Hello everyone,
It’s great to have come on board here in Athens. I am excited to join the GIT blogging community as well. Just a heads up: I come to you with a background in International Relations and Education; so, I tend to look at the social impacts of technology on societies. Nonetheless, that is quite appropriate here in Athens as technology and computer usage in schools is about ten years behind the US. Additionally, I have an interesting spin on improving the learning process in education. Ultimately, I believe that learning could be advanced through the incorporation of advertising and marketing techniques as pointed out in my first blog entry below.
Balancing Social Marketing Techniques and Education
School leaders often espouse their desires to become 21st Century learning centers; however, given the rigid infrastructures that have existed in education for more than a century, overcoming the past is often more difficult to achieve than they imagined. One way to circumvent this engrained tradition is to use the rapidly morphing avenues of social networking that are at hand—primarily meeting places like Facebook, MySpace and Hi5. However, the key to successfully marketing education in those forums is balance, balance, balance—particularly of content.
Unfortunately, the field of education is chock-full of content, content, content. Therein lies much of the problem with creating “educational” scaffolding tools that are designed for modernity and not tradition. In developing learning content, educators often maintain the same sterile “keep-safe” mindset, resulting in traditional education simply being repackaged instead of redesigned.
As a middle and high school educator, I decided to use some of the same techniques for teaching that are employed when designing an effective social marketing initiative. I have shared them below.
21st Century Teaching Initiative:
1. Meet your clients (students) where they socialize—here in Greece, it’s Facebook. Facebook allows for postings to be presented in a laid-back setting. It is a place where the clients are comfortable and connected.
2. Be interpersonal, humorous, entertaining and fun—relate to your clients, but avoid judging their posts too harshly. Let them know that you have a life too. Students can learn from normal and positive adult interaction, show them that you have friends too. The goal is to build a learning community without them having to trade their lifestyles to learn.
3. That said, combine business and classroom ethics. In essence, be professional and use common sense etiquette. You would not invite your students or business clients to your most personal aspects of life…so keep your profile just above the line and clean, but not so prudish that you fail to achieve your goal of successfully marketing educational content.
4. Provide quality content. There are very good content-driven videos from sites like TED, BNET, Howstuffworks, and of course YouTube. But, Balance, balance, balance! After almost 20 years in education, I can truly say that part of the problem with many of our schools’ teaching practices is that we educators are in content-overdrive!
5. And finally, take from the marketing principles of the recent past. Remember that marketing is often about the experience. So make sure your students can have a great and memorable experience around the content that you provide…it will make the technological shift in branding education much easier.
Thus, in moving towards the creation of 21st Century classrooms and schools, think of social marketing, balancing content, the experience and learning; because, to effectively move the next generation forward in education, our focus as women, mothers, and educators should be on the end receiver—the student—not the institutions.
