.
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$0Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$0Expected amount of time to complete project:
1 YearMySyllabi is an online tool that teachers use to automatically send home relevant digital learning materials. When a teacher signs up, she declares her subject and grade interests. We can then populate her calendar with the right learning games, educational videos, web pages, and quizzes. Teachers are free to rearrange the order for which particular topics are taught and when particular resources are scheduled. For example, a teacher can move up her unit on volcanoes from week four to week three. The end result is a list of daily resources that a student and parent receive in their email, MySpace, or Facebook inboxes.
MySyllabi encourages collaboration within the education community by allowing teachers access to each others calendars. Users can create their own original postings, or they can drag and drop postings they like from the calendars of their colleagues. To make this collaboration process easy, we group teachers based on their subject and grade interests, then provide a daily list of the most popular resources scheduled on classroom calendars throughout the site. Teachers can then customize their own calendars with materials shared amongst the community.
EDU-AID is a non-profit that rewards teachers with merit-based pay raises based on the consumption rates of each teacher's parents and students. The non-profit bridges goodwill between corporate sponsors and the teacher community by adopting classrooms. The aim is to motivate teachers to use the MySyllabi tool and improve communication with their students and parents.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Need for MySyllabi & EDU+AID
Now that we are in the digital age, the materials our kids use to learn are transitioning from print to online. The rate for which our schools are connecting to the internet is astounding while the student to computer ratio is shrinking. The advent of the No Child Left Behind Act now holds our educators accountable for identifying the right materials to achieve quantified levels of performance. As our teachers are taking advantage of the immense library of online support materials, they are having a hard time sifting through the masses of digital curriculum content while trying to validate what content is good and what content is bad; not to mention trying to align it to their own particular state standards. This process is a very time consuming that can be easily alleviated through collaborative practice within the profession.
Teachers are using email to disseminate information to their parents and students, yet no tracking system is in place to monitor the success rate of consumption. The silos that this communication represents are major obstacles that our education system can overcome by opening up the masses of email transmissions, making teachers and classroom inboxes public, and by tagging the resources that make up their queues. By doing so, we can have our teachers take advantage of longtail strategy and bring forth exposure to relevant resources related to the subjects, grades and topics that they teach through out the year. We can quantify the most popular topics and learning materials used for any particular niche of subject, grade, and topic interest combination and show this on a daily basis. Teachers should be working together more and we should allow them to borrow great resources previously discovered by their colleagues.
Picking apples from the trees of other teacher's classrooms is a process that would save teachers an immense amount of time and improve the quality of education delivered to their students. This simple concept allows teachers to easily assemble their own digital planner online and provides a simple mechanism for the contents of those planners to be fed to their subscribing parents and students to consume at the venue of their choice: email, myspace, facebook, etc....
The problem is that there is no information system on the market today that combines the identity of content with the identity of an email transmission. Schools and districts already invest a significant amount of money in an inferior email product that doesn't allow teachers to share. For the same amount of money spent, teachers could have access to a library of relevant resource, validated by popularity on a daily basis. Great transmittals should be saved and indexed for similar teachers across the nation to use. Administrators should track the consumption rate of parents and students, then reward teachers accordingly for accomplishing what they are originally expected to do: ensure that the student is paying attention to the curriculum and doing his/her homework.
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
Competitive Landscape
In addition to the content and community features, MySyllabi acts as a webmail client where emails can be sent and received. MySyllabi's core competency is selling this email platform to schools and districts. The main value proposition is an email system customized for the education market. The competitive landscape in the education market is extremely fragmented and ripe for consolidation. While there are many vendors on the educational trade show floor, there are few that combine all the services provided by MySyllabi and EDU-AID: email, community portal, database of relevant resources, subscription learning material marketplace, & teacher-corporation sponsor brokerage. Here we break down the competitive landscape according to the largest players in these categories mentioned above. Also, we list a few large industry participants who have the potential to enter our space yet currently follow different business models. Obviously, each of these represent an attractive candidate for our exit strategy. We focus most of energy on competitors in the email space because schools already have a budget for email and that space is where we can most greatly outmatch the offering of our competition.
Largest Educational Players
* Google
* United Streaming (Discovery Education)
* Apple
* McGraw Hill
* Pearson Education
* Scholastic
* Houghton Mifflin
* Renaissance Learning
* SMART Technologies
* Promethean
School Email Community Portal Database of Relevant Resources
* School Email
* Gmail (Google)
* Outlook Web Access (Microsoft)
* Gaggle.net
* ePals
* Zimbra (Yahoo)
* eChalk
* School Loop
* Blackboard
* FirstClass
* Thinkquest (Oracle)
* Moodle
* Riverdeep
* Softchalk
* Schoolnet.com
* Curriki.org
* Thinkfinity (Verizon)
* How Stuff Works
* Wikipedia
* BBC
* Nettrekker
* Library of Congress
* Learn360
* Schooltube.com
* TeacherTube
* Teacher Created Materials
Subscription Learning Material Marketplace Teacher Sponsor Brokerage Curriculum Mapping
* United Streaming (Discovery Education)
* Safari Montage
* http://www.iqcore.co.uk/
* Lulu
* School Specialty
* Adopt-A-Classroom
* Funds for Learning
* Compass Learning
* Rubicon Atlas
* TeacherEase
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
McFerren Resume
Teachade - Founder, User Interface-Experience Designer
www.teachade.com
Miami, FL - Cambridge, MA
7/04 - 7/07
* Designed User Interface and User Experience for a K-12 education portal - took an initial vision from strategy to scope to structure to skeleton to surface
* Performed thorough research of the competitive landscape and all existing functionality/experiences
* Heavily involved with school purchasing of digital content & I performed frequent teacher interviews at our private test school and at teacher conferences throughout the nation
* Developed the scope of the site with regard to functional specifications and content requirements
* Developed the site's structure and articulated how these variables were bridged together:
* Different types of teachers (subjects/grades interests) and their longtail
* Different types of resources (learning resources , assessments, ect) and their priorities
* Different stakeholders (teachers, parents, students, administrators, vendors, etc..) & their values
* Wire-framed the site's skeleton and produced interface design, navigation design & information design
* Translated user feedback into page mockups, component listings, site maps, statements of work, and version specs for each iteration of the website's surface
* Contemplated variables to uncover the business model behind the website
Teachade – Founder, Product Manager
www.teachade.com
Miami, FL – Cambridge, MA
7/04 - 7/07
* Project Managed contractors located in Miami, Sacramento, Cambridge, & India through alpha and beta development phases of an educator web portal where teachers share resources ($900,000)
* Identified and documented project requirements from user data, industry research, web investigation, school purchasing, interviews and surveys gathered at over 20 education technology trade shows, and parent/teacher/student interviews at our test school located on Fisher Island
* Translated project requirements into version specs and statements of work, complete with site maps, mock ups, and thorough explanations of functionality requirements
* Negotiated pricing structure, hourly rate, and time lines for each version/iteration with web contractors
* Quality managed production throughout the entire development phase of each version based on initial
statement of work
* Identified bugs during pre-release of each version and logged them into Bugzilla for the developers to fix
* Met spec requirements within listed time frames
Teachade – Founder, Content Development
www.teachade.com
Miami, FL – Cambridge, MA
7/04 – 7/07
* Project Managed Content Procurement & Production of over 200,000 web-based teacher resources
* Managed 30 paid teachers responsible for resource collection and tagging by subject, grade, and topic
* Managed 10 teachers on a project to produce 10 flash-based multimedia games ($40,000)
* Gathered vision and story boards from participating teachers
* Translated teacher direction into a statement of work, complete with game mapping and user-
interface navigation
* Negotiated hourly rates and time allocation with multimedia agencies
* Quality managed production throughout the entire development phase of each version based on initial statement of work
* Identified bugs during pre-release of each version and logged them into Bugzilla for the
developers to fix
* Met spec requirements within listed time frames
* Managed content translation and tagging of over 500 flash-based learning games with an Indian web publishing company ($120,000)
* Revised scripts of flash-based learning resources (Rupees to Dollars, Cricket to Baseball, etc...)
* Selected voice-over talent
* Identified bugs during pre-release of each version and logged them into Bugzilla for the developers to fix
* Met spec requirements within listed time frames
* Tagged each resource by pre-established subject, grade, topic directory structure and batch loaded them
onto portal
* Recruited 5,000 community users from online forums, teacher conferences, & focus groups
* Traveled extensively to national teacher conferenences and trade shows to represent the teachade
product, recruit teachers, court vendor participation, and gather feedback/requirements for future site
improvements
