Check out North Marine & Dive Services

He has a new website up, and his About Us page is worth a read! It tells his story of his grandfather being a Royal Navy diver, and his kindergarten picture of himself as a diver.

Check out the site, and give him a call if you need your boat scraped!

Patented this year, the new hunting camo achieves two contradictory goals: improved camouflage to remain hidden from deer while increasing visibility to other hunters for safety.

At the beginning of May See3D launched a Kickstarter Campaign to take pre-orders of this new camo!

In just the first two weeks, the response has been enthusiastic, already reaching 75% of the funding goal.

If you want to get in line for a 3D leaf suit, there is Early Bird pricing, 15% off. But there is a limited quality, so grab them fast.

kickstarter.com/projects/716187701/see3d-redefining-hunting-camo-safer-yet-invisible

The core premise of proficiency based learning is quite simple:

“Schools teach students the most important skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life and make sure students have learned them.”

While schools aspire to this goal, what you might not realize is that many of traditions, systems, and structures of education get in the way. Three examples of these are the Carnegie Unit, 100 point scale grading and age grouping.

The Carnegie unit was established in the late 19th century as a way to standardize college learning. Its adoption was based more to do with professors retirement pensions than what was best for students. In a Carnegie Unit, students learn as much as they can in a fixed unit of time, time is a constant and learning is variable.The Carnegie Foundation itself conducted a study to “consider how a revised unit, based on competency rather than time, could improve teaching and learning in high schools, colleges and universities.”

In Proficiency Based Learning, learning is the constant and time is the variable. A school identifies what skills and knowledge are important, and then structures teaching and learning so that all students gain them regardless of how long it takes.

The A, B, C and GPA that we know of traditional grading began around 1900 and has remained relatively unchanged since then. Most people don’t question it too much, it was probably the same way as they were graded at school, and their parents. But more and more, the research of learning and the brain has shown that it is not a very effective way to help students learn. Consider that a student might have grades of 85, 82, 90 and 0. They were late to class several times, handed last week’s homework in late and had mixed participation in class. Try as they might, as they average all these factors together, different teachers will come up with different “grades”. Particularly in high school, a student’s grade often does not reflect what they learned or can do.

In Proficiency Based Learning, the teacher describes what it looks like when a student has mastered a skill or learned a concept, and then provides direct and focussed feedback on the student’s current performance and what they need to do to get better. This approach, in fact, mirrors what happens in the “real world”. Athletes and musicians get feedback on their performance, a surgeon would get specific feedback on their technique, to pass a driving test, you can drive, or you can’t.

Again, for a hundred years students have been grouped by age in schools. They all get taught the same thing, in the same way, and have the get the same result (the correct) answer on the test. Most people probably realize this “factory” idea of education might not be the best way to teach our children, but like these other traditions of education, it continues relatively unquestioned.

Proficiency Based Learning offers an opportunity to organize learning by what is best for the student rather than what is most efficient. Through flexibility and personalization, it can help students become more engaged in their learning. Teachers define a standard and proficiency and students can demonstrate that they have mastered it in different ways. This can expand the possibilities for learning beyond the classroom, to external courses, internships, travel and more.

The first part of our definition, while not solely unique to Proficiency Based Learning, is important in the opportunity it provides, “the most important skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in life”. The factory model of schools has been one that has focused more on the acquisition of knowledge. Through seat time, “credits” of content, tests and quizzes, learning has often been about knowing more and more.

While knowledge remains important, at no other time has there been such a tension between what high schools produce, and what college and career will demand of our children. Today’s world is less about the retention of information than the analysis of it. Called “21st Century Skills”, or “Transferable Skills”, there is a growing recognition that in a world that changes faster and faster, graduates need the skills and habits of communication, flexibility, problem-solving, innovation and collaboration, among many others. The U.S. Department of Labor summed this up by stating “65 percent of today’s schoolchildren will eventually be employed in jobs that have yet to be created”. This means we need to consider carefully what skills, habits and knowledge graduates need to be prepared with when we cannot really say what exactly they are being prepared for.

Proficiency Based Learning offers an opportunity for schools to “reset” the vision of their graduates to better match the next century rather than the last. It will help them better align teaching, learning and the structures of schools to achieve that vision.

These refinements in teaching and learning are not a sudden change or fad. The reality is that for two decades schools have been evolving in all of these areas. Teaching for understanding, scaffolding, performance tasks, learning pathways, personal learning plans, portfolios, rubrics, senior projects, capstone projects, project learning, standards-based instruction, these are just a few examples of educational initiatives that would come under the umbrella of Proficiency Based Learning. Most, if not all of these ideas are already being used in schools. To a certain extent, Proficiency Based Learning looks like something “new” because it takes these refinements and aligns them coherently in a single structure and organization and gives them a new name.

If you would like more information about the research underpinning PBL, the Great Schools Partnership has gathered and curated the most accessible findings.

Research Evidence

• Research Supporting Learning Standards
• Research Supporting Assessment Practices
• Research Supporting Grading + Reporting
• Research Supporting Instructional Strategies
• Surveys of College Educators and Employers

The Next Gen Science Standards has perhaps completed the shift that was started by the Vermont Framework of Standards. This shift has been a move from memorization, linear labs and passive assessment to active inquiry, open ended investigation and performance assessment.

In other words, a shift from content coverage to “doing science”.

With this in mind, a school that has embraced the NGSS might, in fact, already be “doing” proficiency based learning, or at least something very close to it. If the school made the appropriate changes in curriculum, instruction and assessment, it should be well placed to complete its transition to proficiency based learning with the Next Gen Science Standards.

In my experience working with schools and teachers, one aspect of this shift that often is most lingering is traditional grading. This is a particular challenge as it often is based on school-wide practices and systems (reports card, transcripts etc).

This brief presentation outlines the scope of the shift for science classrooms to move to a proficiency, or competency model.

The site itself is built with WordPress and a Genesis Framework theme. As the business is in its launch phase, one important goal of the site is to build a potential customer base. A key feature to achieve this is the use of a prominent email sign up form above the fold on the home page. A second main technique used is rich imagery, with photos of the suit being used in the woods. This is overlaid with copy that states the camo suit’s main premise, that you can be invisible to deer and visible to other hunters at the same time.

The template, as most are from Studiopress (Genesis), mobile responsive. With more and more customers using phones, tablets and “phablets” to surf the web, this is critical. When working with a designer, mobile responsive design should be a given, not an “add on” feature.

This particular template, Aspire Pro, was chosen for its flexibility of the home page. It uses a number of “featured” sections that allow different backgrounds. This again allows the use of high-resolution photos. In particular, as the site visitor scrolls, it shows the same photos of the suit seen in both black and white and color. Along with the accompanying copy, underscores the benefits of the camo suit. Along with this, there are links to draw the visitor deeper into the site.

As the visitor is drawn in, the funnel is designed to resolve on a contact page. This uses an embedded Wufoo form that collects some basic information about the customer. This is also connected to a Mailchimp account so that an email response to the inquiry can be made.

Originally the site was built on WordPress.com hosting. The need for features/plugins quickly exceeded what that platform can offer, and the site was migrated to self-managed hosting, in this case, Pressable.

The major plugin was the template itself. WordPress.com does not allow installation of custom template, a major lacking. This is probably the major reason you might want to use a self-managed host.

The site took a remarkably short time to build out. Pressable’s features accelerated the process, as did the use of a professional custom theme. With the content pre-written, I think it was under fours hours for the site.

Check out See3D, and if you know a hunter, be sure to send them a link to it!

In the last few weeks, I have been doing research on the in’s and out’s of an apparel start-up. I have an idea that I have been toying with and wanted to expand my non-existent expertise. Pretty easy to do when you are starting from ground zero! My current stage is developing a pattern (used to create the garment) and a prototype. Turns out Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard here. I came across a website illustratorstuff.com that sells Illustrator templates, that is, editable pictures of common garments. Their sign up for an email list was nothing short of brilliant.

The first step was nothing too unusual, the old “I’ll give you something for free if you give me your email”.

In this case it was free examples of some of these Illustrator templates called “Flats”.  So far we have a good (but not groundbreaking) sign up example:

• Emphasis on the word free with color highlight.
• Nice image of the flat (even though it is digital), gives the sense you are getting “something”.
• Some reassuring language in a friendly tone “Yep, totally free”.
• Probably at this point all I might add is “Don’t worry, we won’t spam your email” or suchlike.

At this point I sign up. It happens to be exactly what I am looking for so the “ask” is not a difficult one.

An important thing to consider, however, is the signup is only half of the journey. Most email marketing platforms require a double opt in. They send an email asking you to confirm your subscription. This means any email sign up needs to be successful in getting you to click twice.

This is where illustratorstuff.com got clever.

The email I received looked like this:

I easily recognize this as coming from Mailchimp, I use it myself. Mailchimp does not let you edit the layout of this specific email very much. Here is a screenshot of my version. I don’t think I have changed the template at all. That’s pretty lazy of me and it’s probably costing me subscribers.

There are three things that illustratorstuff.com have done really well here.

1. They have changed the call to action to “click the button below to get instant access”. That’s some pretty good copy. It is reminding me of why I signed up (getting the access) and adds some urgency with “instant”.
2. Again they have the image that creates a sense of a physical object where there really isn’t one. It’s a digital Illustrator template.
3. The third is the clever part. They change the text of the button from “Yes, subscribe me to this list” to “Yes, I want the free fashion flats now”. This is a doubling down on the call to action above, and more importantly because it is on the button it’s making the user focus on that text as they interact with the button.

The takeaway here is that you should always replace button text to create compelling calls to action. Being on an interactive button will make them more effective than just text.

Let’s move along.

Clicking the link engages standard Mailchimp mechanics, you get sent to a landing page – illustratorstuff.us5.list-manage.com. We know it’s Mailchimp because of that domain.

The trend continues with a very strong landing page:

1. The continuing friendly tone “Awesome sauce! You are here :)”. The actual tone is not important, but the fact that the tone is consistent is.
2. The download link, making sure what we came here for is early in the page. You don’t want to frustrate users. Also a nice encouragement to “start designing”.
3. Again we see the image and note also the consistent color of the buttons. They have been the same at all three stages. This consistency goes a long way to assuring the user and making them more comfortable with the process.
4. The video is an important addition, it will help the deliverability to the subscriber’s inbox, that is if they follow the steps. Few will of course, but anything we can do in this area is a bonus.
5. Last we have a signature line from Heidi. Here we see another link to a different product of hers.

When we put everything together, this is a great model for how to increase your email newsletter signups. The sticky flow, the consistency of color and images and most importantly, the great call to action copy.  Illustratorstuff.com has done a very good job at making sure their conversion rate is as high as possible.

Now I’ll sit back and see if the impending autoresponder is as good. I’ll let you know!

PS
Got any other email newsletter signup tips? Leave them in the comments.

PPS
If you want stuff like this in your inbox, use the ‘ol form on the right!

For Parents

• How Does Proficiency-Based Learning Work?
• What Is Proficiency-Based Grading?

For Teachers

• Ten Principles of Proficiency-Based Learning
• Proficiency-based grading and reporting
• Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading
• Reconcilable Differences? Standards-Based Teaching and Differentiation
• Educational Leadership:Effective Grading Practices (ASCD membership needed for some)
• Proficiency-based Instruction and Assessment – Oregon Department of Education (long)

Just a few years ago when a small business or organization (SB/O) needed a website, it was a relatively easy proposition. If they were smart and a little ahead of the curve, they would have used an open source content management system (CMS) to build one – something like Joomla, WordPress or Drupal. They would have built half a dozen pages, known as a brochure website, selected a professional template and launched.

They might have then done some search engine optimization (SEO) to make sure that they were found in Google, worked on getting some backlinks and tuned their keywords.

That would have been enough.

Now, unfortunately it’s not.

Google is still the #1 way that people will find your content, but word of mouth is becoming more powerful – driven by that tiny Facebook Like button.

Now, your SB/O website’s content exists in a conversation. People on the web are not consumers like they were 4-6 years ago. More than ever before they are now active participants, talking, blogging, Tweeting, Liking and Stumbling their way across the web.

They always have been of course, but in the last few years there has been a tipping point of social media saturation. Just like faxes.

I call it the “fax effect”. If you were an early adopter of Facebook faxes, there weren’t many people to fax, probably just a few people. But as more and more people got faxes, there were more people to fax, and it became more important to have a fax because all your friends did and you were getting left out.

Your SB/O website needs to be Social Media Enabled. It needs to be able to take advantage of social technologies like Facebook, Twitter and Mailchimp. This isn’t just putting 54 social media buttons on all your pages – that just looks desperate and gets you untargeted traffic consisting of 20 year old IT professionals.

To be Social Media Enabled your SB/O website needs to connect with your Social Media Outposts. Your Facebook page, Twitter account and Uservoice page, etc. These are your outposts marking your presence in the networks that are important to your stakeholder demographics.

To be Social Media Enabled your SB/O website needs to push and pull key content to and from your Social Media Outposts. This probably means its powered by a CMS so that these external networks can be easily integrated into your content and conversations (you did use a CMS didn’t you?).

Content is pushed to your outposts so that people can have conversations about it. Conversations are pulled to your content so that it enhances and validates the content.

The Difference Between Conversation and Gossip

The word we have mentioned the most so far isn’t “social” or “network”.

It’s the word that makes the difference between people having a connective conversation about your SB/O and just random gossip.

It’s content.

When many people think of creating a website for their business, organization or self, the first idea that comes to mind is the standard “corporate” style site consisting of basic “about” information, followed by a contact form.

Truth is, those kinds of site have limited value. The proof is, of course, in your own online behavior. What kind of site do you visit most often? I bet you find content sites more useful and therefore visit them far more often.

We like to keep abreast of news, read tutorials and how-to guides, be informed and entertained.

You might be thinking to yourself that you are not interested in entertaining people and that you are more interested in where the profit lies.

This is a good point, but in fact content sites are very profitable, and I will tell you why:

1. A traditional site is more expensive to promote and generate exposure for, content sites can be promoted more easily, and for free through social networks
2. Search engines love content as much as human beings do
3. Content sites are linked to voluntarily by other sites, traditional sites are harder to gain links for
4. People are much happier to tell friends about great content rather than corporate websites
5. Old fashioned websites give visitors no reason to return, content sites create loyal, repeat visitors

So a content website is easier to attract people to, and more naturally creates return visitors and is easier to connect to today’s social networks. But there is more …

Content sells.

Think about it, what do you find more persuasive? An advert leading to a long pushy sales letter or well thought out articles that you return to over time, delivered by an expert, who explains and educates?

So now we agree that content sites are superior to the traditional, thin, corporate style site

And we agree that content sites are more able to immerse in highly interconnected social networks on the web.

In this Social Media web landscape, it’s actually business as normal, as it has been for hundreds of years.

Successful businesses have honest conversations about their products and services to people that are interested.

The content-driven, socially connected, web presence simply lets the small business do it better than ever before.

Over the next few days we’ll be talking about how the marriage of a sophisticated content-driven websites and Social Media technologies can make your small business or organization more successful.

There are basically 3 stages

1. Build a content-driven website
2. Establish your social media outposts
3. Link everything together with web apps

For the more practical, you can think of these in a different way:

1. Create compelling content

2. Push your content to social vehicles used by your consumers

We’ll look at all these stages in the next few days as we continue our series of blog posts about “Making Social Media Work”

But Isn’t This All Old News?

You might have read this far and thought to yourself you have heard all this before. Social bookmarking has been around for a few years now. Why all the sudden is social media important? Wasn’t it already?

The reality is that before 2010, social media was still really in its adoption phase. Sure Brittany Spears had lots of followers on Twitter, but real customers that made a real difference to small business were still indifferent.

Now however, Facebook has reached 500 million users and has made the tipping point I described in the “Fax effect”.

In 2011 you WILL have to figure out how to immerse your web presence in social media, and you’d best be doing it with compelling content.

The issue is that spam bots look for that WordPress comment door and use a script to make a comment to the WordPress engine, not the Disqus one that is actually visible. They never get shown, but are a pain to keep deleting in the backend.

Some research showed that there are various PHP tricks you can use, but I hate doing that. My mantra is “Be Vanilla!”

I noticed that there is a setting in the backend however -“Users must be registered and logged in to comment”. I am thinking that if I turn that on, it should stop the problem.

I’ll let you know.

If it isn’t already apparent, the future of computing has firmly left the desktop for the cloud. The trend probably started with the face-off between Microsoft Office and Google Docs. This represented an inflection point between two models, one that had reigned for a decade: desktop software that came on a CD, and an office suite made possible by the ubiquitous availability of a web connection (hello Starbucks!).

Fast forward a few years and we have seen the trend accelerate. It seems Quickbooks Online has taken over from desktop Quickbooks and Google Drive has replaced, well, drives.

Several things have powered this trend. At the same time customers began accepting software to which they subscribe rather than own, there has been a huge increase in the near continuous availability of broadband to use these services. This has led to huge growth in the use of “Web Applications” or Software as a Service – SaaS’s.

SaaS Growth is Old News

The growth in the number of SaaS companies has been huge. Find any forecast and the trend is clear:

We see this anecdotally. Take one example, the CRM database. In the last decade the number of CRM solutions in the cloud as SaaS has exploded.

Source SaaS in NYC: 2015 Overview, Primary Venture Partners

All this is great news for SaaS customers. The explosive growth in SaaS companies has meant more offerings and greater access to better solutions that are more affordably priced.

For the SaaS companies themselves, more competitors might be perceived as a bad thing. But perhaps it has evolved into a marketing opportunity instead.

Some have pointed to a recent trend in which SaaS companies are growing faster than ever before. Younger companies seem to have more accelerated growth compared to older companies:

Source: http://tomtunguz.com/saas-revenue-growth-rates/

Tunguz explains:

“SaaS companies are growing faster and more efficiently than ever before. ….[with] new sales model of acquiring customers with B2C2B techniques by attracting end users through app stores…… [have] created an enormously attractive growth engine.”

One hypothesis might be that the increase in these “App Stores” has made it so much easier for co-marketing opportunities. One can make the analogy to the “Fax Machine Principal.” If you are the only owner of a fax machine, it is not that attractive or useful.  But as soon as more people have them, the more people want them.

A similar thing is happening with SaaS’s. As more have embraced the idea of offering rich integrations with other platforms, there are more platforms to integrate with, making the whole SaaS thing more attractive to customers. It is not a zero sum game.

In particular, this has been driven by how open APIs have become a key aspect in growth. A stellar API means that it becomes easier to integrate with your SaaS. Easy authentication and the use of RESThooks will lower the barriers for other web applications to build and offer connections to your web app, which opens up avenues to attract and retain customers.

Mailchimp in particular leveraged this strategy aggressively, and arguably was ahead of its competitors in pushing integration. We believe that integrability is a major driver of Mailchimp insane growth over the past five years.

The Rise of the iPaaS

This focus on making integrations easier through robust APIs has perhaps led to the rise of a newer type of service: the Integration Platform as a Service, or iPaaS. These are cloud-based systems to integrate other applications. Initial solutions like MuleSoft and SnapLogic were enterprise level iPaaS’s, but now we have seen more SMB solutions like Zapier, Tray.io, and IFTTT.

All of these are characterized by a core concept: connect/integrate your SaaS once to the iPaaS platform, and instantly integrate with all the other SaaS’s on that iPaaS. To take Zapier as an example, it claims over 650 web apps connected on its platform.

Connect with a Global App for your SaaS, and you immediately become part of their ecosystem, allowing your customers rich and extensive integration opportunities. Getting onto an iPaaS platform involves building a specific connection from your API to it. You can read more about How to Integrate Your Web App With Zapier on our blog.

Further information about integrating your SaaS with Zapier can be found on their Integration Partners page.