Thanks for your comments You wrote:
> If BetterLesson has made a point, internally, of saying, “There are some teachers who make junk and our DNA will not let us ship it,” I’d be surprised.

I agree.

I’m fascinated by the question we seem to be talking about, “Can we prevent junk?” Whether one looks at stackoverflow, message boards, or even dribble, there’s always junk. Dribble, a site to share screen shots of designs, perhaps does the best job of any site out there. They prevent junk by making it referral only, thus preventing the masses from signing up. However, making a site exclusive and referral only isn’t a technical decision–it’s a business one. So, could BetterLesson design a system which used technology or UI to prevent junk? I’m not sure.

To truly prevent junk, I think you’d have to have an approval process, which is a business decision, not a technical one. Naturally, there are implications of an approval process. An approval process presents a barrier which could limit uploading and creates possibly contentious situations where one users materials were not approved and one was.

I bring this all up because I think asking, “Can we prevent junk”, while fascinating, isn’t a helpful question to ask. I think it’s a more profitable discussion to figure out how to bring the brillance to the surface and hide the chaff.

Scott: Structurally, I don’t see much difference between a betterlesson lesson and your own curriculum. They call them “lessons,” you call them “weeks.” They have a place for documents. You have a place for documents.

I don’t want to quibble too much here but there’s some kind of world of difference between my two lesson depots and a platform that seeks to facilitate teacher lesson sharing on a broader scale. I can’t really describe the haste with which I tossed those materials online or my surprise that anyone finds them useful at all.

Scott: Take Keynote. Did he really prevent people from making bad presentations or did he simply guide people to making decent presentations?

Clarifying my reference somewhat, my point wasn’t that Steve Jobs has made it impossible to create junk on his machines. It has more to do with Apple’s approach to the market, which is represented by this Jobs quote on an Apple netbook:

There are some customers which we chose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve. And there’s a lot of them.

If BetterLesson has made a point, internally, of saying, “There are some teachers who make junk and our DNA will not let us ship it,” I’d be surprised.

Scott: In my mind, it’s critical to address creating before sharing. A product must satisfy a teachers own self-interest by being super easy, FAST, and providing an easy way to organize activities/lessons. If a teacher uses a product to create, its trivial to invite them to click the ‘make public’ button and share. IMO, BetterLesson doesn’t add value to the creation process and this is the reason we don’t see large usage numbers from them.

This fascinates me. I figured the value transaction was one-sided on these lesson sharing platforms. I’d be curious to see how you’ve made it more symmetrical.

Second, I’m not sure I agree with your statement about Steve Jobs:
“we’re going to grab the high end of the market and make something that will be actively hostile to lousy pedagogy.”
Take Keynote. Did he really prevent people from making bad presentations or did he simply guide people to making decent presentations? I’d argue you can still make bad presentations on keynote just as you can make bad pedagogy on betterlesson. In fact, in any of Apple’s products, have they succeeded in preventing people from making bad design choices? Take the iPhone. They have a review process to weed out bad apps. Their tools don’t prevent the inevitable garbage from being created.

Third, on the idea of creating and sharing lessons…. in my mind, it’s critical to address creating before sharing. A product must satisfy a teachers own self-interest by being super easy, FAST, and providing an easy way to organize activities/lessons. If a teacher uses a product to create, its trivial to invite them to click the ‘make public’ button and share.

IMO, BetterLesson doesn’t add value to the creation process and this is the reason we don’t see large usage numbers from them (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/betterlesson.org/ Even if compete is off by a factor of 10, its still drawing < 2% of the national teaching corp). If a product does add value to the creation process, it forces the sharing process to be non-value added. Uploading lessons to BetterLesson isn't a value added activity. Sharing lessons with colleagues isn't very value added either, as it's easier to use dropbox.

Any system that isn't a natural, value added part of the teaching planning process will see relatively little use and traction. Ideas like stackoverflow, edufy, teachers posting lessons to blogs, etc are great but they limit their audience to teachers who have the time and desire to do the non-value added activity of uploading content.

So, starting from the premise that we must solve the creation problem before we can address the sharing one, what is the creation process and how can technology help make it better? Specifically, how do teachers record "engagement thinking?" and how could a product make that recording better?

I like the work that asana.com is doing with task management. They're focusing on making individual user task management better. Check out their video demo–it's excellent. They point out the tension between simplicity and structure. Post it notes are simple. Project management software is complex and structured. They note that people never give up the simple (post it notes, notepad.exe, strings on fingers, wikis, etc) and thus duplicate what's on the structured system. A great deal of time is spent updating the simple systems to align with the structured. Asana has reject the dichotomy between simple and structured and created a rather impressive product that is both simple and structured.

I think a similar product needs to happen in lesson planning. Most lesson planning web apps are on the structured side. Teachers seem to prefer simple and use Microsoft Word to do most of their planning. A web app has to reject the false dichotomy and create a simple tool that also created structured data.

Finally, in full disclosure, I'm also working to "make something agnostic enough to sell to every charter network in the US." I'm curious what you think of it. We built our product around a menu based approach to curriculum design. For every concept, we've believe there's an array of activities that can be used to teach it. Sadly, this approach doesn't prevent lousy pedagogy, but we think it makes it possible for excellent pedagogy to flourish. Also, we're different from BetterLesson in that we're not focused on teachers; we're focused on helping the curriculum writers (either full time central office staff or teachers doing it after hours) distribute their curriculum to teachers. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts, especially because I think you'd be remarkably critical. Let me know if you'd like to see a demo.

– A “maker” platform supporting something students will be making; play-dough or paper are good platforms
– A “sharing” platform, turning made objects into social objects
– A “discussion” platform for reflection
– Invitation to go back to making/remixing after reflection

Well yeah, some of the social objects can be documents. At the last math club, I invited kids to draw infinity, and their drawings can be thought of as documents. The format is beside the point, though.

I think websites are often useful for providing teachers with time-savers. How many times have I created a worksheet on some topic that thousands of others have already written (be it in textbooks or not)?

My guess is that the BL noticed that users were focused on finding documents, and that’s why they foregrounded them.

I would also point out that your blog does very much the same thing — foregrounding a piece of material (video/photo) and then providing some questions. And the thing is that’s the one thing in a lesson that is transferable between environments (doesn’t depend on class-time or other school-dependent factors) and where the improvements by using someone else’s materials might be the biggest (if you’ve taken the time to meticulously edit something, it’s probably better than what I’m going to do the night before I’m teaching something when I try to google around for some helpful materials, which is what I’m guessing most lesson sites, even ones with a more grandiose vision, are really for).

Indeed. No one–except for Dan, at first–said “worksheet.”

Be honest. Please.

Edmodo seems to avoid the two errors mentioned in Dan’s BetterLesson review:

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1) Edmodo is fun, BetterLesson is not.
2) BetterLesson ties form tightly to content, Edmodo does not.

Not to sound like a shill for Edmodo, but I like what they’re doing. It could become a Delicious for educators…and it would be greatly welcomed!