Today I attended a MassCUE leadership retreat where we participated in presentations regarding different tools and products for education. Two of the tools captured my attention and now have me completely distracted.

Disruptive Technology

Disruptive innovation often initially results in worse performance compared with established projects and service in mainstream markets. But disruptive innovations have other benefits. They are often cheaper, simpler, smaller and more convenient to use.

Clayton Christensen author of The Innovator’s Dilemma

(This is a book I need to read.)

This was the opening slide in a presentation by Rick Trietman one of the creators of Buzzword, also presenting was Tad Stale. Rick’s kids are teachers and he spoke from a teacher/student perspective. He talked about the development of Buzzword and how development and marketing strategies have changed.

It used to be all the cool tools and early adapter where in the world of business. Now it is the kids who are early adapters and testers and then educators looking for free, or cheep, open source solutions. The kids and consumers are more apt to try new things and use the ‘cool tool’ then business. This has resulted in a new way to market and develop products.

He said a key term used in the development of Buzzword was for it to be term paper ready. Kids are so used to having their personal life in the clouds their school work should live their as well. Not bound to a computer or a school network.

Buzzword (recently acquired by Adobe) is similar to Google docs and Zoho Writer but is flash and flex based. There is no need to preview documents it shows pages and has a page segmented scroll bar, good list features and graphics handling with drag and drop photos and text flow. I liked the way it handled tables. More than one person can comment at a time. Comments are like mini documents and can have graphics and tables. There is also a nice history feature to see different versions of the documents. Currently only one person can edit at time but after each save another can edit the document. They are working on improving this feature, as well as adding and developing other applications.

Another product that we were shown was The WorkBench by TRintuition. CEO and developer Ron Gwiazda shared with us the use and development of the product and was asking for ways to tweak it for the education market.

It is a Flash based on-line authoring environment. The media created can be viewed on line or downloaded. It is a quick clean way to make interactive web-page like media. It has many features I have only begun to explore. Projects live on their server and are not shared on the web till you give it a URL name, it can be taken down just as easy by removing the name. Currently it is free to individuals and they are working on a pricing structure for groups, and classes. Groups can share resources, projects and collaborate. My daughter and I are already playing with it. I see her completing a lot of school projects with this tool. And I know I will be playing with it during my upcoming April vacation.