Using Services to Stretch the EdTech IT Budget

It’s not news that EdTech budgets are under constant pressure and often face cuts or reductions as tax receipts drop in some areas. While at the same time there are new and increasing needs for EdTech solutions within schools to meet the demands of 21st century education.

It seems to be an impossible situation, doing more with less. Especially when you consider that the cost of staff, hardware, and many products just seem to go up every year. As with most IT operations, the largest part of the EdTech budget is allocated to staff costs. This means that any leverage of these staff resources brings substantial benefit to the budget. This is where the judicious use of Service Providers can be a great strategy.

One of the great truisms about Information Technology is that 70-80% of resources are focused on just “keeping the lights on” or more accurately, managing and administering current systems. This is one aspect of operations that is ripe for outsourcing or dropping on a service provider. The reason for this isn’t just to lower costs, but more importantly, to free up staff resources to work on the new projects that are unique to your district. It could be a network upgrade or new security solutions.

The corollary to this is to use a service provider to do the work on the new project and to have them handle on-going operations. This has been a common approach as the cost of the service provider becomes part and parcel of the new project and put into the overall budget request. The only issue here is that it leaves district staff a bit removed from the new project, and farther from being able to really add value to the district’s IT strategy.

One of the single best ways to stretch the IT budget in a district is to stop paying for things you don’t use, or use sparingly, but buy all of. This is approach of “paying by the drink” is a hallmark of cloud services. You only pay for what you use. This may be why using cloud service providers can actually save you money.

Let’s use Office 365 for example. Rather than buying an Office license for every administrative system, you might find that not all users need this software and that having end users sign up and register as needed for this cloud based version of Office, your costs could actually drop. In addition, as a monthly fee, you don’t have the one-time charge for a license purchase. This is one example, and you may find many others.

Services may become an essential tactic in dealing with tight budgets and limited resources. They can be attractive as staff extensions, but also, look at the pricing models for services as the movement to a “pay as you go” pricing model could be very beneficial to your budget.

View the original article here

Retailers using controversial marketing tools

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- When you're shopping, you're being watched. And not just by security. Retailers want to know everything about how you behave in their stores.

When you're shopping, you're being watched. And not just by security. Retailers want to know everything about how you behave in their stores.

And now, two Bay Area companies are working on technologies that will watch you like never before. We have a look at what these new marketing tools could mean for your privacy.

Sometimes a sign is just a sign. But sometimes, it's watching you.

"This sign here, basically has a small camera hidden into the back of the sign," said Mark McGowan.

He's a Product Director for EFI, they're in the printing business. But now, they're getting into the camera business.

"As I look at the sign, as you can see, my face is now circled," McGowan said.

It's called SmartSign. It's an ordinary cardboard sign, with an extraordinary ability to recognize faces. It can tell if you're looking at it, and for how long. And it's remarkably good at telling your age and gender.

When asked why put a camera in the sign, EFI Chief Technology Officer Ghilad Dziesietnik answered, "Well, because that's the best way to attract the immediate reaction of the observer in the sign. It's a one-to-one viewing angle."

He says internet marketers can tell if you click on an ad. But stores often don't know if their displays are effective.

"Are people even looking at the sign?" Dziesietnik asked. "What is the focus they have on the sign? Who are the people that look at the sign?"

SmartSign gives all those answers on a colorful web page from a device so cheap that once they release it in a few months, it could be everywhere.

"We really see the cost getting down to really a couple hundred bucks to actually get one of these on the street," McGowan said.

But retailers don't have to put a camera in a sign to start learning more about their customers. In fact, some are already doing it with the cameras that are in the ceiling.

"A system like this can work using your own existing surveillance camera," 3VR Chief Marketing Officer Joe Boissy said.

San Francisco-based 3VR is mainly a security company. Founded with money from the CIA, they built facial recognition that profiles people by age and gender, and tracks them through the store.

"Understand exactly where they're standing, what are they doing, and where they dwell," Boissy said. "Even though some people might say it's controversial, the way we would like to talk about it is to say, we are a friendly big brother."

3VR has tools aimed at customer service:

"I can ask the system to alert me when the line gets longer than six people because maybe I need to send another staffing member out there," 3VR Field Sales Engineer Diego Simkin said.

It can even tell if customers are happy or upset. And it answers the all-important question about the conversion rate -- how many of the people walked into the store and bought something, because they have cameras connected to the point of sale.

And that's where it gets sticky. Cameras connected to cash registers. Privacy advocates say it could mean that stored image of your face is no longer anonymous.

"It could be linked to their credit card transactions at a register, and then the store just has a wealth of information available on people," said Jennifer Lynch with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We don't know what's happening to that data, how long it's being stored for, and who it might be shared with."

The EFF worries it could be used for invasive advertising; or, in the wrong hands, identity theft.

When asked what the solution is here, Lynch replied, "I think that the solution is for retailers to not store as much information."

EFI is taking that suggestion. SmartSign analyzes the video, but never stores it. All marketers see are the numbers.

3VR does keep the video, but says it's not linked to your identity.

"We're not tracking people, we're tracking profiles, things that help retailers and consumers at the same time, save time and money," Boissy said.

Consumer advocate Jon Fox likes that promise, but he's worried.

"I think the problem with that argument is that it relies a lot on us trusting companies," he said.

(Copyright ©2013 KGO-TV/DT.

View the original article here

Free Assessment Tools for Classrooms Using One-To-One Technology

If you weren’t one of the 200+ attendees of my live webinar, you can still check out my presentation:

View on SlideShare

Download the Presentation

Using Positive Patient Reviews on Your Medical Practice Website

An online search for "reputation management" yields 62 million results, including a dozen paid ads for services.

The paid ads on Google point to the profitability and popularity of reputation management services.

Reputation management in 2012 involves monitoring the online presence of a company. This could mean looking at social networks, discussion forum comments, and generally tracking who’s saying what about your practice.

It also includes the more active function of responding to negative comments, posting content like blog posts, and managing patient reviews.

Actively soliciting reviews and ratings from patients is a vital function of these services. The good news is, you can do this yourself if you make a habit of it.

Whether you hire someone to get patients to review you online or you do it yourself, here are a few ways to further leverage positive reviews from satisfied patients.

1. Post them on your own website

Create a separate page on your practice website for patient comments. You can label the page "Patient Comments" or "What Patients Are Saying."

Whether you get the comments from online or offline sources, make sure you respect the level of privacy or anonymity of the patient’s review.

Some patients put their full name in their review; others leave it totally anonymously.

Use the whole comment, break it up into paragraphs, or just post an excerpt.

2. Ask permission for future use

Before you try the technique in number 1 above, it’s better to get permission from the patient.

Be explicit when you ask!

Ask if you can include their full name, city, state, occupation, and even a picture. You won’t know until you ask.

If patients are genuinely excited about their experience, they don’t mind sharing some or all of these things. Give patients some idea of how the comments will be used — in print ads, online, or in the office.

3. Ask patients for multiple reviews

One of my patients recently posted her comments and reviews on two separate ratings websites.

All I did was ask her to visit an extra site when she left the comments.

Another way to get reviews in multiple locations is to let patients know they can just leave a quick "star" rating, like at Healthgrades.com. This takes a few minutes and doesn’t require writing a paragraph of comments.

4. Mix reviews with patient education

Imagine you’re a patient looking for information on eczema treatments.

You look at a local dermatologist’s website and read patient education articles on the subject.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if you read a testimonial from an eczema patient in the body of the article? Of course!

Try putting excerpts of patient reviews in your patient education articles.

Even if that particular patient had some other problem, it helps patients to see that other people are happy with your office as they’re reading about conditions and problems they have.

5. Let your patient know what’s next

Finally, think of other ways you can get your happy patients involved in promoting your practice.

Patients who leave positive reviews, especially in multiple places, are bona fide raging fans. They are usually willing to spread the word about you in other ways, too.

After they’ve left a review, let them know you may ask them to do a video review in the future, contact them for a media interview, or let other patients call or e-mail them if they have questions.

If you’re just getting started, I’ve written some guidelines on how to pick patients to review and rate your practice.

Find out more about C. Noel Henley and our other Practice Notes bloggers.

View the original article here

Using Positive Patient Reviews on Your Medical Practice Website

An online search for "reputation management" yields 62 million results, including a dozen paid ads for services.

The paid ads on Google point to the profitability and popularity of reputation management services.

Reputation management in 2012 involves monitoring the online presence of a company. This could mean looking at social networks, discussion forum comments, and generally tracking who’s saying what about your practice.

It also includes the more active function of responding to negative comments, posting content like blog posts, and managing patient reviews.

Actively soliciting reviews and ratings from patients is a vital function of these services. The good news is, you can do this yourself if you make a habit of it.

Whether you hire someone to get patients to review you online or you do it yourself, here are a few ways to further leverage positive reviews from satisfied patients.

1. Post them on your own website

Create a separate page on your practice website for patient comments. You can label the page "Patient Comments" or "What Patients Are Saying."

Whether you get the comments from online or offline sources, make sure you respect the level of privacy or anonymity of the patient’s review.

Some patients put their full name in their review; others leave it totally anonymously.

Use the whole comment, break it up into paragraphs, or just post an excerpt.

2. Ask permission for future use

Before you try the technique in number 1 above, it’s better to get permission from the patient.

Be explicit when you ask!

Ask if you can include their full name, city, state, occupation, and even a picture. You won’t know until you ask.

If patients are genuinely excited about their experience, they don’t mind sharing some or all of these things. Give patients some idea of how the comments will be used — in print ads, online, or in the office.

3. Ask patients for multiple reviews

One of my patients recently posted her comments and reviews on two separate ratings websites.

All I did was ask her to visit an extra site when she left the comments.

Another way to get reviews in multiple locations is to let patients know they can just leave a quick "star" rating, like at Healthgrades.com. This takes a few minutes and doesn’t require writing a paragraph of comments.

4. Mix reviews with patient education

Imagine you’re a patient looking for information on eczema treatments.

You look at a local dermatologist’s website and read patient education articles on the subject.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if you read a testimonial from an eczema patient in the body of the article? Of course!

Try putting excerpts of patient reviews in your patient education articles.

Even if that particular patient had some other problem, it helps patients to see that other people are happy with your office as they’re reading about conditions and problems they have.

5. Let your patient know what’s next

Finally, think of other ways you can get your happy patients involved in promoting your practice.

Patients who leave positive reviews, especially in multiple places, are bona fide raging fans. They are usually willing to spread the word about you in other ways, too.

After they’ve left a review, let them know you may ask them to do a video review in the future, contact them for a media interview, or let other patients call or e-mail them if they have questions.

If you’re just getting started, I’ve written some guidelines on how to pick patients to review and rate your practice.

Find out more about C. Noel Henley and our other Practice Notes bloggers.

View the original article here

Using the web for learning and teaching – a new understanding

Using technology for teaching and learning in higher education goes way beyond Google. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

What are the implications for learning and teaching when we move from perceiving the web as a collection of tools to thinking of it as a series of overlapping spaces? This was the focus of a recent Higher Education Academy event on flexible learning and online residency. The term residencycomes from the Visitors and Residents continuum (V&R) which I proposed as an alternative to Marc Prensky's digital natives and immigrants idea.

V&R is a simple metaphor for online engagement: some people visit the web while others live out a portion of their lives online and are, in effect, resident in online spaces. Unlike Prensky's idea, the V&R continuum does not assume there are links between age and technical skill, but instead focuses on motivations to engage. We are currently using the V&R continuum as the underpinning principle in a longitudinal JISC-funded project which, in partnership with OCLC, is exploring what motivates learners, teaching practitioners and researchers to engage with the web. We are particularly interested in learner-owned literacies – approaches to information seeking and collaboration online which individuals evolve outside of an institutional context.

Rather than aiming to produce a framework of digital literacies, we are working with the notion of 'genres of participation', an approach first used to define aspects of digital youth culture but which, using V&R as genres, translates well into more academic contexts.

The strength of taking this approach is that the notion of genres is inherently fuzzy edged, reflecting the increasingly blurred boundaries between roles and behaviours online – between the personal and the institutional. Unlike many competency frameworks, V&R doesn't imply that there is a linear progression in developing digital literacies. In fact our data indicate that individuals evolve their forms of engagement online in a fairly ad hoc, try-it-and-see manner, based on their immediate needs. In many cases their approaches are blunt but effective, with the response to the question "How do you go about using the web for your learning?" often being "I Google and see what comes up".

At the HEA event we focused on the residency end of the continuum, not because this is necessarily a more effective genre of participation for learning, but because the implications of the web-as-a-space and the related modes of engagement are less understood than those at the visitor end of the continuum. Certainly residency is inherent in some of the new forms of practice we see emerging online such as the original form of the MOOC (massive open online course), and the notion of residency is often linked to agile, communal forms of knowledge creation and ways-of-knowing.

Many of the graduate attributes higher education institutions are espousing appear to require reasonably high levels of residency and visibility online with phrases such as "engage productively in relevant online communities" and "influence others in an increasingly digital world". So the importance of these forms of engagement is being established but what is not yet clear is how we actually support this in practice.

It's not easy facilitating a shift from a visitor to a more resident mode and some of the teaching practitioners at the HEA event shared how difficult it is to communicate to learners what the possible benefits of having a presence and sharing practice online could be. For many, education is predominantly about consuming knowledge from trusted sources and seeking the wisdom of established experts. Study is seen as a relatively private activity which finishes with a series of exams. It's not commonly perceived as an evolving practice in which personal views are openly shared and in which students' opinions become a valued part of a communal learning experience.

The resident style digital literacies that are often discussed, such as developing a professional identity online and the ability to visibly collaborate on the web, can appear daunting, risky and potentially a huge distraction from the "real" curriculum for many learners. Even so, I think this type of anxiety is a valid and good defence against a consumerist mindset. We should be pushing learners to expand their view of education beyond traditional forms of expertise. The V&R project is gaining an understanding of how, and more importantly why, we use the web for learning. It will continue to share its findings and is planning to produce a toolkit-style learning resource to support practitioners interested in resident forms of practice. We are keen to move this area forwards so that our learners, to use JISC's definition, are fitted with the capabilities for "living learning and working in a digital society", to achieve this we need to be doing much more than advising how to Google a bit better.

David White is a researcher and co-manages Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), a learning and technology R&D group in the University of Oxford. He tweets at @daveowhite.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here

Using the web for learning and teaching – a new understanding

Using technology for teaching and learning in higher education goes way beyond Google. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

What are the implications for learning and teaching when we move from perceiving the web as a collection of tools to thinking of it as a series of overlapping spaces? This was the focus of a recent Higher Education Academy event on flexible learning and online residency. The term residencycomes from the Visitors and Residents continuum (V&R) which I proposed as an alternative to Marc Prensky's digital natives and immigrants idea.

V&R is a simple metaphor for online engagement: some people visit the web while others live out a portion of their lives online and are, in effect, resident in online spaces. Unlike Prensky's idea, the V&R continuum does not assume there are links between age and technical skill, but instead focuses on motivations to engage. We are currently using the V&R continuum as the underpinning principle in a longitudinal JISC-funded project which, in partnership with OCLC, is exploring what motivates learners, teaching practitioners and researchers to engage with the web. We are particularly interested in learner-owned literacies – approaches to information seeking and collaboration online which individuals evolve outside of an institutional context.

Rather than aiming to produce a framework of digital literacies, we are working with the notion of 'genres of participation', an approach first used to define aspects of digital youth culture but which, using V&R as genres, translates well into more academic contexts.

The strength of taking this approach is that the notion of genres is inherently fuzzy edged, reflecting the increasingly blurred boundaries between roles and behaviours online – between the personal and the institutional. Unlike many competency frameworks, V&R doesn't imply that there is a linear progression in developing digital literacies. In fact our data indicate that individuals evolve their forms of engagement online in a fairly ad hoc, try-it-and-see manner, based on their immediate needs. In many cases their approaches are blunt but effective, with the response to the question "How do you go about using the web for your learning?" often being "I Google and see what comes up".

At the HEA event we focused on the residency end of the continuum, not because this is necessarily a more effective genre of participation for learning, but because the implications of the web-as-a-space and the related modes of engagement are less understood than those at the visitor end of the continuum. Certainly residency is inherent in some of the new forms of practice we see emerging online such as the original form of the MOOC (massive open online course), and the notion of residency is often linked to agile, communal forms of knowledge creation and ways-of-knowing.

Many of the graduate attributes higher education institutions are espousing appear to require reasonably high levels of residency and visibility online with phrases such as "engage productively in relevant online communities" and "influence others in an increasingly digital world". So the importance of these forms of engagement is being established but what is not yet clear is how we actually support this in practice.

It's not easy facilitating a shift from a visitor to a more resident mode and some of the teaching practitioners at the HEA event shared how difficult it is to communicate to learners what the possible benefits of having a presence and sharing practice online could be. For many, education is predominantly about consuming knowledge from trusted sources and seeking the wisdom of established experts. Study is seen as a relatively private activity which finishes with a series of exams. It's not commonly perceived as an evolving practice in which personal views are openly shared and in which students' opinions become a valued part of a communal learning experience.

The resident style digital literacies that are often discussed, such as developing a professional identity online and the ability to visibly collaborate on the web, can appear daunting, risky and potentially a huge distraction from the "real" curriculum for many learners. Even so, I think this type of anxiety is a valid and good defence against a consumerist mindset. We should be pushing learners to expand their view of education beyond traditional forms of expertise. The V&R project is gaining an understanding of how, and more importantly why, we use the web for learning. It will continue to share its findings and is planning to produce a toolkit-style learning resource to support practitioners interested in resident forms of practice. We are keen to move this area forwards so that our learners, to use JISC's definition, are fitted with the capabilities for "living learning and working in a digital society", to achieve this we need to be doing much more than advising how to Google a bit better.

David White is a researcher and co-manages Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), a learning and technology R&D group in the University of Oxford. He tweets at @daveowhite.

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.

View the original article here