 2010 Saturday
Time: 5:00 PM EST

Session Description:  This session will present 4 models of student leadership focused on improving technology integration in real schools around the world. Having tech-savvy students help solve the authentic problems of 21st century education builds future leaders, learners, and citizens.

You can download the conference schedule here (PDF)

To register for the conference, you simply check off the sessions you are interested in. Online conferences are great ways to participate without a huge committment of time or money! And yes, although the sessions will be permanently archived, it’s more fun to be in the “action” online. You’ll be able to chat and interact as the session goes on.

Hope you’ll stop by!

Sylvia

This free guide from OnGuardOnline.gov tells parents and teachers what they need to know to talk to kids about issues like  cyberbullying, sexting, mobile phone safety, and protecting the family computer.

I’ve taken a look at this guide and like it. It’s sensible, straight-forward, and best of all, not fear-based. It contains positive messages about Internet use and real facts (what a concept!) It addresses parents of teens, who need different information than younger children.

Best of all, it’s FREE. You can order the print version of Net Cetera in English or Spanish. If you need lots of them, for your whole school, for example, bulk orders are available from the government printing office. Yes, your tax dollars being used for something useful!

Other links:

• Download a PDF of the guide
• Download a Net Cetera PowerPoint for presenting to groups
• Get a button for your website or blog

There is a nice article about it in the The Christian Science Monitor if you need more information.

Sylvia

December 8, 2009, 8-9PM ET : Education in the Digital Age: a tour of FRONTLINE’s Digital Nation

FRONTLINE producers have learned a lot during a year-long, multi-platform project exploring the impact of the Web and digital media on life in the 21st century. PBS Teachers invites anyone interested in teaching about and with digital technology to join this FREE webinar touring FRONTLINE’s Digital Nation website.

The Digital Nation website will include online video reports on how the Internet and technology are changing cultures, reshaping workplaces and creating new approaches to the way we solve problems. Issues to be examined include the Web’s impact on education, how social media has changed the way individuals interact, and Internet safety and privacy. Central to the site will be a mosaic of user-generated content designed to let visitors participate in the documentary process. The site also will feature a producers’ blog, embeddable video and other sharable content, and a schedule of live online events with expert guests.

More information and registration.

Student Support of Laptop Programs – new laptops? old laptops? Are you getting the benefit of making students allies in your laptop initiative? Peer mentoring, student-led training on new hardware and software, student tech support and other ideas can be time saving, cost effective, and best of all, good for students and the whole learning community.

This whitepaper contains research, case studies, practical information that you can use right now, whether you have one cart or are a 1:1 laptop school.

Student Support of Laptop Programs (PDF)

Sylvia

May 6, 2009 is the last day to download a free ebook, Educating the Whole Child, from ASCD. After this, this 366 page e-book will only be available for a fee.

Do students really want to learn? Can schools and classrooms become joyful? Are there natural links between standard curriculum and what motivates students to learn? Explore these and other questions in this e-book collection of articles from Educational Leadership by renowned authors such as Carol Ann Tomlinson, Richard Sagor, Nel Noddings, Thomas R. Guskey, and Allison Zmuda.

Besides these fabulous and well-known authors, you will also get our article, Working with Tech-Savvy Kids, along with other articles by Will Richardson, king of the edu-bloggers, and many more.

Don’t miss out on this free offer!

Educating the Whole Child ebook – free download link (valid April 15 – May 6, 2009)

Sylvia

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But it’s not at all clear cut who will make it through the tough times. There’s a lot of good stuff out there that is great for classroom use. But we know that lots of these tools are made by companies that are simply going to pack up and go home in the near future. So how can educators figure out which of their favorite tools will remain standing?

Here are ten questions and thoughts to ponder.

1. Do they make money?
Here’s the big question. A company with no visible means of support is not living on love. Someone is taking home a paycheck. Someone is paying the server bill. These companies are either someone’s home brew project in mom’s basement, or they have investors. Investor money runs out eventually, and there isn’t going to be a lot of new investment anytime soon. If there is no revenue, they have less of a chance to survive.

Ad revenue is almost as shaky as no revenue, since in a recession, ad rates tend to fall like a rock. Who clicks on banner ads anyway? People stop kidding themselves about these things when the money runs out.

Some small, individual projects can be very useful, but if they are cursed with popularity, they will need more people, servers, and other stuff that costs money. Maybe the key is to keep your favorites to yourself. Stop sharing! (OK, probably not the best answer.)

2. Spend some time with your favorite search engine.
All US public companies have to file documents with the government that give details on their finances. These are available online. Plus, if they are large, analysts and the press write about them. Stock price is an indicator too, if it’s gone down (worse than most!) that’s an indication something is wrong. In cases like Yahoo, all the bad news about failed mergers, the CEO leaving, and things like this are an indication of a company in crisis. It’s not smart to depend on them.

A non-public company is harder to find out about. But in my book, the more self-aggrandizing publicity a company has gone after, the more likely they are in it just for a quick flip. So for me, I’ll take the company with less news about awards, big PR blitzes, and showing up at every social media event.

In contrast, take Zoho, which makes productivity and collaboration web applications. They just continue to crank out good, solid products and services. Plus, they have a business model – they sell their premium services. And they make money. Check out this interview with Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, about how he and his brother bootstrapped the company (meaning no outside investment) while his wife earned enough money to support the family. Smart, sensible, and pragmatic.

Are they a better long-term bet than Google Docs for web-based productivity tools? Who knows?

3. Do they have investors and how long will the money last?
Try searching on the company or tool name plus words like “invest”, “funding”, “owner”, “sell”, “layoff”, or “round”.

For example, if you are thinking about starting a local district professional development network using Ning as the basis, you might be very worried that they will just disappear. Google “Ning funding” and you find several sites that confirm that Ning received $44M in July 2007, and another $60M in April 2008. This article makes some guesses about how much money Ning makes – only $2M per year on subscriptions and ads, so they certainly need to figure out how to make money. However, $100M is a whole lotta money to skate on while you figure things out, so they may make it through to the other side.

A company that’s trying to go big but got a less than $5M investment more than a year ago might be having serious problems.

Another measure is how many employees they have. A completely rough estimate is that every employee costs $100,000 – $200,000 per year. The high side is companies that need vast server farms or other exceptional costs. But rule of thumb, a company with 10-20 employees, a $2M investment, but no income can only last a year.

Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life, says they are doing great with 300 employees. They raised $11M in funding in 2006, and $8M a few years before that. Obviously they are making enough money from Second Life to sustain themselves or they would have gone out of business already. This blog from a venture capital firm estimates their revenue at $8M per month, or nearly $100M per year. This blog does the same calculation and guesses their expenses are about $30M for employees, plus another $10M for office space, servers, and other stuff. So, if these guys are right, Linden Labs is making at least $40M profit per year on Second Life.

The question is, if you are a school about to drop a lot of money and resources on a Second Life presence — will the economy, or some newer, sexier virtual world cause their subscriptions to drop and sales to slide? Most of their money is made on virtual land sales, not subscriptions, and if I had to guess, only new subscribers buy a lot of land. After a certain amount of time, people tend to “settle down.” But still, $40M a year is a nice cushion. It’s hard to be sure if all the speculation is true, since Second Life is not a public company. But my guess would be that Second Life will still be around for a few years. And better yet, will still have time to cultivate educators and cater to their special needs.

Yes, I know Second Life is not technically a Web 2.0 app, but neither is Google Earth or Twitterific or half a dozen others — everyone lumps these things together. Who am I to try to untangle the misunderstanding of what Web 2.0 is?

4. Layoffs?
Actually, this is a mixed bag. Layoffs can be the sign that a company is intelligently trimming its sails to ride through the storm. However, layoffs that cut to the bone are a sign that the company is about the crash and burn. How do you know which is which? That’s hard, especially with small, startup companies. There are sites like TechCrunch that watch the technology industry, or websites like this that track startup companies going under (the name contains a four letter word, don’t say I didn’t warn you), but layoff news is often full of unsubstantiated rumors.

5. Gut check — does this make sense?
C’mon, who really thought a social network for people who love their sneakers was a good idea. Let’s get real, this was simply a couple of guys trying to cash in on the social media craze.

Not to keep picking on Yahoo, but there was a recent announcement that Yahoo for Teachers has been shut down. This was going to be a social networking site for teachers offering portfolios, networks, and other free goodies. Now the service has been cancelled by Yahoo, and the former URL (teachers.yahoo.com) redirects to the main Yahoo page. But a new site, called Edtuit, says it “… picks up where Yahoo! for Teachers left off.” But look around the site, there are no names, no explanation of who they are, or why a teacher should believe any of this. If Yahoo couldn’t make it work, how will they?

To me, this kind of announcement sends up a big red flag. Call me when they go live in “Fall 2008″ — oops!

6. How big are they?
Strangely, the ends of the continuum will win. Big, big companies tend to have resources and deep pockets. Small companies can survive like cockroaches. People can work virtually, keep their day jobs, live in mom’s basement, or on a spouse’s paycheck. Some of these are student projects. Medium size companies have problems. Keeping 10-150 people employed is one of the toughest jobs ever.

Take Wordle, for example. Wordle is a web toy that makes pretty word clouds out of text. On the Wordle website, there is one person’s name listed with an email address. The blog says he’s an IBM engineer who wrote the code in his spare time. No investors, no PR and marketing budget, just a guy who likes words.

Will little, one programmer projects like Wordle survive? Sure, until he or she loses interest (or graduates from high school.)

7. What’s your exit strategy?
If you are in love with ustream, Qik, Flickr (uh oh, owned by Yahoo!), or any free service for that matter, don’t assume that their business model will stay the same, and that your use won’t be affected. A few will just disappear without a word. But there is no doubt that all these companies will have to make money off these services to survive. Don’t expect them to send out a memo, these people are fighting for their lives. When you find Viagra ads embedded in your “free” videos in the middle of a class project, that’s when you’ll find out how they decided to monetize their service. You know you are supposed to back up your hard drive, now you have to back up your “cloud” too!

8. Is it great? Would you pay for it?
If this is something you already use, you know quite a bit. Does it just plain work or are there a few too many “we’ll be back soon” messages? Was it easy to learn and use? Do you honestly have good enough connectivity at school? Does it do a little more than you actually need? If you are going to be teaching it to others, they will probably have different needs than you. Will it stretch for them?

And if the company starts to charge for it, would you pay something, anything for the service? What would you do if the company went out of business or changed the service drastically in the middle of a class project? Is it simply a toy you would toss out and find a different way? If this is the case, maybe it’s too trivial to bother with for the long run.

9. What do your friends do? What do your friends know?
It’s not just about being trendy. Other teachers you know can be good sources of information. If you know someone using the tool you are interested in, ask them not just how it works, but how has it changed over time. Have they had any issues that required tech support and did they get an answer? Have things changed recently? Were there a lot of promised features that have not appeared yet? Are unexpected, unannounced changes occurring?

Check out places where teachers using Web 2.0 hang out -Twitter, Plurk, and Classroom 2.0 come to mind, but if you only have a Facebook account, ask your friends there!

And don’t forget to check if there is a company blog – a blog that hasn’t been updated is a bad sign. A blog with regular, informative updates and truth about service interruptions is good. A blog with special mentions of classroom use is better!

10. But education is so important! Teachers are special! They can’t do this to us!
Well yes, yes they can. Schools are a small niche market. We want free stuff. And not just free stuff, but ad free and adult content free. Free stuff with extra controls and settings that help teachers manage student accounts, work with tricky firewalls, and other extras that no one else demands.

The only way most of these Web 2.0 companies will survive is to get a lot of users and get bought by someone, quickly, before the money runs out. We all know the low penetration rate of new technology in schools. If you feel like the only one on your block using Web 2.0 technology, it’s because you are. So if a company has a choice of reaching, say, a million Twitter users vs. the tiny fraction of teachers using Web 2.0, which would you choose?

Really – Do I have to do all this work?
Nope – you can just keep using what you are using and stay nimble. Lots of this will be based on luck, not cold analysis. But if you are recommending these tools to others, spending money and time implementing them, planning lessons, or shifting your “business” to them, a little time invested now may make a big difference later. You may decide instead to use tools you can really own, like a do-it-yourself open source implementation, or tools from a company you can trust. They might cost a little more time or money up front, but give you peace of mind as bubbles burst all around us.

This too shall pass.

Sylvia

Bonus! Check out Mathew’s session for the K12Online Conference, Film School for Video Podcasters.

Superbonus! Mathew’s site for Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom.

Sylvia

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