We all would like to be better communicators. Whether you give formal presentations or simply share ideas informally with others, we always can become even more skilled at communicating. These slides share 10 tips that anyone who communicates. Courtesy HubSpot

In this episode, Marissa Lowman from LearnLaunch joins MEP to talk about the Boston education technology community, what it takes to build an engaged community, and the first cohort of their accelerator:  LearnLaunchX. Don’t miss it! Marissa Lowman is the Executive Director and a co-founder of LearnLaunch. She is also the founder of EdTechup (now part of LearnLaunch), an organization that brings together education technology entrepreneurs and educators in the Boston area to collaborate with one another. Most recently, she worked in sales and marketing at mobile payments startup AisleBuyer, which was acquired by Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU). Lowman taught in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship, worked for Teach For America and helped grow the National Partnership for Educational Access (NPEA) at The Steppingstone Foundation. She also served as a member of the steering committee of the Boston Leaders for the Future of Education (BLFE) from 2010-2011. In addition, she served as the Marketing Director for DartBoston, which helps emerging entrepreneurs start companies. Lowman received her BA from Johns Hopkins University. Social Media: Marissa Lowman on Twitter Shout Outs: Upcoming LearnLaunch Events Boundless Learning EverTrue For more episodes featuring thought leaders in education visit MeetEducationProject.com, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and follow Nick DiNardo on Twitter.

On Friday, 3/29/13, I will be giving a keynote presentation from 12:45-1:45PM CDT entitled, Social Teaching Strategies for Engaging Today’s Active Learner at the Annual Western Illinois University Symposium on Teaching, Research and Creative Activities. During the presentation, we’ll consider how students today are using social media in their daily lives and explore together how social media can be used to actively engage students in the learning process, both in and outside the classroom. A social teaching framework will be shared as well as principles and best practices for leveraging social media in teaching and learning. I’ve begun drafting a interactive online handout that will contain presentation slides and resources that I will share. In addition, as I’m always willing to try something new in my presentations, I plan to incorporate for the first time into one of my faculty presentations several interactive pieces that will provide further opportunities for faculty participants to interact live using their mobile devices as well as extend the presentation beyond the "physical walls" of WIU. Live-Tweeting & Twitter Backchannel I’ve selected the hashtag #socialteaching and will be using it extensively over the coming days in sharing resources prior-to, as well as during my presentation. Join the conversation or share additional resources on Twitter related to use of social media in teaching and learning using hashtag #socialteaching. Thanks to the instructions I initially stumbled across from Alan Levine and step-by-step video from Adam Bellow, I plan to live-tweet during my presentation using Keynote Tweet 2 on my Mac. Watch for the #socialteaching Twitter stream on Friday, 3/29 and join the conversation! Mobile/Web-based Polling using PollEverywhere As I’ve been informed that the majority of the faculty who will be attending live will have either a smart phone or tablet, I plan to incorporate numerous polling questions before and during the presentation using PollEverywhere. I’ve signed-up for a presenter plan for 1-month for the sake of this presentation and will be using the PollEverywhere Mac Presenter App to embed live polls in my Keynote slides as well as live-tweeting the polls, with responses able to be received by web, text, or Twitter. Please feel free to respond to the polling questions when you see them become available! Texting Backchannel using Celly I’ve been intrigued for sometime now with the applications for use of text messaging in teaching and have been exploring various text messaging tools. I recently setup a free account with Cel.ly and have created a Celly group @socialteaching that I will be inviting participants (live and virtual) to join and try as another backchannel option before, during, and after the presentation. Whereas the Twitter stream is public and open, the texting backchannel can be made private and has different applications for within a class setting. During the presentation, I plan to send out a couple of different polls that participants can respond to directly via text message. Participants can also share a comment or give other feedback directly via text message. Again, this is another experiment on my behalf and would love to have anyone interested in seeing in action to join the texting group and give it a try! To join, simply text @socialteaching to 23559 or join at cel.ly/c/socialteaching. Google+ Hangout on Air I’m also toying with the idea of doing a Google+ Hangout on Air and live-stream the video of the presentation. I’ve not decided yet if I will try pulling this off, chiefly because I will be relying on a wi-fi connection during the presentation. If my connection seems solid and I can pull off the technical details, announce the live stream on my Twitter and Google+ and the live stream of the video (and later the recording) will be on my YouTube channel. Your Participation is Invited! I’d love for you to participate "virtually" via social media in this presentation! In summary, here again are the ways you can get involved: Join conversation on Twitter, hashtag #socialteaching Respond to polling questions, as they are live-tweeted (will have prefix hashtag #poll for easy identification) Join the texting group to participate in private backchannel and share your insights via text message One more request I will throw out…What suggestions or strategies would you share for faculty who are considering incorporating social media into their teaching? I’d love to include tips as part of the presentation! Feel free to leave a comment here on my blog to tweet using hashtag #socialteaching

As you might know, EDUKWEST was built upon the idea to share the conversations I had with edtech startup founders, investors and thought leaders. Over the years the team and I have added new shows, news coverage and opened up EDUKWEST to contributors from across the edtech landscape. This year again we are going to focus more on our roots. I can already tease that we will get back into recorded interviews very soon here on EDUKWEST. We won’t do video interviews though but focus on podcasts instead, the format of consumption that our audience has favored over the past years. We will start to record our new formats very soon, so stay tuned. But there is more. In the meantime we are thrilled to welcome Nick DiNardo and his Meet Education Project to our site. Enter Nick: I've been an admirer of Kirsten and EDUKWEST for many years. In fact, Kirsten's video interview series was an inspiration for my early work with this podcast! Why did I start this podcast? It's simple. Over the past 10 years, I've had had the chance to sit down with professors, c-suite administrators at higher ed and K-12 schools, ed tech entrepreneurs, and VCs...just based on a curiosity about different perspectives on the future of learning, inside and outside of our traditional education system. Back in early 2013, I asked myself the question: would an audience benefit from these conversations? Should I record them? So I did. Almost two years later, I've been honored to have 75+ interviews with thought leaders and action takers across the industry. It's been a blast, and I can't wait to see what the future holds. I hope to provide some value to you all with some of these conversations. Please let me know what you think on twitter (@nickdinardo33) or through email (ddinardo33@gmail.com). I'm easy to find. I have to thank Nick for his kind words. We also recently sat down for a MEP episode, which you can check out right now on MeetEducationProject.com. Of course, we are going to post it here on EDUKWEST, as well. To give you an idea about this partnership, we will be publishing Nick’s interviews with edtech startup founders and investors, starting with his archives and working our way through to the latest episodes. We plan to publish a MEP episode each Monday.

This video, found thanks to Graham Attwell, highlights the role of the teacher in creating and sustaining a learning community, developing presence and fostering engagement. What additional tips might you offer faculty seeking to develop a sense of "presence" in their online teaching?

One of the biggest problems for language learners at any stage is to find people to practice their conversational skills with. Language exchange is probably one of the most popular methods but as I wrote back in the days, it’s complicated. i2istudy aims to provide language learners and teachers with a platform that does most of the heavy lifting by providing them with interactive content and ideas to work on. Introduce your startup and give a short description of what you are doing. i2istudy is an international online community, where people teach and learn foreign languages. On i2istudy anyone can be both a student and a teacher. It is an easy and effective way to speak a foreign language with a native speaker. Who are the founders, how did you meet, what are your different roles in the startup. The founders are Ilya Osipov, Anna Prasikova and Vadim Grishin. Before i2istudy.com we worked together on a different IT project. Ilya Osipov CEO (IT entrepreneur) Anna Prasikova CIO (linguist) Vadim Grishin CTO (programmer) How was the idea for your startup born? The project started in 2014. The founders of the project are a group of linguists, programmers and entrepreneurs experienced in creating large Internet projects. We noticed that the most effective way of teaching is when a person studies face to face with another person, and, unlike math, for instance, almost every person in the world has a perfect command of their native language, or at least its conversational part. We realized that the native language is a precious knowledge that can be an object of exchange. By teaching your native language you can take lessons in a foreign language in exchange for free. However, the difficulty is that sometimes there is nothing to talk about even in your native language and with a person you already know. Now two unacquainted people are able to talk for a long time in a foreign language, teaching each other at the same time! Besides, it’s one thing to speak a language, but teaching it to someone else is another! We created a new model of online studying, which had not existed before i2istudy: studying face to face with a system of slides according to the principle of time banking free, simple, on the spot What is the main problem in education that you aim to solve. «I understand how I can learn a foreign language. But how am I going to teach? I don’t know what to do!» - that’s the most common question that we get from people. We help people to find interlocutors for language practice and solve their contact problem - created the special connection platform, time banking, gave all training materials for the dialogue. There’s no need to be a professional teacher on i2istudy! You get dialogues that have been prepared for you, along with games, pictures and films. The teacher doesn’t have to prepare for a lesson, only read the assignment and add your personal touch to it. That’s why anyone who speaks a language freely can teach it! Who are your main competitors? What sets you apart from them? The main competitor is www.italki.com. They use Skype for communication. Our advantage is that we have audio and video integrated into the system, a platform for dialogue with educational materials and Time Banking. In which markets / regions are you active. What markets / regions are next. At the moment English, Russian, German and Spanish are in the system. Our regions are all countries who speak these languages. We plan to add French and other European languages as well as extending the service to the Asian market. Right now we already have a few lessons in Chinese. Who is your target audience. They are people whose occupation requires them to spend much time in front of a computer. They are those who want to brush up their knowledge of a foreign language but don’t have an opportunity to visit a tutor or have one come to their place and overpay for that. They are people who want to study whenever they have free time - at a lunch break, while the baby is sleeping, simply when they have a free evening. They are those who would love to talk to native speakers but don’t have foreign friends. Those who don’t want to slave over textbooks and do homework on their own, but simply communicate in a foreign language without concentrating on grammar. How do you engage with your target audience. How do you convert them into users of your product. We actively use Time Banking and Gamification in i2istudy. We motivate our users to invite their friends for sharing their native language and learning foreign languages. Each invited user receives bonuses from our system. What is your business model. How much does your product / service cost. We have two kinds of study options: for free and for money. FOR FREE - If you teach your native language and then you learn some different language. It`s like a barter. You share your language with each other, not using your money, but your time and knowledge as a currency. FOR MONEY - If you don't want to teach somebody, then you pay money for learning. Some people say «I don’t have time to teach, but I want to learn myself!» or «I don’t need to learn a foreign language, English is more than enough for me». If you don’t have the time to do both, you can teach and earn money from those who want to learn with you. In this case, users pay or, respectively, get money for their services. You can pay and or withdraw money on i2istudy. OUR BUSINESS MODEL: We take a commission of 15 percent from paid study. If you raised funding, how much did you raise. Who are your investors. If not, are you planning to raise funding. We raised $ 300K from private investors. Are there milestones you are especially proud of and would like to share. At the moment we are especially proud of the fact that users invite each other and we observe the viral growth of our user base. What are the next steps in growing your startup. Next milestones for us are growing the user base to a few million users and add more languages to the platform. How can people get in touch with you. For communication purposes with our users we use the feedback form in i2istudy, we use groups in social networks. We teach and learn in i2istudy with our users as well!

For the next several days, I’m in Las Vegas for the Sloan Consortium 6th Annual International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Online Learning. I’ve had the privilege of serving on the steering committee for this conference this year and also will be presenting. I look forward to accepting the "challenge" of sharing my experience and takeaways of the conference. My blog here will be the primary home for my shared notes and social media, more to follow on my plan to knit my social media tools together to here on my blog and to "mob log" my experiences using just my iPhone. Let the sharing begin! You’ll find me sharing my et4online experience at the following social media locations.

Former textbook rental juggernaut Chegg is on the home stretch to turn itself into a 100% digital company. Ingram Content Group will take over the entire physical textbook business of Chegg and market it under the Chegg brand starting May 1st 2015. Chegg will exit its warehouse operations by the end of this year. The strategic Chegg Ingram partnership was launched in August 2014. Under the partnership Chegg will only earn 20% commission on printed textbook, but CEO Dan Rosensweig believes that digital revenues from services will balance out the loss in the long run. Overall digital revenue grew 71% year-over-year to $28.5 million and made up 34% of total revenues in Q4 2014, up 12% from Q4 2013. The year-over-year growth of subscribers to Chegg’s digital services is 54%. Chegg will use the freed capital from textbooks to further grow its digital services. The Student Hub currently reaches 50% of college students in the US and 75% of college-bound high school students. Further Reading Chegg outsources Textbook Distribution to Ingram in its Transition to Digital Company | EDUKWEST Chegg and Ingram Content Group Announce Agreement in Principle Setting Chegg on Path Towards 100% Digital Revenue | Press Release Chegg Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2014 Results | Press Release Chegg Will Outsource All Its Print Textbooks to Remake Itself as a Digital-Only Company | Re/code

If you are looking for an elegant way on your mobile device to follow #ET4Online conversations on Twitter, consider creating a custom section on Flipboard for following the saved Twitter searche #et4online. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do so. Similar steps could be followed to add other streams of #et4online social media to Flipboard…give it a try!

GuideSpark, which provides HR organizations with a platform to turn paper-based training material into interactive and mobile courses, has raised a $22.2 million Series C led by Meritech Capital Partners with participation from previous investors New Enterprise Associates, Storm Ventures, and IDG Ventures. The new round brings the total funding raised to $42.2 million and will be used to invest in product, sales, and marketing. GuideSpark raised a $15 million Series B a year ago. According to GuideSpark the company has over 500 customers ranging from small businesses to 15% of the Fortune 500. GuideSpark’s platform helps those organizations to communicate and engage with their employees through customized video and mobile experiences throughout every stage of the employee life cycle. Further Reading GuideSpark Raises $22.2 Million in Series C Financing Round | Market Wired GuideSpark Raises $22.2M To Create Customized Videos That Make HR Less Tedious And Confusing | TechCrunch GuideSpark Snags $22M Series C for Developing HR Communication Tools | Xconomy Links guidespark.com