Learning Management Systems
Things are moving so fast in education technology right now that it is almost impossible to stay on top of everything. Here at ABCTE we just put out an RFP for an LMS - learning management system. We had a demo from one company and the low cost surprised us. So we decided to take a look as it would increase our ability to track our teachers and help us improve customer service to our school districts and our teachers. We were pretty stunned to get 10 proposals. There are that many companies doing this now. One person told me that LMS is now a commodity and the only way to differentiate is to load it up with add-ons. With this much competition, I am looking forward to seein

Charter Schools Rule
Again with the good press on charter school results. I was recntly at a conference with some of the top researchers in education and they keep pushing to figure out what the next question will be. In the case of teacher certification, for them it is a known that where you comes from doesn't matter - it is more about where you go. From a research perspective the biggest difference is the building and not the person.The same will soon be said for charter schools. We need to stop studying if they are better t

Joomla vs Drupal cage match
One of the toughest things to stay on top of right now is our web strategy because everything changes so fast. What worked a year ago no longer works now. Creating websites in-house made sense but now it is so cheap that doing it with contractors seems to make more sense. Right now you can have a group design and launch a new website cheaper and faster than you coudl do it on your own and you can then maintain it in-house with the great tools that exist today.Right now we have a mini-test going on to see two things; Is Joomla or Drupal better for us as an organizationDoes having a micro-site with a real purpose help traffic to our original site

School budgets cutting to the bone
Budget cuts are threatening innovation and 47% of ARRA funds are not innovating – just filling holes as reported by eSchool News. I don’t think this is surprising as budget cuts hit everyone. But when you cut charter school per pupil funding and they are already funded at a lower rate than other public schools, it really hurts. They are also going after the virtual schools. The next two years are going to be painful for innovation budgets. All the billions of dollars the feds are pouring into states and districts are just going to be used to try to stem the hemorrhaging.

$40M Reasons to Digitize Texts
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt just signed a $40 million multi year deal to sell a computer based teaching system it developed with Microsoft to connect teachers, students and administrators. It is a shift away from textbooks!There are some texts but it mostly involves a customized interactive classroom. So in order to survive in the new world of textbook publishing, they are bringing together the best of learning management systems and content to schools.Over at ABCTE we have an