So we decided to find out. With our marketing colleague Ray, we employed a research organisation to help us survey real, live teachers to find out what you want from Microsoft and how we can create and -- more importantly, we learned -- organise resources and materials to meet your needs.
We learned a great deal from these interview results; Ray blogged about his key learning already (network managers and teachers have a relationship problem). Here are a few things we took away from this research.
- Teachers aren’t just teachers. You’re English teachers or French teachers or geography teachers or science teachers, and you teach primary or year 7 or S1, and so forth.
- You want resources that will fit what you need when you need it.
- You want to be able to find these resources quickly and easily. If you can’t see a link to what you want on a site’s homepage, you move on.
- You like web sites and content repositories with reviews of content, so that you can see what other people liked and what is worth using.
- You have to be able to edit whatever content you download to fit your specific needs.
- And…you don’t have enough time to do even the things you have to do, much less start anything new (this one we knew).
What can we do about all of this? For a start, we’re going to be writing shorter blog posts. (Starting with the next one, I promise.)
We’re also reorganizing both the blog and the Partners in Learning Network so that you can find what you want a bit more easily.
And, we’re introducing something new for the next few weeks in the blog – called Subject Snacks (once again, we’re really not marketers…). We hope these will encourage more of you to share you ideas of how you use technology to teach your specific subjects.
What do you think – was our research right? Or are we completely off the mark? Let us know!
posted on KristenW’s behalf
Sounds great - I look forward to following your BLOG over the next few weeks.