Is it just me or is anyone else bewildered by the plethora of services and software available to schools via subscription? It’s not that I’m against the services on offer, most seem valuable, it’s the business model that I question. Most of the subscription services just seem so expensive! Why is this? Not only do they seem expensive but they also seem to lack flexibility.
I do question, and I’m sure most schools do also, why they are being asked to pay £2500 per year for a service. Does that service offer £2500 worth of NEW and relevant content each year? That really is the fundamental question and I feel sure many subscription based services would fail on that question.
Many subscription services seem to offer little more than storage and delivery of content. How much does that really cost the company providing the service? I may be cynical but it would seem that some companies are charging schools far more than would be justified by their costs. Do companies not feel that schools will see through this?
Why I say that subscription services seem to lack flexibility is that they often seem to be based upon a whole school subscribing. What, though, if the product or service is only really needed in one class, one year group, one keystage, or by a few special pupils? in such cases, the cost of a whole school subscription could be prohibitive and unjustifiable: consequently pupils may miss out. Can companies providing services via subscription not be more flexible in what they offer schools?
What happens when you cancel a subscription? Generally, it seems, you no longer have access to the services offered. Okay, that seems only fair but what sometimes also happens is that you no longer have access to old content or to material you may have made yourself by using the service. Now, is that fair and justified?
Lets compare this to the old days, you know, the good ol’ days! In the past I could purchase software and I could purchase as many copies as I needed or the budget would allow. That way I could try to meet as much need as possible. Alternatively, I could buy a licence for the software and that licence could cover as many users as I needed. Moreover, once purchased, the software could be used for ever more. Sure I might want to buy updates or addons but I didn’t have to. It would certainly have been very rare for a company to ask me to pay again each year for a product I had already purchased!
So what outcomes can be drawn from this ranting? Well, I would urge subscription services to review their business model. We are not against companies making a profit but we don’t like to feel we’re being ripped off by high subscription costs. We’re not against subscription services per se but the subscriptions need to be sustainable for schools. By asking high subscription costs, companies do risk being perceived, wrongly perhaps, as being of the ‘take the money and run’ variety. Above all, I think subscription companies need to be flexible in their offering and make sure they focus on the education benefits of their offering.
As for schools, it is understandable if they think twice about subscribing to a service. After all, they could be embarking on a path that commits them to an annual expenditure of funds. On the positive side, I feel schools should be much more prepared to negotiate with companies, I know individual teachers may not like doing this or, indeed, have the time to do it but negotiating can be important. If a company wants to do business with you, them they’ll be prepared to discuss and negotiate. If you do find a company that won’t negotiate, walk away!

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Apple, Sony and RM, are all brand names that we have probably all heard of. It is likely that when you read each name, that you have some impression of their brand or products or reputation. It’s quite understandable that if you have a good experience with a manufacturer’s product that you would consider buying more product from that manufacturer and, vice versa, if you have a poor experience of a brand then you are probably less likely to buy further products.

I have not always had products from Apple and, as an outsider I have been surprised by the apparent loyalty (some might say, addiction) of fanboys to their products. I no do have a couple of Apple products and, I shall be honest, I have been pleased with them and would consider buying further products from them.

Similarly, I had always thought that Sony were a reputable brand and bought a Sony camcorder based upon that impression. I was not happy with it. Okay, it took good video and had a good selection of features but the camcorder proved to be incompatible with just about every piece of computer software apart from the ones made by Sony. Recently, I bought a laptop by Sony and I really wish I hadn’t. All the extra junk, Sony have put on it have made it a difficult computer to use, many items of software I want to install just do not install properly (if at all) and the keyboard layout just really isn’t to my liking.

RM, as many of you will now, are a major player in the ICT in education arena. I recall some of the early RM products and especially recall the pain of the MCA computers and, later, Window Box. Yet, RM, remain a dominant player in the educational technology arena, which again indicates the power of a brand name booth for good and for bad.

So what can we learn from this? Well, I guess the first thing is never trust a name, no matter how good it may have been in the past and no matter how much other people praise it. The second thing to learn would be to always trial a product before purchase. Just because something the company has made in the past has been good or bad, does not mean that the same will be true of subsequent products. The third thing to learn is that when buying any product, make sure it will work with what you already use !

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We all know that spam is bad and nobody wants it but what might just be possibly worse than spam in your twitter stream are twitterers using certain tools that are bound to annoy their followers. I’ve used some of these myself, for which I apologise. You see, few people actually set out to annoy their followers, what usually happens is that they come across a new tool and think, ‘that looks good, let’s try it out’. In some cases the tool is good, for the user, in some cases it’s not. If it’s not good for the user, it’s not surprising that they stop using it. It’s those tools that look good for the user but are not good for their followers, those are the awkward ones – the annoying ones. So here I give you a list of the top five annoying twitter tools …

1. Scoop.it I put this at the top as it’s probably the newest of all the tools in the list. Like some of the others, it’s an aggregating tool that collects items on a common theme and presents them fancifully for the user. The problem comes when one of the articles is tweeted, the followers see a tweet with a link, supposedly to the article but it turns out to be a pop out window of just the title and pic of the article; it is this that annoys the followers. Why not just give your followers a link to the article?

2. Deck.ly This one is reallllly annoying! Tweets are limited to 140characters and that seems to work well. What Deck.ly does is to extend the tweet, so if you are too lazy to rephrase your tweetif it’s too long, don’t worry, Deck.ly will come to your rescue. It will tweet the first 140 characters of your tweet including a link. Your followers can click on the link and be taken to your long tweet. The trouble is, the link takes you out of twitter and the twitter stream; that annoys your followers.

3. Paper.li This is another aggregator tool and, in my opinion, one of the best. It simply presents interesting items in your twitter stream as if they were articles in a newspaper. You can then catch up by reading them later, rather than missing them. Nice. The problem comes when a user switches on the tools auto tweet function. This then announces to all followers when paper.li publishes a newspaper. Sometimes this can be interesting for some followers but often it is only of interest to the user, so why use auto tweet? Turn it off!

4. 4sq and other check in services. Okay, 4sq can be fun and sometimes it can be useful to tweet where you are, particularly if your friends are looking to meet with you. Most the time though, there is no need to tweet your checkins, they are rarely of interest to your followers; so turn off auto tweet and only tweet checkins when useful or if your add a tip to your checkin.

5. Almost anything that auto tweets. In my case the local paper does this an awful lot so does edugeek and it does get annoying. Very often, auto tweeters will tweet up to a dozen tweets all in one go and they’re hardly likely to respond if you reply to any of them. Be warned, some auto tweeters pose as people, making you believe the tweet has come from an actual person. I don’t know why they do it or what they get out of it but I do wish they’d stop. Of course, I hear you say, one can always stop following, and that is good advice but sometimes, just sometimes the auto tweeters have good content, you just wish they’d tweet it properly!

So there you are, 5 twitter tools that annoy your followers, well they annoy me anyway and I dare say you can think of other tools that annoy you.

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Here in the UK it’s summer holiday time and most children and their teachers are on a break from school. I call it a break but I know that many teachers still do work and preparation during this time, both in and away from their school buildings.

At this time it is no surprise to see a dip in teacher activity on Twitter as the teachers take some time for themselves and their families, hopefully by enjoying a relaxing and well deserved holiday. What also happens though, and I have seen this in previous years, is that the drop in activity from individual teachers doesn’t just last through August but also into September. It seems that many teachers simply do not return to Twitter after the summer break.

Why might this be? Well, of course, some of them may have moved on to new pastures and no longer feel a need for Twitter but I’m also sure that many just don’t feel a need or inclination to be quite so active as they used to be.

For sure, there will also be other teachers coming on to Twitter and exploring it’s potential. So overall teacher activity is quite likely to increase over time and there’s little fear of the individual teacher feeling lonely or isolated on Twitter.

What puzzles me though, is that we often hear time and again how good Twitter is for professional development. If that really is the case, why do so many teachers leave Twitter?

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