Education

Randy Wilhelm

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this morning’s session in the Congress Centre but, as a mother of two, I was open-minded and hoping to hear how new innovative products and approaches might help teachers and learning in the classroom.  I certainly wasn’t disappointed.

The two-hour session was divided into four, with four different speakers presenting their own, very different, business models.

First up was Sebastian Gutmann, Managing Director of a company called Kids for Kids which is only 3 years old and based in Germany.  This is a multi-media, educational publishing house which specialises in teaching English as a second language to children.  Their product entitled ‘Discover English with Ben & Bella’ looked like it’s great fun to use.  Aimed at pre-school kids and their parents, everything is sound-based.

One fact we know is that children respond much better if they learn through play and by using methods that are enjoyable.  This product uses 3D technology to encourage the kids to really engage and to learn without really realising they are doing so.  For example, one of things kids can do is learn a song and dance routine whilst watching the DVD.

What they don’t realise is that by following the instructions, they are absorbing lots of new and interesting words, at the same time as learning how to articulate them correctly.  Kids for Kids have, by producing a box-set, provided parents and teachers with a one-stop shop.  The box-set includes story books, DVDs, CDs, activity books, a PC game, flash cards, and a guide books for parents, with picture dictionaries highlighting words in different colours.

As we all know with kids, the key to learning anything new is repetition and with kids you need to repeat a word 3 times for it to stick.  So all the DVDs and books tie-in together and you get exactly the same on the DVD as in the book.  An interactive game is also included to evaluate how the kids are doing as you go along.

Next to present was Randy Wilhelm, CEO and co-founder of a firm called netTrekker in the US.  The company was founded in 1999 and it specialises in internet development.  A leader in the delivery of digital K-12 educational content, it serves over 10 million students, teachers and schools worldwide.  It was the first to market with a standards-based educational search tool which delivers the rich educational value of the internet to every child in a safe, teacher-approved, relevant, easy-to-use format.

Their real goal is to get kids more excited about the things they are learning and to help teachers find the right tools to help individual students.  Education needs to be personal of course as no two students are the same.  netTrekker, which is subscription-based, is currently partnering with other third party companies to deliver the complete solution, for example with a company called Brainpop which gives video-based explanations and helps kids learn individual words in an entertaining way.

It also provides keyword searches, and everything they offer has a readability rating.  It also has the option to search and has an impressive list of different languages too.  The company’s motto is ‘Go do something good for kids’ which I liked - anything that helps children to learn has got to be a good thing.

Sudhir Singh Dungarpur, President and CEO of Q2A Media in India, followed.  This presentation demonstrated how teachers can use interactive whiteboard technology, using student response systems, for formative assessment to improve classroom instruction and student learning outcomes.

The company is a ‘one of it’s kind’ learning-based content provider, in both print and digital media, focusing on the children’s market (pre-school through to 16 years old).  It is the largest packager in the school and library segment and a key player in the primary and secondary school text book market in the US and Europe.  It has also developed its own interactive classroom product for elementary maths and science.  In order that we could understand how the product worked, we were taken through a typical lesson.

The clever thing about this business model is that, by asking students questions as you go along, it has the ability to assess how the students are reacting.  In other words it can check that they have understood the topic and can see where the gaps are.  And maybe the most important point to make here is that it’s adapted to the curriculum of each country.

In a Q&A session that followed, the presenter was asked how easy it is for teachers to understand the product?  It seems that it takes only around 30 minutes to get your head around it but the crucial thing, as with all new products, is to feel comfortable with it.  Many people have a fear of technology but once you are familiar with it, it’s easy to use.

Livescribe

Lastly, we came to Holly De Leon who is the Vice President for Sales of Livescribe Inc in the US.  For me this was the most exciting presentation of them all and was, although the smallest, in a way the most innovative.  The bottom line is that Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen simply revolutionizes the act of writing.  It gives learners all the portability, flexibility and ease of use of a pen with the functionality and power of a computer.  In other words, it records everything you hear and write, and makes taking notes and listening at the same time much easier.  A modern way of multi-tasking if you like.

We’ve all sat in the back of the room, trying to take notes at the same time as trying to work out what on earth the guy at the front is saying!

This device means that life in the classroom is going to get a whole lot easier.  Basically there is a computer in the top of the pen.  It captures everything that you are writing, but also captures the audio at the same time as well.  Both processes are then synchronized together using an infrared camera which takes 70 pictures per second. And, it seems, you can even have terrible writing and it doesn’t care.

You can choose to buy the product with one of two different memory capacities - either 2GB (which gives you over 200 hours of recording time and costs $169) or 4 GB (which gives you 400 hours and costs $199).  With a 3D recording headset, you can get really good audio - even in a big lecture hall.  In order to make it work, you need special Livescribe dot paper which comes in different forms and different sized notebooks.  The charge plugs into your USB port and you can then download all the information onto the computer.  The wonderful thing is that the pen can capture the whole of a teacher’s lesson, so if the student hasn’t fully understood it, the student can replay it as many times as they need later on.  You can share your work with others as you can easily email it to your fellow students or colleagues.  Alternatively, a teacher can email it to any absent students.

I wasn’t at all surprised to hear that the company works with a lot of special needs kids, as this device I’m sure could help a lot of children with learning difficulties, including dyslexia. The desktop software is free and we were told that in the near future over 5,000 aps are going to be available as well.  An amazing product that, in my opinion, deserves to be a massive hit around the world.

O’Reilly Media, the golden child of computer book publishing (golden, in no small part because of how much more than just publishing they truly are), co-organized a one-day prequel shindig yesterday, the “value proposition” of which was implicitly articulated by O’Reilly VP, Andrew Savikas, in his closing keynote. In describing the remarkable geographical diversity of the appeal of iPhone app versions of their “Missing Manual” series, he observed that those data would be worth keeping in mind as the audience “engaged in the Book Fair itself in the coming days”—true for that data for sure, but also very much the pitch of the organizers and one which, to their credit, they very much lived up to.

For while the traditional Tuesday flurry of agent and editor and rights director pitch meetings proceeded apace in the lobbies and nooks and crannies of the Hofs Frankfurter and Hessischer, Tools of Change Frankfurt added, for this year at least, the Radisson Blu to the roster of reasons to fly out Sunday (though both your correspondent  and fellow Messe blogger Chad Post still chose to fly out Monday night and brave Tuesday’s activities on an hour of sleep.)

I spare you all the exhaustive report on panel after panel in this post, but expect nuggets of information and perspective from the panels and talks scattered throughout my posts in the coming days. But in the Tools of Change Frankfurt spirit of offering takeaways to keep in the back of your mind in the days to come, keep an eye out for these two themes likely to recur over the course of the Fair:

Partnerships. A great deal of what publishers need to do, digital and otherwise, is going to require finding more shoulder to put to the grindstone than any publisher has to hand.  Whether it is Granta partnering with the events newsletter Flavorpill to promote a user-generated content series of short films inspired by one of their books, or O’Reilly partnering on delivering three hundred iPhone apps in nine month with the assistance of Lexcycle (now owned by Amazon), the purveyors of the Stanza reading app, publishers who want to move fast, or want to move smart (going to where someone has already got the audience together), are looking for shoulders to add to the grindstone.

Flattening. Hierarchies are out. Communication can’t be done in a one-way, broadcast fashion any more. Openness, candor is critical. This applies to marketing interaction; this applies to ebook software vendors offering APIs and doing so in the least restrictive fashion possible; this applies to the sourcing of the published content itself, although, for  the moment, the “crowdsourcing” of content is restricted largely to professional publishing.

Keep an eye out for those themes—no actual prizes for finding them, beyond your own personal satisfaction!

As part of the Education Forum taking place in Hall 4.2, there was a CEO roundtable this afternoon to discuss “Four Big Ideas that Will Change Your Business.” With representatives from Lightning Source, the British Educational Suppliers Association, Smart Technologies, and Bowker/ProQuest, this promised to be a very interesting and useful discussion.

Larry Brewster of Lightning Source opened up the meeting with a visionary talk about print on demand and how this is altering the overall business publishing model–not just for educational publishers, but for traditional ones as well.

In looking at the benefits of single-copy POD, Brewster emphasized a few key advantages, some more obvious ones (low inventory costs, smaller capital investment), and others that are a bit more subtle (one that he really beat home was the fact that having books available on single-copy POD ensures that a publisher wouldn’t miss a single sale due to a book being out-of-stock).

What was most captivating about his speech wasn’t necessarily the advantages to the publisher of having their books in a POD system, but the implications of this. For instance, the idea of “Distributed Printing” opens up a whole new world of cost-savings and instant access. His vision was that POD machines would be located throughout the country/world, in both warehouses and bookstores. This would allow publishers to transmit digital files to a plethora of locations where the physical books could actually be printed, thus destroying the traditional method of printing a bunch of copies and paying astronomical amounts to ship books across the country. (Not to mention the additional cost of having these shipped back from all points of the globe in form of returns.)

Taking this one step further, he touched briefly on end-user creation, which could really appeal to educators. Under this model, a particular educator/reader could pick-and-choose things that they want in a book and then have the POD machine print up the exact number of copies they need. Customization that’s currently impossible . . . The opportunities are very broad, especially once color POD machines are available and the cost of POD printing falls to that of traditional offset presses. And like Brewster said, “this is a model that works. It’s a just-in-time system that will continue to grow.”

The next two presentations focused a bit more on the idea of “disaggregation” in educational publishing. Ray Barker from the British Educational Suppliers Association touched on the way the British government has invested billions in Interactive Classroom Technologies, such as interactive whiteboards and now, “learning platforms.” According to Barker, all UK schools are supposed to be using a “learning platform” by 2012. Which, he admitted, might be a bit ambitious and will probably be bumped back a few years. Regardless, this is a huge opportunity for educational publishers, especially those able to figure out how to produce disaggregated content–content that is segmented and that educators can pick and choose from.

Nancy Knowlton, the CEO from Smart Technologies talked about the desire on the part of educators to get things for free. This is an issue that’s starting to impact the entire publishing industry (and will for years to come, especially with the rise of e-books), and although it sounds completely damaging at first, Knowlton suggested that there are opportunities here as well, especially for businesses that are willing to reach out to potential customers and listen to what they have to say and be willing to educate educators on the relationship between quality and a fee.

Finally, Andy Weissberg from Bowker/ProQuest talked about gaming in education and the need for there to be a stronger connection between games and the curriculum. (As an example, he talked about his two daughters coming home from school and either playing Farmville online or some “educational” games on the Leapfrog, but that neither of these activities really related to what they were covering in school.) In terms of pure opportunity, from my perspective, this seems very attractive, especially with the proliferation of iPhones and other such devices and the relative ease with which people can create apps.

I’m not terribly sure there were four big ideas presented at this roundtable, but a few of the pieces were pretty thought-provoking. To be honest though, I was really looking forward to hearing from Mike McGuinness of Scribd about “viral marketing and piracy protection.” He was advertised in the events brochure, but bailed for whatever reason. And seriously, viral marketing and piracy are two ideas that most definitely WILL change your business.

Today’s EPP (Educational Publishing Pavilion) panel on “Global Innovations and Market Opportunites,” blended together two of the primary focuses running throughout this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair events: educational publishing and digital initiatives. (I’ll be writing about a number of e-publishing panels later this week . . .) This particular panel featured three CEOs who are utilizing emerging technologies to improve the educational content they’re producing.
 
The event opened with an intro by Dr. Hugh Roome from Scholastic International in which he pointed to four key markets that will become more and more important to educational publishers over the next five years: 1) developing online courses and materials for a variety of students, both in traditional schools and those being home-schooled, 2) English language training for the world, 3) school-to-work programs to teach immediately relevant skills, and 4) working with Ministries of Education in developing countries to incorporate solid, inexpensive educational programs into their poorer schools.
 
Each of the panelists presented a new technology (or new way to use technology) that would assist in the creation of educational materials designed to reach one of the markets/opportunities Dr. Roome mentioned.
 
Sudhir Singh Dungarpur from Q2A Media (Hall 8.0 J 954) presented information about the “Interactive Whiteboard,” a multimedia enhanced whiteboard that can be used in classrooms to better engage and interact with students. Although he didn’t have a whiteboard there (it is on display at their stand, which is (Hall 8.0 J 954), it sounded pretty cool. Teachers can edit and load lessons that contain a variety of flash media, learning quizzes, and other interactive activities, encouraging students to “do” things in class. (This “doing” was very important to Sudhir–according to a study he cited, we remember 10% of what we read, 30 per cent of what we say, and 90 per cent of what we see, say, and do. It was interesting, although scary to me, how visual-heavy these new teaching technologies are. Books are being replaced in schools by podcasts and flash animation . . . though if it helps kids learn, it’s definitely a good thing.) The first phase of this project is ready to be deployed, and over 300 schools in Europe will be using these in the near future. And apparently, American schools are receiving large grants to purchase these as well. Of all three presentations, this seemed like the most game-changing technology, altering the way classes can be taught.
 
The DNL e-book format was the focus of Adam Schmidt’s (DNAML Pty. Ltd., 8.0 L 977) presentation. DNL is a particular e-book format that works on PCs and will soon be Mac-compatible. At this time, it wouldn’t really work with an e-reader because it too is very media/flash heavy. (Maybe in the future . . . It would seem to make most sense to have these books available on iPhones. . . .) The format was pretty nice, contained all the bells and whistles you might expect, and was DRM protected on their server. (This was a huge selling point of his, something that helped his pitch with HarperCollins, but something that I’m personally not keen on. Kids illegally download math books is the least of our problems . . . Kidding of course.) You can also buy the book within the book, which is a very cool function. There wasn’t much info about how easy/difficult it is to create these books, which would’ve been interesting to find out about, especially in contrast to Sophie, a free, very usuable e-book programme.
 
Finally, Rachelle Cracchiolo from Teacher Created Materials in California (Hall 8.0 O 907) talked about the immense popularity of the podcasts they’ve made available on their website. Although they’ve mainly used these as a marketing tool, she saw a huge growth possibility in providing English as a Second Language content and materials for staff development and teacher training. The basic message: people dig iPods and are willing to listen to things they normally wouldn’t find the time to read and study. Sort of co-opting the Apple cool for educational purposes–not a new idea, but one that could be implemented more widely and in more situations.
 
Although I’m a trade publisher who loves fiction, this panel was interesting to me in the way it demonstrated how different types of publishers are preparing for the future of publishing and learning.

Shashi Tharoor nearly became the successor to Kofi Annan as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Had he succeeded, it is likely he would have made the education of women around the world a top priority

“When I was at the UN and asked the one single to change the world, my answer is “educate girls.” He cited statistics that offered proof that if you educate a girl as opposed to a boy, the positive effect spreads out across the entire community with which the girl has, or eventually, will have contact.

Tharoor is today a chairman of the Dubai-based Afras Ventures and a patron of LitCam, the Frankfurt Book Fair Literacy Campaign. His comments came during the opening speeches of the second annual LitCam conference, which this year focused on the topic of multilingualism and – a term new to me – interculturalism in Europe and abroad.

Tharoor described a situation in his homeland of India where fewer than half the women in the country were literate. Yet, recounting his experience touring a charity school that catered exclusively to the children of families who made less than twenty euros a month, that learning to read was possibly the most impactful thing one could to change economic and social prospects.

“Economic success is based on education success”, he said, adding: “In the last century we were told of the objective to make the world safe for democracy, and while that is increasingly being realized, I think now through literacy, we can make the world safe for diversity and development.”

According to 2006 statistics from UNESCO, there are more than 774 million illiterate adults and ¾ of those live in only 12 countries, primarily in South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab states.

NGOs and nonprofit organizations have long championed teaching people to read, but new strategies abound. Under LitCam’s own umbrella, the “Football meets Culture” project combines soccer training with inspirational lessons. In just two years, it has expanded from Germany to South Africa and then Turkey. Others participating in today’s programs included Tin Tua of Burkina Faso, the Mother Child Education Foundation of Turkey and the National Center for Family Literacy of Louisville, KY.

Among those attending the conference was Robert Cornford, marketing manager for the publication, books and journals, for Oxfam in the UK.

“Everything you do in development depends on literacy”, he said. “The printed word is how you communicate with people.”

The LitCam conference continues tomorrow in the Congress Center.