Talk to Us or Follow Us – And Win an Amazon.com Gift Card!

Maybe it’s seeing all the holiday decorations cropping up in stores across the country, but something has got the Riverside Publishing Product Innovation Team in an especially generous mood these days. We’ve decided to launch our very first contest on our good ‘ole blog. We’re posting this quick before the “powers that be” change their minds. : )

The contest is fairly simple… and we’ll be giving away two prizes. There are two ways to win:

1) Between now and Friday, Dec. 11, 2009, simply post a comment to one of our existing blog entries and you are entered for a chance to win a $100 Amazon.com gift card. Riverside’s Product Innovation Team will select the winner based on the comment we feel is the most creative, thought-provoking or informative. Your post doesn’t have to be long – just the type of thing to spark some good online discussion.

or

2) Between now and Friday, Dec. 11, 2009, sign up on Twitter to follow our tweets and you are automatically entered to win a $100 Amazon.com gift card. We will randomly select one person who signs up to follow us on Twitter to win this award. You can find us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/RPCMikeMNextGen.

If you do both – create a post and sign up to follow us on Twitter – you are entered to win twice. We’ll contact the winners and get you your gift card in time for you to use it for some additional holiday shopping this year.

One important note: Riverside and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt employees and contractors, and their immediate family members, are not eligible for this contest. We understand that’s a bummer, but this contest is really designed for our customers. You are, however, welcome to encourage our customers to participate, and of course enjoy their postings.

Twitters, Tweets and Facebook – Oh My!

Everyone seems to be talking about social networking. Here at Riverside Publishing, we’ve even noted that many of our parents are signing up for Facebook accounts – a sure sign that social networking has hit the mainstream.

As we think about “next generation” systems, we are exploring the extent to which educators want to incorporate social networking experiences into their usage of such platforms. In an increasingly mobile MySpace’d-Facebooked-Twitter’ed world, do such communications tools have a role to play for K-12 educators?

The example at left is a concept we’ve been playing with. Cleverly (and with a knod to Facebook users everywhere) we’ve called this rough concept  ”My Wall.” Within the context of an educational assessment delivery platform, such as our own Edusoft or DataDirector, would educators want the ability to post messages to each other or status updates within the application itself? Or, would busy educators just view this as “one more place to check” for such messages?

Should we link our assessment delivery platforms to popular tools, like Twitter? Would it be helpful, for example, to “tweet” the beginning of your district’s newest benchmark exam, or to inform classroom teachers that the latest set of academic standards (think: Common Core Standards) are now available within the system?

What’s the appropriate role, if there is one, for such social networking tools? Post your thoughts and ideas. We’d love to engage in some online dialogue with you on this topic…

Follow Me On Twitter

You can follow my Tweets about our product innovation efforts on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/RPCMikeMNextGen and be among the first to know what we are working on and thinking about at Riverside Publishing.