Five education practices that should be replicated nationally

An extra day for teachers to plan and collaborate each week, and requiring classes in advanced reading strategies in high school, were among readers’ top ideas

By Meris Stansbury, Online Editor
Read more by Meris Stansbury

An Illinois district has boosted the percentage of its students meeting state standards by requiring reading classes throughout high school.

Education leaders are always looking for examples of successful programs they might be able to replicate within their own districts. But it can be challenging to find a program or policy that could work for hundreds, or even thousands, of diverse schools, districts, and states.

That’s why, in a follow-up question to our story, “Readers: These 10 education policies need to go,” we recently asked readers: “If you could name only one, what school or district practice would you like to see replicated or implemented nationally, and why?” Here are our readers’ best responses.

What do you think of these policies and practices? Could they be implemented on a national scale? And, do you have any ideas of your own for policies or practices that should be spread more widely? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

5. Monitoring networks to gauge application usage

“We developed a system called VIC (Virtual Information Center) that monitors all computers in the district to determine which applications are being used. This is not used in a punitive fashion, rather it is used to monitor if software or hardware is being used and when. We have learned a lot about what [software] teachers will and will not use. It’s all about accountability. We measure what we treasure—technology.” —Andrew Berning Ph.D., chief information and technology officer, Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD, Carrollton, Texas

Image via CrunchBase

I came across a great post today on the TL Advisor Blog.  The information presented is very helpful for educators who are interested in using the Facebook social network for professional use, but may be uncertain about how to do so safely and securely.

As the Director of Technology for a K-12 school district, I do not block many of the sites that my colleagues in other districts do.  It has been my experience that the more barriers and limitations that educators encounter in their quest to utilize the latest technology, the more it will result in the educators becoming frustrated and giving up quickly on the use of technology in general.

I also recognize that the educators in my district are professionals and should be treated as such.  Each day these educators present materials to our students in many different formats.  Being professionals implies that they will use their best judgement and carefully monitor the information they are presenting or is being accessed by their students.  

Yes, there are those that may not behave as professionals, but my experience has been that this is the rare exception and far from the norm.  I will not burden the vast majority of the educators, who are working hard each day to provide  the best learning environment for their students, with road blocks put up to prevent a limited few from behaving inappropriately.

There are tools for me to review online activities, when warranted, after a problem is brought to my attention.  I have no desire or need to be monitoring the activities of the educators in my district in real-time.  

Instead, I prefer to spend my time working to assist my colleagues in their efforts to find the and utilize the best technology resources for and with our students.

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“Advice for Choosing Pages, Groups or Profiles When Using Facebook for Education by Lisa Nielsen

I’m an advocate of using real world tools in school.  After all, if we’re not using tools of the world in our classrooms, then what world are we really preparing students for?  The one that is most convenient… or the one that is right for kids?  If you want to do what is most convenient, then you can work at a school where they ban, block, filter and restrict.  You know those schools.  Some kids’ heads are on their desks, others are facing forward listening (but are they really?), and others are engaged in the outdated skill of taking down the words their almighty teacher says or writes on the board. Paper, pencils, pens, outdated textbooks are plentiful.  In schools where we’re doing what is right for kids, you see engaged youth who use the filter between their ears to determine how to best access information. Students are empowered rather than restricted from using personally owned digital devices in school.  At these schools they understand that people, not tools, have behavior.  Fortunately, more and more often these schools that mirror the real world are starting to crop up in places like New Canaan High School in Connecticut and The School in Harlem, New York.

When I speak about schools such as these, I often get a lot of questions like this one I received recently from a Twitter follower. 

“Great ideas for Facebook, but would we be taking a social risk? Facebook is taboo for many admins and districts are frowning on FB because of the potential risk for unprofessional behavior bit.ly/gCEp2n .”

My reply to such inquiries is always the same.  Tools have no intent.  Facebook doesn’t cause a risk for unprofessional behavior, but it catches those who engage in such behaviors.  What we’re really saying when we block and ban is that we don’t want to bother dealing with issues such as those who have chosen to publicly engaged in unprofessional behavior.  It is much more convenient to turn heads the other way.

After I’ve convinced educators that Facebook is a powerful tool in education because it’s one that our kids are already using and it is our professional duty to use and help keep kids safe in the environments of their worlds, I’m often asked this question: 

“Would you encourage using a Facebook page or profile to connect with students? Is there a difference?”

Students bring their own devices to New Caanan High School and use an unfiltered internet

There is not a one-size-fits all answer.  It depends on your intent.  If you are like me or Principal Chris Lehmann you have one profile because it’s just another way to communicate and you’ll communicate with your students in any way they wish.  The idea of being two separate people may just be too hard to keep track of and you enjoy being a professional and social role model for students.  If you are like librarian Michelle Loots (Luhtala) you use a personal page to connect with friends and family, a professional profile for students and apage to keep students in the know about library activities.. If you are like first grade teacherErin Schoening you create a page as a window into your classroom to connect students with parents.  If you are like Brooklyn Tech High School you use a page as a place to connect with present and past students and teachers.  You might be like Education Land, a group created to connect those who are interested in education.

If you want to understand how you can maintain a professional presence on the site separate from your personal profile, here are some tips, directly from Facebook’s Safety for Educators page (note: You may also want to visit the “Teachers” page in the Facebook Safety Center.)  First they suggest that if you are a teacher and have a personal profile, you can consider creating a group or a Page specifically for interacting with students, parents, or colleagues. Create Friend Lists to control what parts of your profile students are able to access.  If you don’t get the difference between pages, and groups, and friend’s lists here is how it’s explained on Facebook’s Safety for Educators page.

Pages, Groups, and Friends Lists Overview 

Pages 
Pages are for broadcasting great information to people on Facebook. For example, you could create a Page called “Ms. Smith’s 9th Grade Science Class” where you post daily homework assignments. Anyone can become a fan of a Page on Facebook. People who choose to become a fan of a Page will see updates on their profile. To create a Page, click here. Pages are free, you can control them with your personal profile, and they keep your profile separate from your students.

Groups 
Groups make it easy for members of a community to connect, share and even collaborate on a given topic or idea. For example, you could create a group called “American Literature 101 Discussions” where you and your students can contribute to group discussions. Or you could create a group for all of the educators in your your department to collaborate on lesson plans and share ideas. To create a group, click here.

Friend Lists 
Friend Lists provide organized groupings of your friends on Facebook. For example, you can create a Friend List specifically for your students. Then you can control which parts of your profile are visible to this entire list. You can also filter your view of each list’s stream of activity separately on the home page, or send messages and invites to this group of people all at once. To learn more about creating and managing Friend Lists, click here.

Connecting with Other Facebook Using Educators 
If you want to connect with other educators who are using Facebook for Learning, join the Facebook in Education page.  This page is a resource for teachers, professors, administrators, counselors and others who work in education. You can refer to this page for privacy tips to help you maintain both a personal and a professional presence on Facebook. You’ll also find answers to common questions including how to report abuse to Facebook and the best way to use Facebook as a communication tool in your school. To become a fan of this page, click here and choose the “Become a Fan” option at the top of the page.

Read Librarian Michelle Luhtala’s response to this blog post at Y U Need 2 “Friend” ur Students!

Lisa Nielsen is best known as creator of The Innovative Educator bloghttp://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com and Transforming Education for the 21st Centuryhttp://ted21c.ning.com learning network. Lisa is an outspoken and passionate advocate of innovative education. She is frequently covered by local and national media for her views on “Thinking Outside the Ban” and determining ways to harness the power of technology for instruction and providing a voice to educators and students. Based in New York City, Ms. Nielsen has worked for more than a decade in various capacities helping schools and districts to educate in innovative ways that will prepare students for 21st century success. Her first book “Teaching Generation Text” is set for a fall 2011 release. You can follow her on Twitter @InnovativeEdu.”

Related articles

• The Why and How of Using Facebook For Educators – No Need to be Friends At All! (theedublogger.com)

Through their collaboration, the Peapod Foundation and Adobe Foundation have launched two Peapod Adobe Youth Voices Academies that will give kids access to use video, dance, music, and art to spark social change in their communities.

Learn more and view the PSA here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efSYEZZNrEQ

Crystal (Adobe Youth Voices)”

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Education Technology PSA | Edutopia Group Discussions by and for Educators.

Image by Ewan McIntosh via Flickr

I just made,excellent use of the last 14 minutes or so of my time ,by watching TEDxNYED – Will Richardson.

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Will as a keynote speaker at a local technology conference I attended.  I had heard and read a great deal about him.  It was all true.  His style made the audience feel very comfortable, very quickly.  It was his content however, that was most impressive.  Will Richardson presented very thought provoking ideas and observations, in a very straightforward manner.

I was unable to attend the TedxNYED on March 5th, in New york City.  From the videos I have reviewed, it appears I missed out on some spectacular speakers and talks.  Aside from Will, well known speakers such as Alan November and Gary S. Stager also provided unique insights during their presentations.

Will’s points were particularly poignant.  As school’s around the country face financial obstacles and are forced to reduce the number of teachers, they are also being pressed to improve test scores.  Schools are in fact becoming (or already have become) primarily focused on test prep and test scores.  During his talk, he points out that “test prep and learning are two different things.”

We have become so driven to produce high scoring test takers, that we are not allowing our children to be creative or to learn in the manner that is best suited for them.

We need to stop the assault on teachers and focus on the needs of children.  Children can do amazing things, if we encourage them and allow them to do so.

Related Articles

• TEDxNYEd Talk (weblogg-ed.com)
• My TEDxNYED Revelation, Takeaways and a Suggestion (edtechpower.blogspot.com)

Yes, legal concerns can be overcome through proper modeling.  Yes, teacher training is possible and who better to teach teachers than other teachers?  Freeing up teachers from mundane an outdated tasks to allow them the time to impart 21st century skills on today’s students makes perfect sense.

I may be wrong about this, but whenever I poll teachers and students about technology available at home, the response is that nearly all (if not all) students have computers and broadband access to the Internet.  Those that do not are directed to the local public library.

Of course implementing technology can be expensive, but as stated, “”we cannot afford to fall any more behind in our comfort and use of technology.”

It is time for parents, community members, teachers and administrators to ban together in recognizing the importance of effective use of technology to the future of our students.

We speak about the achievement gap between the different cultures in our schools. Meanwhile, however, many of the stakeholders in education have created a vast trench that lies between those who accept the inevitability of technology and those who still refute its place in our classrooms.

Policymakers demand our schools must reflect the 21st century, yet continue to deny schools the funding to do just that. Additionally, our districts block many of the online sites for collaboration from our schools.

It is fear that guides many of the decisions about educational technology: fear that we will be left globally behind by countries more committed to technology integration and also fear that our students will somehow be scarred its use.

Frankly, there are many reasons to avoid providing technology as a more common and frequent tool in education. However, as stated in “Strictly Ballroom,” one of my favorite movies, “a life lived in fear is a life half lived.” Fear cannot shut us down from our mission: to educate students for their future.

For the Naysayers

Here are some typical arguments against technology in schools – and better ones for using it:

1. The legal issues are daunting: what if a student writes inappropriate content online? Answer: Our job is to teach them how to use the tools of the real world. After all, using a circular saw is dangerous too, but only through shop class have many students learned to build a birdhouse safely. So is it with technology. Parents and teachers must be a part of monitoring and modeling. It may be scary, but without teaching students about appropriate use, they will surely encounter exactly that which we are most scared of.

2. How ever will we train all those teachers? Answer: It’s simple. Have teachers train teachers. Give teachers who know how the paid release time to be trainers during their contracted hours of those who don’t know how. There are willing teachers on every site, at every district, teachers willing to take on hybrid roles in education that allow them one foot in the classroom and one foot working to improve the pedagogy and practice of those who need to learn. For those who train, they will, as a result, avoid burnout by being permitted ways to utilize their other skills, all the while helping other teachers improve their own 21st century knowledge.

3. Where does the time come from? How can we add more to a teacher’s plate? Answer: How ’bout this? Don’t. Instead, take something off teachers’ plates rather than put more on. We have to prioritize, and including technology is too important. We can’t continue to have teachers waste their time on the curricular needs of yesteryear. We need to redefine how a teacher spends their time during the day and redefine the curriculum of tomorrow.

4. Some students don’t have access to technology at home so how can we expect them to use it for assignments? Answer: To this I say, many homes don’t have libraries either, but we still teach how to read. The fact is that it’s a school’s job to step up to provide and instruct. Even though some students may not have access to a computer at home, the school needs to see its role in equalizing the differences between those who have and those who don’t. It’s also society’s role to find a way to provide for those homes in a more equitable way or our country’s children will be left behind. Some districts are already working in conjunction with phone providers and computer companies to help bridge this gap. Those districts should not be few and far between, but should be commonplace.

5. It’s expensive. Answer: Nevertheless, “we cannot afford to fall any more behind in our comfort and use of technology.” Policymakers need to start backing up their demands with funds. Parents need to be a part of monitoring their student’s use at home. Teachers must continue to develop the skills that make them the technology guides in the classroom. For as the gap gets ever wider, the money it will take to fill the divide will increase. We are already in the red. Our reluctance to think and plan ahead has already created a debt of technological knowledge.

Taking Action

We can’t allow fear to dictate our progress, nor can we allow those who won’t move forward to dictate whether we do move forward. We cannot allow policymakers to insist on adoption and not provide for it, or worse yet, tentatively provide it and not find bravery and support by those within education’s walls.

Teachers need to be on the forefront of curriculum, not in its wake. We need to be leading the charge towards preparing our students for their future, not hindering our march towards tomorrow.

View the original source for this post here

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• Tech Changes Practice; Practice Changes Tech (techpudding.com)
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The original "blue" eno stylus.

When it comes to the stylus for the Eno board from Polyvision, color appears to matter greatly.  To the gang at Polyvision, if you are reading this, I want the BLUE stylus back.

Over the past few years I have integrated almost 20 Eno boards into various classrooms throughout my district.  Each of these boards shipped with the blue stylus, which performed without any issues.

Since the beginning of this school year, I have brought in over 100 more Eno boards, with plans on installing over 300 more within the next few weeks.  Apparently, at some point, Polyvision switched to the new “black” stylus.  Each of the new boards this year has included this new stylus.

For the most part, the new black stylus performs pretty well.  I have received an extraordinary  number of complaints about the new stylus though.  Almost immediately after rolling out the new stylus, the teachers began to complain about battery life.  Literally within hours of beginning to use the new black stylus, teachers reported they needed a new battery.

Normally, the lithium AAA battery that ships with the Eno stylus will last a teacher weeks or even months, depending on usage.  The Polyvision driver includes a mechanism for alerting users to a “low battery” to allow them time to replace the battery before it completely runs out (usually right in the middle of a lesson that is being observed by an administrator.)  It turns out the batteries are fine.  There appears to be issues which cause the warning to pop up prematurely.

I must not be alone with this issue as Polyvision has recently provided an updated driver which turns off this “low battery warning.”  While this “fix” will prevent the warning from appearing and will likely decrease the number of requests for unnecessary battery replacements, it does not really address the problem.  It is sort of like placing a piece of black tape over the check engine light that appears on your car’s dashboard.  The problem isn’t really fixed, but as long as you don’t see that annoying light you don’t feel compelled to do anything about it.

Now I will be receiving panic calls from teachers when their stylus’ battery really is dead, since they no longer receive a warning ahead of time.  When the battery is dead, the teachers will be in a jam.  They cannot use the Eno board without a stylus.

I want to be very clear here.  I love the Eno boards.  Even more importantly, the teachers who have received their Eno boards love them too.  The boards are extremely durable and versatile.  Teachers use them as interactive white boards, dry erase boards and magnetic boards.

The teachers and their students love the easy to use board tools that are included.  The teachers that have taken the next step and are using the included RM Easiteach software, are very impressed.  The only complaint we have is with the new black stylus.

Polyvision please bring back the “blue stylus.”

For years now the state of Maine has been a pioneer in this area.  There are a great many lessons to be learned from Maine’s experiences.  Recently Mashable‘s Sarah Kessler posted about six of these lessons that can be learned from Maine’s Learning Technology Initiative.

When students at Skowhegan Area Middle School decided to undertake a study of the town’s history, they departed from traditional readings and paper writing. They instead made podcasts about historical landmarks that cumulatively produced a walking tour, recorded interviews with town elders and created websites for local farmers. Like the 225 other middle schools in Maine, every seventh and eighth grade student has been provided with a laptop computer, making projects like these accessible.

“It’s just a part of how we do business now, and in some ways we’re starting to take it for granted,” explains Michael Muir, who helped design the leadership development program for the initiative that brought one-to-one computing to Maine. “It’s very exciting because it’s now a part of the culture of teaching middle school in Maine … that all the kids have laptops and you teach with technology, and it’s exciting because it’s no longer the new thing.”

In 2002, the state of Maine signed a $37 million contract with Apple that provided laptops to 33,000 middle school students and 3,000 teachers. The contract was extended in 2006 and expanded in 2009 to include some high schools. All seventh graders, all eighth graders, and students at 55% of Maine’s high schools are currently issued laptops. At the launch of the initiative, the state made no apologies about how it had chosen to spend its one-time state surplus.

“The challenge is familiar, but the imperative is new: we must prepare young people to thrive in a world that doesn’t exist yet, to grapple with problems and construct new knowledge which is barely visible to us today,” reads the the 2001 request for proposal.

It’s been about 10 years since Maine implemented its initiative, and while at least 33 states had experimented with one-to-one computing projects by 2007, none have reached the scope of Maine’s project. As jobs and life increasingly involve computers, it’s clear that in order to remain relevant to students, schools will need to adopt more technology. Here are six lessons about doing so successfully, taken from Maine’s initiative.

1. Treat Technology as a Tool, Not a Curriculum Area

Bette Manchester, who directed the program for its first seven years, organized many training sessions for teachers, but none of them focused on how to use software.

“You would say, ‘What are the objectives we’re trying to teach in mathematics?’ And then you would work backwards and say, ‘OK, what kind of software or what kind of resources would help the students in middle school learn algebra,’ for instance,” she says. “So you would be selecting your resources based on what you decided you were teaching the students and work backwards, instead of buying a bunch of math software and having no clue what you are going to do with it.”

Instead of running a workshop for teachers on how to use a spreadsheet, for example, the state might hold workshops on collecting and analyzing data. While the teachers left the training knowing how to use a spreadsheet, the focus remained on the learning.

2. Think Differently About Teaching

This graphic, from a presentation at one of Maine’s teacher training sessions, shows different levels of technology integration.

Muir and his colleagues who work on technology initiatives in schools jokingly refer to their main obstacle as APP or “adult paradigm paralysis.” In order for technology to enhance education, Muir says, schools need to change the way they think about education. And that can be a difficult process.

“I think there’s still a lot of assumption that a school is doing a good job if kids are sitting in rows and being quiet and the teacher is at the front of the room directing the activities,” Muir says. “And the new paradigm that took a while for people to get used to is kids working on projects, kids looking up the same information not necessarily all from the same place and sharing what they’re learning about a topic — a lot of small group work and kind of a productive hubbub in the room.”

When the laptops were first introduced, there were some teachers who merely substituted a computer projector for a traditional one or used the computers only to assign homework. This kind of technology use obviously wasn’t going to make a change worth the investment of the laptops.

Research suggests that classroom technology initiatives are only as effective as their teachers. It’s only when teachers in Maine used the laptops to connect students to resources, interact with students in other parts of the world, extend discussions, create multimedia and work on collaborative projects that students started becoming more engaged. The new tools had the capability to diversify teaching methods, but only if teachers were willing to explore them.

3. Decide to Do It, Not Pilot It

Maine never ran a pilot program for the initiative. It did have nine exploratory schools during a “phase one” of the project, but there was never a question of whether the program would continue. The departure from the term “pilot” was intentional.

“If you do a pilot to see if you want to do it, nobody will take it seriously because there’s no guarantee that the program will continue,” Muir says. “Well, if people don’t take it seriously and put their time and energy into it, it’s no wonder that the program isn’t going to continue.”

4. Concentrate on Current Curriculum Initiatives at First

Students at Skowhegan Area Middle School created a podcast walking tour of their town to explore its history.

As the technology integrationist at Skowhegan Area Middle School, Laura Richter works with teachers to design projects like the town history unit. She admits that not every teacher has been as eager to work with technology as she is. “They weren’t able to see that this isn’t beyond and extra, this really is a part of what you’re already doing,” she says about teachers who have been hesitant to integrate digital learning.

To help these teachers adjust to using computers in class, Richter asked them to look at the projects they were already working on and think about how they could enhance them using digital resources. A teacher already working on a unit about irrigation in ancient Egypt, for instance, could ask students to look up an illustration on the Internet rather than providing one from a textbook. When a variety of images portrayed the system differently, they could discuss those differences.

Another approach that Muir says helped initiate this kind of thinking without overwhelming teachers was to ask teachers who were beginning the laptop program in their classes to do at least one new thing with the laptops before December.

“Almost always it was like putting a pinhole in a dam,” Muir says. “Once you got them started it was kind of hard to stop them. But setting that expectation made it clear that it was an expectation, that you had to do something, but it also it got people over that initial hump of getting started.”

5. Support Teachers as Much as Possible

“There was resistance, and it came from fear,” Manchester says. “I can’t say that people weren’t very worried about how it was going to go and very fearful, because you can imagine as a teacher … in a middle school you see 100 students over the course of a day, and all of those students are on the Internet at the same time and may be much more adept at using technology than you are. That’s a pretty scary situation for a teacher.”

One thing that Maine did right was not abandoning teachers with a class full of laptops and no direction on how to use them. The state paid for substitute teachers while full-time teachers attended training sessions and held workshops where school leaders could exchange ideas. Every principal was provided with a stipend to appoint a teacher as a tech leader. Maine continues to maintain a resource website as well as provide training sessions, web seminars and even instructional podcasts (iTunes link).

“This isn’t unique to laptops, but if you’re going to ask teachers to do something new, train them, support them, and give them professional development in an ongoing fashion. Have them share information with each other,” Muir says.

6. Make Technology Part of Teachers’ Everyday Language, Too

Before Richter became a technology integrationist, she conducted technology trainings for teachers around the state. One success factor she noticed among new laptop schools was whether principals from a school used technology themselves.

“In the schools where you had principals who were themselves using technology [and] delivering class development information or communicating with teachers digitally, [computer use] became part of [the teachers'] classrooms faster,” she says. “It was their way of connecting with the administration, and then it was easier for them to say, ‘OK, this is the real world, students need to be using this tool also.’”

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Related Articles

• Subject Matters: Students struggle with math fundamentals (cnn.com)
• Teacher Training, Taught by Students (nytimes.com)

Stay tuned.

I am in Saratoga Springs, New York right now, about to attend a session with Alan November.

The hotel clerk recommended a local restaurant for breakfast.  After ordering my breakfast, the waitress brought over a bottle of ketchup.  Not so extraordinary except for the fact that it was not my preferred brand of ketchup.  Instead of my usual Heinz, she instead placed a bottle of Red Gold Tomato Ketchup on the table.  Up until that moment I never really considered how strongly I felt about brands, but I should have.  As I think about it, I am very particular about all sorts of brands in my daily life, from food to clothes, etc.  Oddly, it made me examine my strong brand loyalty for the technology products I favor.

For years I was a huge fan of Dell computers.  I had been instrumental in placing literally thousands of these PCs in the various schools I was involved for a period of 10 years or so.  I recommended them to everyone.  My family members all had Dell’s as well.  They were (and likely still are) terrific machines.  They were the only machines I would even consider when purchasing or recommending PCs.

Then I found Apple.  More accurately, Apple found me.  I got hooked very quickly.  I am now an Apple evangelist.  Not because they are cool and sexy (though it helps), but because they work.  Upon doing a lot of research, it became clear to me that the TCO (total cost of ownership) of an Apple is actually far less than that of comparable Windows-based PCs.

I have also been swayed in my printing choices.  Once a huge fan of HP printers (still think they work great), I have moved on to OKI printers.  Oki makes great, reliable printers too.  But what I like most about OKI’s are their low cost for consumables like toner.  Over the life of a printer, the TCO of an OKI is far lee than HP or other manufacturers.

The point of all of this is that if I am honest with myself I will realize that often when I break away from my tried and true brands, I find very good, if not better, alternatives.

Maybe the next time the waitress brings me an unfamiliar brand of ketchup, I should actually try it.

Image via CrunchBase

Further proof about the genius of the folks at  Google was brought to light today by technology columnist, David Pogue, in his New York Times post, “Pogue’s Posts.”

It was announced today that Google’s GOOG-411 service will end on November 12, 2010.  While I have found this service to very useful on many occasions, that is not the part of Pogue’s Post that caught my attention.

What I found most insightful about Mr. Pogue’s post was his uncovering of the real reason Google established the free service in the first place.  Why (and how) Google would offer this service at no charge was always a mystery to me.  Outside of the tagline about calls being connected by bandwidth.com, the service was free of advertising and there was no clearly identified mechanism for Google to make money on this service.

Apparently, Google’s purpose for offering this service, according to Pogue’s Post, was as a “phoneme-harvesting operation for honing Google’s voice technologies.”  In other words, they collected voice samples from the service users for the further development of other voice services.

This is just another example of how brilliant the minds of those working at Google really are.  The last time I was this impressed by Google’s genius was when they came up with the brilliant marketing campaign to spread to the word about the release of their Chrome browser.  The idea was that the gift giver could prepare an interactive online greeting card, for friends, family members and colleagues, while simultaneously introducing Google Chrome.

Word comes out very frequently these days, that Google is spreading its wings.  It recently expanded into areas like Google TV and investing in the transmission of power generated by Wind Farms off the east coast of the United States.  It is likely just a matter of time before more of Google’s brilliance is unveiled.

By the way, I still swear the “beep, beep, beep” sounds heard while waiting on the GOOG-411 service, were human, not computerized tones.

Related Articles

• Farewell, GOOG-411 (pogue.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Is Chrome OS Imminent? Here’s What to Expect (ostatic.com)
• When the a David Pogue Tweets (pitchengine.com)