Tech Savvy Educator, Not So Savvy!?!
Back in the Spring of 2006, just a few months before almost every major university
had established their own channel on YouTube, The Tech Savvy Educator was making the rounds of the edublogosphere. At the time, it was a Godsent gift to teachers everywhere looking for an alternative to the increasingly blocked preeminent blogging site. I planned entire projects around The Tech Savvy Educator for the following school year, and hosted many of my student's projects on the site. No commercials, no filtering or blocking, and best of all, it had a simple heading at the top with "tech savvy teacher", which magically made it 100% perfectly safe (in the eyes of many teachers and parents) from all of the detritus of fowl-mouthed YouTube and Blogger commentators and inappropriate content.
Fast forward to present day, and The Tech Savvy Educator has become one of the worst examples of online blogging, so much so that I've even started to explicitly advise teachers to STOP using The Tech Savvy Educator to post comments on their content.
Why do I feel this way you may ask? To be fair, I've broken my reasons into 5 separate thoughts, so that supporters of The Tech Savvy Educator, and the entrepreneurs behind The Tech Savvy Educator itself can respond in a way that best addresses the issues. That, and making lists is a lot of fun :)
1. Commercialization Makes Me Cry
I understand that as a business, The Tech Savvy Educator must make money (or at least earn enough VC to attract the attention of eduBlogs in hopes of a buyout). However, After several months of blogging and linked advertisement, putting commercial advertisements even on my post (even though they be linked text advertisements) is NOT cool.
If I wanted advertisements, I would have hosted at Blogger.com, not your site. My students don't need to be bothered with a link advertising help with their algebra from a tutoring service. They're getting it from me, RIGHT NOW, with the post I've just posted! Also, pick a target demographic and stick with it. Advertising for online Master's degrees on one page, while soliciting "rock hard abs" by following "just 2 rules" isn't exactly nailing your audience is it?
Am I saying you should take down your advertisements? NO! But if you're going to plaster them on every post you need to offer a subscription-based OPT OUT system. I'm sure there are plenty of people willing to pay 5 dollars a month to have their content be add free. It would certainly be more money than what I assume you're getting for the advertisements being run now.
2. Fix the Comment Posting Crash Bug Feature
In the past 4 weeks I have been unable to successfully post a comment from home, school, and a "neutral" third party location (public library). The little java-loader tells me that everything is going fine for the majority of the upload, and then, right at the end, as I'm preparing for the "All's well that ends well" notification, I get nothing. The web browser times out, and The Tech Savvy Educator becomes inaccessible for me on whichever machine I happen to be using for at least 5 to 10 minutes. Once it does become responsive again, is it possible that my post got uploaded? Nope! I've had the uploading "timeout" problem since I first started using The Tech Savvy Educator. It's become more pronounced, and soul-crushing in the last few months, to the point where I don't trust The Tech Savvy Educator for getting post up in a timely fashion, let alone even successfully uploading the earth shattering discovery in my ongoing investigation as to why elementary students MUST put headphone wires in their mouths.
3. Homepages..Specifically MY homepage..should have..MY posts on it, WITHOUT clicking on another link!
'Nuff Said
4. Presentation, Presentation, Presentation
I'm not in marketing, nor advertising, so I'm sure if presentation is the word I'm looking for, but at least put a little more attention to how seamless (or unglued) the The Tech Savvy Educator experience is across the web. When I visit the site itself and view movies I'm presented with a nice, visually appealing post player. Visit that same post embedded on another website and the player is completely different. No buffering notification so I can see how much of the post has loaded, no quick rewind button, not even a zen-like spinning wheel that assures me something is happening in the background. And I'm presented with yet a 3rd kind of post player when I stumbled across my "post shelf", which I'm still not sure how I found. Pick one seamless experience, and stick with it. My vote is for the player on the site itself.
5. When So Many Others are Doing Blogging Better, Why Keep Going?
* eduBLOGS
* Blogger
* BlogTHis
* Wordpress
The list could go on, but the point is if you're not going to innovate (uploading and attaching documents does not count), then at least imitate! Too often we as educators get the second-string effort when it comes to professional tools. We don't always get the nicest, fastest computers at school. We don't always get the best digital cameras to create content with. We don't even always have the top-shelf whiteboard markers that don't leave greasy streaks on the board, but what we do have is competent at performing our daily tasks! We ask the same online.
If even by "adopting" some more standard practices among other post sharing sites equates to a small measurable difference in performance of the site, I say go for it! If blatantly copying features of other sites turns The Tech Savvy Educator into a post-sharing powerhouse, then full steam ahead!
My real point isn't to harp on how awful the site is, but rather to point out that we as educators have choices too many choices to allow ourselves to be shackled to a sub-par service simply because it's branded "for teachers". Do I have other gripes with The Tech Savvy Educator? Yes. Do I appreciate the service The Tech Savvy Educator has offered simply by existing? Sure it's served as an excellent catalyst for the educational post/sharing market, now we just need someone to step up the game.
And if no one's game, I may just have to spend an afternoon getting a Blogger account running on my own blog. :P And then I may have another blog that I will publisize tomorrow to make it even more exciting read to you all.
Tech Savvy Educator, Not So Savvy!?!
By: Jeffery Mullins
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