Several months ago, the guys over at PollEverywhere wrote a blog post asking “Should we even offer a free product for teachers?” At the heart of the conversation, the issue was that while they wanted to keep free accounts for teachers, people using the service does cost them money. “Considering that we pay the mobile phone companies several cents for each text message, a disturbing proportion of free users (overwhelmingly educators) cost us over $50/user/year in texting fees, and that’s before we spend any time on customer support.” That may not seem like much, but when you start adding up the numbers, it’s a matter of dollars and cents. If it’s free for you, someone is paying for it. And considering the size of many of these Web 2.0 companies, often that ‘someone’ is the founder and/or developer.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m a big fan of free sites. One of my most popular presentations focuses strictly on free tools for educators. I know far too many teachers that make a point to only use free sites. Some do it as a point of pride, others do it due to financial considerations. The trouble is though, if a site isn’t making any money… it likely won’t be around for very long. That’s not good for anyone.

People often ask me whether they can rely on a Web 2.0 site being around for a while. Generally, I respond by telling them to look for a business model. Do they have premium features that people can subscribe to? Advertising on the site? Enterprise level solutions that business can purchase? If there’s a clear indicator for how the site is making money, then they’re probably going to be around. If there isn’t, that’s a red flag to me. Some sites like Wordle I wouldn’t stress about as much. They’re simple enough that I have a hunch that they are just paying for hosting/bandwidth at this point, which can most likely be covered by ads. However, the trade off there is that there isn’t any active development going on there. When was the last time you saw Wordle release a new feature?

Which brings me back to my point. There are some sites that I promote through my presentations and professional work. I do so because I see potential for them and believe educators can get good use out of them. I don’t get a kickback from any of these sites (besides my host, Bluehost) other than a few sites have given me a free premium account. That said, there are several sites that I use on a regular basis that I do pay for. I bought a pro version of Flickr several years ago because I thought they were one of the best sites I’d ever seen for photo sharing and I wanted to see them succeed. I have even given pro subscriptions to friends and colleagues as gifts. I’m a huge fan of Tripit.com and recently upgrade to a pro account. I’ll be honest, I don’t think the features you get for upgrading are even worth the cost, but I wanted to support the company. I love the service they provide and hope that they can stick around. That’s worth a $50 donation from me even though I’m not a fan of their premium features.

There are many sites that have created educational portals/pricing to support the things teachers are doing in the classroom. PollEverywhere is a great example of this because they literally restructured their entire free scheme around the classroom. Prezi created educator specific pro-accounts as well and have publicly stated how committed they are to supporting teachers. Other sites like Glogster and Voicethread have devoted enormous resources to making their sites better suited to teachers’ needs.

But these sites can only keep doing that if there’s money coming in. It’s a bitter pill, but that’s reality. If you love free tools, then you need to do your part to keeping them free. Consider it paying it forward. Don’t do it for every site, and don’t do it for a site you’ve never tried before.  But if you’ve been using the free version of the site and think it’s something you feel is worth continuing to make use of, then consider paying for the premium version.  Even if you don’t need the premium features, do it so that you can hold your head up high and know you’ve done your part to make sure that site is going to be around for the long haul.  And don’t forget, as a paying customer, you usually have a more direct line to the developer’s ear.  Let them know what features you think the site needs, or how it could be better suited to what you do in the classroom.  That same email has a lot more weight when it comes from a subscriber rather than a free user.

I know some of you are going to say that you spend enough on the classroom already, and that the school should pick up the bill.  Fine, then fight that fight.  But if you can’t push that through, I hope that you consider doing something personally.  It’s the only way these tools we love so much are going to be around for the long haul.

In my next post here, I’ll be sharing a new offer from PollEverywhere.  I didn’t write this post to push you over to them, but they do happen to be one of the sites I’m a huge fan of.  They’ve been kind enough to give me a premium account to use during presentations.  However, I’m putting my own money where my mouth is and buying into the promotion as well.  Why?  Because I believe in what they’re doing, I believe in their commitment to education, and I want them to stick around.  If they aren’t your site of choice, that’s fine.  Pick another.  But spend a few minutes thinking about what tools are perpetually on your ‘goto’ list and how you can help make sure they don’t go away.

Because if we don’t support the sites we can’t live without… well, you better be prepared to live without them.

What have you found worth paying for?  Are you willing to pay out of your own pocket to support a site you love?

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Will be presenting in about 10 minutes at the NICE mini conference here in Illinois. Doing a revamped version of my Top 10 Web 2.0 for Educators. Most radical change is that I don’t have an aggregator in there. Still kinda torn about that. Part of it is that time is limited, but another piece is that I’m not positive that it’s as relevant as it used to be. Considering people are aggregating via their inbox, via iGoogle, via My Yahoo, within the browser and more. There’s so many ways to subscribe, that I’m not positive it’s worth including an aggregator in this type of fast paced presentation.

Regardless, the current version is embedded below, and the examples I show for each site can be found here.

Let me know what you think! What did I get right, and what did I miss? Above all, please be sure to include WHY. Oh yeah, you can also add your thoughts to this Wall.

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I think that many people (myself included) that share sites like Twitter at conferences inadvertently do our attendees a disservice. In the effort of attempting to demonstrate how wonderful, simple, powerful and dynamic it is, we make it seem much more effortless than it really is.

For example… How many times per day do you see somebody say, “Give a shout out to the people in Nepal who are attending my presentation about social networks about using the Luge to teach physics!” And then 30-40 people reply with a hearty “Hello”. So attendees believe all it takes it to toss a tweet out there, and dozens of responses will pour in.

What isn’t necessarily shown, or may just be glossed over, is the fact that it takes TIME and EFFORT to gain a few hundred followers. And without having a critical mass of people to message out to, your odds of getting a response from a general tweet are VERY small. If you have 40 followers, more than likely none of them are actually online at the same time as you. And even if they are, who knows if they’re checking Twitter? And even if they are, who knows if they’ll see your tweet? And if they do, how many people will see it and ignore it, versus will see it and respond?

For example, if I send out a “Please give these folks a shout out” tweet, I expect maybe about 30-40 responses on a typical school day during normal hours. If it’s a weekend, or in the evening, you can cut that number in half. I currently have about 5000 followers. So at best, that’s less than 1%. At that rate, if you have 100 followers, could you realistically expect an instant response from even a single person? I’m not sure… It depends on who is following you.

That’s not to say that everyone should run out and get more followers. My point is simply, things aren’t necessarily as rosy and simple as we may make them seem during presentations.

I can’t tell you how many times I see a Twitter newbie who has under 50 followers throw out a request like, “I’m trying to find schools that have updated their AUP this year. If you know someone, please tell me.” Then when they don’t get any responses, they get frustrated and may wind up quitting. While I can’t address what may be an issue with persistence, I do think that person has set themselves up for failure.

I really do think you need to follow/be followed by about 100 people at the least for Twitter to begin to be valuable. If you have a dedicated, highly focused group, that number may be smaller, but in general I think that’s a fair ballpark. If you have less than that, you need to be much more aggressive to get responses.

A few suggestions for people who are new to Twitter or have relatively small audiences right now.

1) Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting a message out there multiple times. If you’re worried about looking like a spammer, reword it. Mention that your STILL looking for information. But it’s entirely possible that people didn’t see your message. So give them another chance. And yet another.

2) Ask some people directly to respond. If you send a tweet that includes @TheirUsername, more than likely they will see it. It may take a day or two before they look for personal replies, but most people WILL see it. Unless they have fairly strict privacy settings, it should work. So if there’s someone you think might be able to help you out, send it directly to them by using this feature.

3) Reach out to the hubs in your network. Let’s face it, some people have more followers than others. Maybe they do a lot of conferences, maybe they just have too much time on their hands. Regardless, they may have a longer reach than you do. So contact them directly and ask them to retweet it for you! I’m extremely grateful to have the audience that I do, and I’m happy to share them whenever someone asks. By doing this, you maybe be able to ensure that your request has been seen by a few thousand people instead of a few dozen. Doesn’t guarantee a response, but it does give you better odds.

Of course, the best solution in the long term is to build up your own community. The only real way to do that is to maintain your own presence, to reach out to others, and to follow people and give them the chance to follow you.

For those of you that do present sessions including Twitter, do you see the same thing happening? Is it just me or is this something you’ve experienced yourself? And if so, how do you address it?

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I’ve had several requests via email for my Top 10 presentation from NECC, and realized that I should probably post it here. Of course, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing!

So here’s a link to the presentation slides, such as they are. Most of the presentation is live demonstrations, so they’re only of limited value by themselves.

Here’s a link to the ISTE broadcast of the session. Video looks and sounds great, but they didn’t record what I was doing on the screen until 20 minutes in.

Then there’s my own personal broadcast of it using Procaster and Livestream. It has what’s happening on my screen throughout the entire presentation. However, the camera angle isn’t exactly the most flattering one I could have chosen

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ArtsCow.com is doing a sale right now on their custom Dog Tags. Using their designer, you can upload your own images and have them printed out on a dog tag. Normally, they cost 8.99, but through August 16th, they have a sale going on. If you use the coupon code 199DOGTAG, you can get a two sided dog tag with free shipping for $1.99. I don’t ordinarily post deals like this, but I think this could be a lot of fun for educators and it’s a pretty darn reasonable price.

So what can you do with a $1.99 dog tag?

• Create one for each of your students that has your School, Class Name, School contact info, and then their name and/or photo on the back. Be great for field trips, and early learners can use it to help learn how to spell/write their name.
• Random student grouping. Mix and match pictures and colors on each side, so you can use them for random grouping. For example, if you want to be able to do groups of 3, 4, 5, or 6 at different parts of the day, put 5 different animals on 3 different color backgrounds on one side, and then put 6 different shapes on 4 different colors on the other side. Then you can give each child a tag when they walk in, and call out groups as you need it. “All squares, come to the writing table.” “Yellow tags, go to music, green tags, stay with me.” You get the idea.
• Extension activities/centers. When students finish their assignment, they can pick an extension activity out of the bucket. Only put in as many tags in there as you can have at that activity or center. They were it as they play, and then put it back and pick a new one when they’re done.
• Job chart. List their jobs on the tags, and they can wear the tag to remind them what their job is until they do it. Then they just hang it up.
• Create permanent versions of Kevin Honeycutt’s Web2.0 keychain. A website on one side, a tip and a mentor’s email on the other.
• Bathroom passes, hall passes, Star of the day necklace, create yourself a cool keychain, etc. Hey, for 1.99, why not?
• Rewards for other teachers at your school. Create your own, Technology Teacher of the Month award! Give your colleagues a pat on the back for doing innovative things with technology in their classrooms. For $24 you could create one for every month this year.
• If you’re a geocacher, this would make a fantastic travel bug!

That’s about it off the top of my head. So let me toss the ball to you. What might you create custom dog tags for?

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Nice move for both of them. Key paragraph from the press release:

The partnership allows the students and teachers using Glogster EDU �” now more than 450,000 around the world �” to share their Glogs using the popular SchoolTube sharing site, and also allows them to easily import multimedia elements found on the SchoolTube site into their Glogs. All student-created materials on SchoolTube must be approved by registered teachers, follow local school guidelines, and adhere to the company’s high standards.

So it provides them a moderated means of publication, and also a way for Teachers to browse for edu-safe glogs. Kudos all around. Hope more sites go this route. There’s so many great Web 2.0 tools that educators COULD be using, but because of red tape and policy issues, they’re unable to leverage them.

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Hi. My name is Steve Dembo. If you do a Google search for “Dembo” I have four hits on the front page. Considering all the famous Dembo’s, that’s quite a mediocre feat! And that’s how I identified myself to most people for the first few decades of my life.

About five years ago, I registered the domain name Teach42.com. Since then, there are thousands of people who know me primarily by that name. It has become my brand, my online identity, my signature. People know that if they see Teach42 on a website, that’s me.

This is nothing unusual though. Anybody who registers for just about any website has some sort of alter-ego now. An alias that they use to refer to themselves. Use the same one often enough, and you become quite attached to it.

How disappointed would you be if you had visited Twitter, intending to register, only to find that YOUR username had already been taken? Somebody else was online and communicating under the name that you had dibs on. Deliberate or not is irrelevant. First come, first served.

This has led to hundreds of thousands of URL’s being snatched up and squatted on. The cost is so low that it’s easy to grab them, either to hang on to or to put up for sale/auction. Heck, for only 8 bucks, I can register any open domain I want. 8 bucks is nothing, right?

Well, mull this one over. Twitter accounts are free. And considering that Twitter is now one of the largest social networking sites on the internet, are names on Twitter as valuable as domain names? Some sites seem to think so. People are snagging up Twitter names and putting them up for sale. After all, there’s only a finite amount of ‘good’ ones, right?

Of course, why stop at Twitter? While it may be the flavor of the month, who knows what will be replacing it. With new sites being launched daily, perhaps the next big thing went public this morning. How can you ensure that you will be able to get in there and get that perfect username, the same one that you used everywhere else?

Sites like UsernameCheck.com provide lists of Web 2.0 and social sites, and will check your username against all of them, to let you see where it has been registered and where it as available still. You could easily use that to see where you haven’t registered yet and start chasing windmills, registering your username on every site out there. But more will be coming out tomorrow, and the day after that. Can anyone really keep up?

Which leads me to KnowEm.com. It’s similar to UserNameCheck, but with one small twist. They’ll check where you’ve registered … and for a small fee they’ll register you on the rest. Then, for $20 a month, they’ll keep registering you on any new sites that they add, an estimated 15-20 per week.

I puked a little when I read that at first. Really?? I’m going to pay more than I currently pay for Tivo to have somebody register my name at every site that gets released? But then I started thinking about how bummed I’d be if I didn’t have Teach42 registered on Twitter. Or on Flickr. Or anywhere else for that matter. It’s my own personal brand. It has led to my current job, speaking gigs around the country, and an audience that I’m eternally grateful for. Is that worth a few bucks per month? Well, I haven’t plugged in my PayPal account yet, but I no longer think it’s such a crazy idea.

And that’s for me on a personal level. From a business standpoint, I think it’s almost a no-brainer. Why wouldn’t you want to maintain a tight leash on your brand and online identity?

So the question is, just how valuable is your online name? Can you put a price on it? And how upset would you be if it wasn’t available? What, if anything, would you spend to ensure that you maintain control of it and to be 100% positive that you have it reserved for you when the next big thing hits?

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The other night I was scanning through tweets about Phish’s recent concert, and came across the tweet of a certain MusicLoverChick. The tweet was interesting, but what was even more interesting to me was the fact that the gramaphone in her profile pic MOVED. It was subtle, but every second or two, it just thumped a little. And yet, that little bit of motion BLEW ME AWAY. I have been so used to looking at Twitter images as static and motionless, that just the little bit of animation was enough to knock me off my rocker.

Of course, I simply HAD to know how it was done.

After a few searches, I found a couple of sites with decent directions. And it didn’t look that hard at all! Just take an animated GIF and upload it, right? Well, in reality it wasn’t QUITE so simple.

Here’s how I did it.
1) Get your footage. I decided to use a video and started off with a video of Aiden that I had recorded in Qik. Unfortunately, Qik’s download feature is broken right now, but there’s a hidden way to get access to those files still through the RSS feed. If you go to http://qik.com/USERNAME/latest-videos, you’ll get their RSS feed of videos WITH the download links available. Footage obtained.
2) Trim it down. I used QuickTime Pro. Popped open the video and trimmed it down to JUST the part I wanted. Or at least the part I THOUGHT I wanted at the time, but more on that later.
3) Export it as images. Using Quicktime Pro, one of your Export options is Movie to Image Sequence. Choose that and it’ll save your video clip frame by frame as jpg images. My 8 second clip resulted in a couple hundred images.
4) Crop and resize it. This part may be a bit tricky, and might be worth doing prior to step three if you have a video editor that’ll do it. Instead, I grabbed photoshop and created an action that cropped the image down to a square (centered) and then resized it down to 150×150. Then I used the Batch fucntion in Photoshop to resize the entire folder of images at once.
5) Create an Animated GIF from it. While there are dozens of programs that will create animated GIF’s, I took advantage of a free one for the mac: GifFun. All you do is drag in your folder of images, make a few tweaks and then click on Create GIF. One thing to keep in mind though is that you probably want it to have something like 3-5 microseconds between frames, and by default it is set at 20ms. Change that in the program options first, so when you bring in your images, they’ll all be at a nice 5 ms between frames. Then click on Loop Forever and Make GIF and away you go. I haven’t tried any of these yet, but here are 5 online tools for creating animated GIF’s.
6) Trim it down…. AGAIN. The resulting image will be opened in your browser. Just save the iamge to your computer for now. Once you do, check on the file size. Twitter won’t take anything over 700KB, but I found that I had better success in the final step with smaller file sizes. So try to keep it down to around 500kb or smaller. How do you do that? Two ways. In the options for the program, you can reduce the color palette or in GIFFun, click on Minimize Output. Not sure what that does, but it does shrink down the file. you can also remove unnecessary frames from the GIF. So in the eye example, I went from over 200 frames down to a paltry 89 frames. It’s a shorter animation, but the file size requires it. C’est la vie.
7) Upload it. Rinse, repeat. You’re now ready to upload it to Twitter, which unfortunately is the most complicated step in the whole process. First of all, Twitter is not supposed to support animated GIF’s. While that may be their official stance, the site DOES support it…. kinda. You’re able to upload GIF’s as an avatar pic. But animated GIF’s routinely fail. Seems like there’s some faulty code there, and the first 10 times or so that I tried to upload my animation, it failed. I tried in Firefox on the Mac and got the Fail Whale. I tried in Safari and got the same. I tried in Firefox for Windows and no dice. I tried in IE7 for Windows and nada. Then I tried in Opera for Windows……. and SUCCESS! My boy was on the screen bonking his head for all to see.

So what’s the moral of the story here? If you want to upload an animated GIF, you’re going to need to be patient, persistent and may need to try uploading it 30-40 times before it works. If it consistently fails, try tweaking it just a touch. Maybe shrinking it down a little, removing a few frames. And then keep trying to upload it. There’s no magic formula for this part. Just be persistent. When I tried to change it from Aiden bonking his head to my eye blinking, I failed about 40 times before I resized it, failed 10 more times before it finally went through.

One thing to note. Seems that Twitter isn’t happy with their inability to handle animated GIFs well. Supposedly, they won’t be accepting new ones anymore.

There is no plan to remove existing GIF images. You’ll still be able to use JPEG (image/jpeg and image/jpg) and PNG (image/png) images, but new GIF images will no longer be accepted. This code should be ready within the next week.

That was posted on the dev boards on January 29th. Seems they’re running a little bit behind schedule. Point is though, if you’re interested in having an animated avatar, I wouldn’t waste any time. Could be locked out any day now and then the only people who will have them are those that are grandfathered in.

I can’t help but think that as more and more people do this, Twitter is going to look more like the Daily Prophet from Harry Potter. I know some find it distracting, but I love seeing how people express themselves. Look forward to seeing what you come up with!

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One of the nuggets that stood out to me from PETE&C was a comment made during a presentation by the two EdTechInnovators, Ben Smith and Jared Mader (I listed Ben first because he was left off the poster at the conference). They were describing how technology can be seemless in the classroom, not something you teach, but something that just… is. And one thing that they mentioned (I think it was Ben), was that he doesn’t feel like he gives assignments anymore, he gives creative briefs.

For example, if the students are expected to learn about different types of waves, he wouldn’t ask them to write a report, or to create a powerpoint, or to make a collage. He would ask them to demonstrate their knowledge. If they chose to create a video podcast with original music and lyrics, then so be it. If fact, so much the better.

I love the idea. Make it clear what the goals are. Make it clear what you’ll be assessing them on. And then give them some freedom. I think they’d certainly appreciate having the freedom to do some self-expression, and who knows what they might learn in the process….. in addition to the actual curriculum they were supposed to learn. Bonus perk, you aren’t wasting extra in class time on this. It’s up to them.

One other example, so long as we’re on a musical kick. Check out this video Lisa Thumann shared on Twitter.

You may say, “But the video doesn’t truly demonstrate their knowledge! I mean, could a student really learn anything just from this YouTube video?” I’ll let the author of the video respond, by sharing a comment he left someone asking that very question on YouTube.

This video was a project to summarize trig formulas and to create a song parody. It’s not intended to be a a study guide.

Here’s a suggestion for doing well in trig. Read from your textbook; don’t go on youtube to get your answers.

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I wish I had checked out Traci Blazosky’s blog before I saw her at PETE&C, because if I had I would have hopped at the chance to use her recent post in my presentation. She mashed up a blabberize, some images, a song, a voiceover and more to create a toad-ally incredible video demonstrating not only facts about frogs and tadpoles, but also how to tie different tools together to make a great video for students! Love the idea and the end result is just a treat to watch. I particularly enjoy the tadpole song!

Check it out!

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