Jane Payfer, CMO @ Ergotron

True confessions here,  my grandmother was a teacher. My mother was a teacher.  My aunt was a teacher. My cousin is a teacher. My brother is a principal, and still a teacher, and yes, in some unofficial capacity, I am a teacher too, having graduated many, many years ago with a Bachelor of Science in Education degree.

I had a diploma, but never the gift of patience required to be successful in a classroom full of inquiring minds and frequently, squirming bodies. I was in the classroom, but not for long.  After starting my own family, I took refuge in corporate life.

Which makes this TeachWell Mobile Digital Platform launch especially dear to my heart.  It brings me back around fully to where I started: in classrooms, learning how to make a better world through the education of our children.

About two years ago, Ergotron started working with teachers to uncover what they  needed to be more effective in their classrooms. Teachers taught us how tough it is to integrate all the different sources of educational content they use in their lesson planning, preparation, and in their classrooms. 

While a lot of content is still “paper based,” much is now digital content, whether online or from a stored media source like CDs and DVDs. There are a lot of different kinds of devices needed to share and present all this content, computers, digital cameras/visualisers, CD and DVD players, projectors.  

About a year and a half ago, we thought we had a pretty good grasp of the technical challenges they were facing, when we uncovered another challenge. Not only were there too many gadgets in the rooms – the hardware used to access the digital content was stashed away inconveniently in too many places. Some of the playback devices were shared resources, locked away in the “AV” room. Other teachers purchased their own players, but didn’t have enough space in the classroom to store them away when not in use. The end result was the same. It was frequently too hard to access the hodge podge playback devices, get them powered up and turned on, when it came time to actually use them.

In addition, traditional desks were physical  barriers between teachers and students. Most of them are monstrosities older than the teachers who use them, taking up way too much space for the limited storage function they provide. They hinder the collaboration and interaction necessary to keep students’ attentive and enraptured with subject matter.  Worse yet,  it takes precious time to get out from behind them, and even the most organized educator feels  tethered to them,  with frequent trips back and forth to pick up the tools necessary to get through a class:  markers, laser pointer, tissues. Exacerbating the situation further,  audio visual carts haven’t changed or improved since the ‘60’s even though  the technology they support has gone from film strips to 35mm proctors to DVD players.

What this means, in real practical language, is that precious teaching time may be wasted on “technical difficulties.”

The reality is there isn’t much teaching time to waste.  A study done by Richard Rossmiller, University of Wisconsin Department of Educational Administration Chairman, illuminated this issue, showing that only 364 hours of a typical U.S. school year of of 1,080 hours were actually spent in “time-on-task.”  And this was in 1983!

My brother’s 1998  masters’ thesis reinforced Professor Rossmiller’s findings, with an average of only  40% of the class period in Washington state schools spent conveying new educational information.  The other 60% of the time was spent getting students ready to learn, books open, in disciplinary discussions, and, you guessed it, trying to get multi-media content working. No wonder our students’ test scores are in decline.

Students are losing out, not because we don’t have enough “good” teachers, or because our teachers “don’t know how to teach,” but because teachers may be getting bogged down and caught up focusing on the technical “how to” instead of the content “what.” 

Having solved a similar situation for today’s nurses, Ergotron knew there had to be a better is way.

The TeachWell Digital Platform was born.

A little over a year ago, we had a pretty good specification of what TeachWell would need to be.  To be sure it would provide the best functionality it could for our teachers who are giving the best they’ve got, every day, we spent the past year refining, testing, and perfecting the concept.

So, that’s exactly Ergotron’s hope for TeachWell. 

That when using it, the good teachers in our schools can get back to teaching.  Our students will be more engaged in the learning process.  The deep well of digital content used by today’s 21^st Century Educators, will be taught well, ensuring the knowledge transfer has impact.  The lessons are learned.  The subject matter is conquered.  And the teachers’ physical well-being isn’t compromised in the process.

This is the goal of TeachWell.

From Ergotron. 

Dave Sanders, Director, Roadmap Innovation – Education & Healthcare @ Ergotron

Last month, I had the humbling experience of walking a mile in the shoes of today’s teacher…sort of (I’ll explain the qualifier in a bit).  You see, I was responsible for a session at our annual sales meeting during which I was to train the sales team on our product offering and message for K-12 and Higher Education customers. 

And with overzealous confidence, I declared to my peers, “If I’m going to train the team on how our products can serve as the platform for the 21st Century Classroom, I’m going to do it Smart Classroom style”.  Easy enough, I thought. 

Wrong!  I had forgotten that I am a Digital Immigrant.

I quickly came to appreciate how daunting it can be for a Digital Immigrant Educator to step out of the old school and into a 21st Century Classroom.  

Teaching in a Smart Classroom requires all of the usual preparatory effort – what content to be delivered, how to engage and motivate students, etc.  It also introduces a very time-consuming stressor:  how to put a bunch of new technology to productive use without losing the lesson in the process, or worse yet looking just plain foolish? 

After all, one of my daughters reminded me a couple of days ago how wide the tech-divide is between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives (Marc Prensky offers up more insight on this divide at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp).

I had just sent her a text message containing “u” for you and “fb” for Facebook.  I thought I was both digitally cool and efficient.  Wrong again!  She said, “Only parents shorten words like that.”  I guess kids don’t need to, given their native ability to rifle off one-handed text messages on a cell phone keypad while playing a video game with their free hand.

So back to my “class.” The 90-minute agenda included a PowerPoint-supported training presentation, a small group breakout segment to discuss homework enabled by Google documents, some Excel spreadsheet data review, a guest lecture by one of my colleagues on education technology, an awards session facilitated by a document camera (to display the various awards to the whole class), and some mp3 audio content thrown in for spice. 

This was all delivered 21st Century Classroom style to about 60 “students” using a convertible tablet pc and the document camera mounted on a powered mobile teaching platform, with wireless KVM technology to throw keyboard, video and mouse action to a projector and screen at the front of the room.  Content was also thrown to two large-format LCD displays on mobile carts at mid- and back-room to ensure view-ability and facilitate collaboration during the breakout segment.

Needless to say, I spent a great deal of time preparing for this session, as did an especially tech-savvy colleague who helped make all the technology components talk to each other.  This led me to think of the significant time and energy that teachers must invest in education technology training as they move into a Smart Classroom setting. 

In the end, our smart classroom efforts paid off.  Everything worked properly and the session was productive.  This brings me back to the qualifier I made at the top of this post.  I was “teaching” a group of sales professionals – a tough audience in its own right – but undoubtedly not as challenging as connecting with a room full of Digital Natives!

As I travel the US this year meeting with K-12 and Higher Education professionals, and our technology integration partners who serve them, you can bet that I will be drawing upon insights gained from this walk in a teacher’s world to help them navigate the technology jungle. 

If I don’t find you first, look me up!