I spent my own money on this...

Business of Learning Letter reader and all-around smart individual Colin Megee of Product Vectors writes:

Thanks for the details, Gerard. In addition to this, many edtech companies are trying to map how schools and districts spend money on supplemental programs.

Which programs are provided by the district? which programs are purchased by your school or department? which programs are free? which you drum up money for? (grants, personal $$, etc).

If you had to give advice to an up and coming Newsela, for example, about getting your school to pay for a supplemental English / language arts program that costs a few hundred dollars per year, what would that be?

I'm going to answer this like so:

There's one time I sat at my teacher's desk, pulled out my credit card, and spent my own money on the yearly fee for an EdTech product. It was for these reasons:

• The solution was a huge time saver
• It was a passion project for me
• It was going to make class a lot better on a daily basis for me and the kids

I was deep into exploring different approaches for assessing and cultivating independent reading with my students. This eventually led me to publish my book Hacking Literacy.

At this moment, I knew that I had to still meet all of the writing and reading standards required, but I was integrating far more choice reading into the curriculum. So, the way I was going to make all this happen was by having students launch blogs about their independent reading.

As a writer, I knew the difference between having a real, public blog (or at least one with a real audience) vs. just writing for a teacher. It was a world of difference.

However, I also knew the dangers in just having kids chose any 'ol tool and launch their personal website. I needed a certain level of control.

There's one more factor to throw into all this.

If you haven't realized by now, I'm someone who gets ideas and acts on them fast. In the long run, I can plan in very vague ways, "I'm going to write an email every day this year...I'm going to read two books to my son each night...I'm going to stop working and relax with my wife by this time every day..."

However, making detailed plans in advance does not compute for my brain.

So, I decided to "do blogs" with the students and knew immediately I had to act on that inspiration if it was going to happen. After doing a little Googling, it was clear that one option (I think it was KidBlog) would be better than the rest. It would let me manage all of the students sites, it uses real WordPress blogs, and it was an affordable price.

So, that doesn't perfectly answer Colin's question. But it's a real example of how one teacher was motivated to pull out his credit card and make a purchase.

Funny enough, it didn't involve any efforts on the part of the company whatsoever, except for showing up well through SEO.

Is that story worth anything to you? I'm not sure. Happy to answer more questions on this topic. Thanks again to Colin and Alicia for making comments on yesterday's letter.

Thanks for reading,

Gerard Dawson