Image by Old Shoe Woman via Flickr

As some of you who have been with WeAreTeachers for a while understand, our community is a wonderful collection of teachers who enjoy collaborating, connecting, finding one another, and finding resources to help them with their important work. It’s also a place where teacher-created content can be developed, shared, or even sold.

But a place that also welcomes marketers, vendors, publishers, and other commercial partners?  My, my!  What are we thinking!  How can commercial providers and teachers actually mingle, share, even ‘get along??’  And in a network that prides itself in having no traditional ‘banner ads’ or other overt advertising for its monetization strategy?  What ARE we thinking??

This is a question we get quite often, so I wanted to address this conundrum right up front.

First, we are very clear at WeAreTeachers that our CENTRAL purpose and ‘value proposition‘ obligation is for the TEACHERS in our community.   We work every day to find better ways to get teachers connected, and to honor and support their fine work.  We work hard to provide tools and programs that support teachers at the grass roots level — not just through the institutions in which they happen to work — but teachers at the point of their interaction with students, and at the point in which they transfer knowledge and wisdom to others.  We try daily to think of ways to empower teachers, and to ensure their collective voice is heard as a powerful and compelling force in education improvement.  We try to find the very best teachers and give them a megaphone, so that great teaching and teaching ideas surface.

For ‘Marketers’ in the education industry?  WeAreTeachers also has an important value proposition for them.  Namely, we believe there is an enormous need for providers of education content to connect directly with end-user practioners — called ‘teachers.’  And we believe technology — primarily via social media tools — has a lot to offer to facilitate that connection.  While many companies are beginning to understand this need, most lack resources or expertise to understand how to connect properly and appropriately with teachers through social media.  There is great tempation to just utilize social media marketing to ’sell at’ teachers — and little expertise or understanding of how to promote a brand and, at the same time, genuinely have meaningful conversation with (and add value to) these teachers.

Is this because the education industry lacks great people or great products?  Of course not.   Rather, it’s simply that this level of end-user connection — particularly through the on-going engagement today’s technology represents — is just something most companies have little experience in utilizing.

That’s where WeAreTeachers comes in.  We look carefully at the needs of teachers — and we listen closely to our community.  Then we seek corporate sponsors to help fund and support things that really matter to teachers.    Like MicroGrants for supporting creativity.   Or a scholarship program to support inner city learning.  Or a MicroGrant to support environmental education.

We also seek ways to help marketers in the education space connect with teachers during the product development phase.  Soon, we plan to launch a program to ask Teachers what they really NEED to be better teachers, then connect that need directly to the companies who have the resources to meet that need.  We also connect teachers using particular commercial learning programs to one another — in WAT Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) — to encourage best practice sharing, and collaboration.

We’re still learning, but we hope to find the careful intersection of ‘WHAT TEACHERS NEED’ and ‘WHAT VENDORS MIGHT PROVIDE’ — and to connect those dots that also promote proper and useful conversations and sharing between end-user teachers and those commercial providers who publish great content.

What a wonderful thing if we make a dent in this arena!  We think its about time that all the stakeholders connected!   And what better place to make that happen than in the online community called WeAreTeachers?

I’d love YOUR thoughts about this!   Our commitment to the community?  We’ll work hard to bring on the very best commercial partners, and to facilitate the very best conversations and programs to support great teaching and learning.

Tags: Best practice, Education, K through 12, Marketing, Teacher

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 10:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.