iD8-TripleSSS is Off and Running in 2013!

(image courtesy of Times Union, Albany, NY)

Our New Year started with a flurry--both literally and figuratively. iD8-TripleSSS Media Development is located in the beautiful upstate New York area, and  literally, our winters are full of flurries and less than balmy yet we are made of hearty stock. Figuratively, an exciting new client invited us to submit proposals for creating content and developing several substantial online courses that are due to start imminently. One has already been awarded to us.

These opportunities both surprised and thrilled us, as our journey into digital educational content and course development is now well established. This burst of unexpected new business was so encouraging that it raised our confidence about meeting and possibly exceeding our 2013 goals.  We invite you to talk to us about it!

A new business model, however, has emerged for us to add to our company. It is service as a product and with it increased ways for us to expand. Service may mean creating custom products for specific clients or it may mean providing “everything content” while also starting to offer our own courseware—blended class/online learning will be required in all markets within in two years. This is an exciting initiative for us that creates opportunity that does not compete with our current client base.

We invite you to share in our goals, which include:

1.  Continuing to provide development and content to all our clients in the digital space as well as the print/blended spaces.

2.  Breaking into new markets while acknowledging existing business has evolved almost wholly into digital opportunities.

3.  Meeting face to face with and listening to our clients’ needs, present and future.

4.  Talking with educators and administrators in the K-12 market-space as well as our postsecondary spaces, and trying to determine how best to meet those needs.

5. Relying on our staff, the very heart of our business, to grow and learn with us, as we create the content that will always serve as the fabric of educational publishing.

As the business climate of educational publishing has shifted, so have the opportunities for us to grow. Growth is never something we take lightly, especially in this still-struggling economy coupled with the excitement of digital transition in educational publishing. As an organization based on a service model, we pride ourselves on being  flexible, customer focused and devoted to quality. 

Thank you for trusting us on this educational journey. We are there and ready to take those next steps with you. 

Reflections of 2012--and What a Year It Was…

What a difference 10 years makes! iD8-TripleSSS celebrated its 10^th anniversary in October of this year. There are two words that encapsulate the year for us--technology and people.  They may seem like polar opposites, but it is the advances, innovations, and expectations in educational technology and the people with whom we worked on our digital journey that have made 2012 memorable.

Technology changed our processes, and services, and advanced our skills and services in ways that we could not have dreamed of even one year ago. We used to set up FTP sites, and transfer files through yousendit and related sites. Now we set up a Dropbox folder for each project, and we check the files on our phones and tablets. We ask our clients whether we should provide mapping documents or author online. Flash has given way to HTML 5 and social media has become as important as a website.

Print marketing materials? Nonexistent. Tablets? They are crucial to our clients and to us.  For years we’ve written some content for online courses. Now we are often asked to write the entire online course, thanks to the wonderfully qualified professionals we employ.

Rather than developing postsecondary content for only print or online courseware, we began developing content for multiple media and platforms. We recently completed a successful foray into app content development for the K-12 space, and we now create builds for proof of concept work and beyond . We learned about keeping our footprint “light” so we do not take up band-width. The amount of new buzzwords we now employ (not just read about) could easily comprise a short dictionary.

We studied best-practices in K-12 and assessed our  strategy in this entire market-space and made some investment decisions accordingly. We watched and acted as content become personal, and adaptive-learning  became the expectation at all levels. While content became more personal, access to resources continued to open-up, and OER (open educational resources) grew world-wide and became less of a threat (maybe) to the copyright world.

Finally, what made 2012 most memorable for us is the people. The loyalty, skills, and growth of our writers, developers, project managers, and creators inspire us each day. We have learned together and helped each other through challenging projects and times.

We suppose anyone with an organization claims to have the best people, but we will always argue that iD8-TripleSSS truly does have the best.  We do not settle for less than the best and are thankful everyday that each of these excellent professionals chooses to work and grow with us.

A client once said we are “transparent,” complementing us deeply and something we take to heart. “It’s personal” was our original mission when we opened our doors 10 years ago. “It’s still personal.”

Thank you! May your New Year be Healthy, Happy, and Prosperous-- from all of us at iD8-TripleSSS Media Development, LLC. 

Classrooms Come Alive with Interactive Textbook Platforms

The K-12 educational environment is changing at a rapid pace, for the better.

Thanks to the constant upgrades and innovations in the tech industry, classrooms are feeling the positive effects and are able to elevate the learning environment for students to a whole new level.

Computers are in most classrooms these days and the amount of students with access to tablets, computers and smartphones has never been higher, and is growing each year. With these technological upgrades, students are afforded the opportunity to learn online some of the time in a blended class and have unprecedented access to information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. "Amazing things are happening in education right now, " says Mike Sullivan Teacher and Co-Founder of Noyo, an interactive language software company. "Once a fire is ignited and a student has a burning desire to learn more in a subject, they now have constant access with no one to hold them back."

According to Ariel Diaz, Founder, and CEO of BOUNDLESS, "textbooks are the curriculum of the past and we're {Boundless} working to build the curriculum of the future." Interactive textbooks that can be custom-designed by educational publishing gurus such as iD8-Triple SSS Media Development, LLC. Boundless offers a unique opportunity for all those engaged in the educational environment: students, teachers, parents and publishers alike. "Technology will only improve over time, but the old textbook in hard copy form can only age. New platforms will only get better,” says Sullivan, who cannot imagine ever paying $100 for a textbook again and which will probably be outdated by the time it hits the classroom.

These new interactive textbook platforms will not only offer unlimited access to learning for students of all ages at a fraction of the price, but they also make it easier for teachers to focus learning goals on the needs of each specific student. Parents win too because the classroom can come home with their child and offer extra tutorials and assistance in problem areas that students may not get during the class day.

Educational media companies like iD8-Triple SSS Media Development benefit as well because these interactive textbook platforms allow for top-notch customer service. Books are no longer created with the hope that they will be purchased; they are created through a very streamlined process and delivered through specific projects at the request of a client, minimizing duplication of products and reducing costs.

The only drawback to these new interactive textbook platforms is that “it is hard to support everything out there,” and keep pace with the constant changes and advancements.

Guest Blogger: Daphne Butas
Daphne is a seasoned writer and former teacher who specializes in developing educational content for use in books, manuals, testing materials and online resources. She lives with her husband and 3 children in Falls Church, VA and thinks that motherhood has been the greatest and hardest educational experience of her life.

Where Are You In Your Digital Journey?

I think of blogs as informative and contemplative, which brings me today to the ethereal and yet concrete future of educational publishing. It seems many of our clients are in the midst of gigantic internal shifts ranging from how they are organized to how they produce all types of print, digital, and blended products. While it has been going on for a while, the transitions are now going to shift hiring, roles, reporting structures, and the selling conventions of all products.

What has that meant for iD8-TripleSSS Media Development, LLC? We now have an Advisory Board comprised of some of the greatest minds in educational publishing from K-12 and higher education. We have added a Managing Editor, Allison Murray, effective November 1. Her job title, we decided, doesn't need "digital" in it because the shift now means that it's understood that we are ALL doing working in the digital space. We work with a wonderful company, Finder of Fabulous, who is directing our social media strategy, and we've increased our bandwidth for speed, storage, and transmission because we work almost solely in the cloud now. We totally revamped www.id8triplesss.com to be fully reflective of all that is noted above.

It's fascinating to us here at iD8-TripleSSS who started writing content for the digital space five years ago in small doses and then three years ago in large doses to now being a leader in providing digital content. Today, we are confident in not only writing the content but also building the product as needed—ranging from courseware to curriculum.

What does that mean for products and how students view them? We are working on two App products designed for the iPad-type tablets (the big iPads but I'm sure it'll be for the smaller one, too, now). Students are getting annoyed if their texts are not available online, even if they bought the print version. Students are getting annoyed by carrying large textbooks and would rather get them online--and will pay for them in an online version just to not carry them. This alone will drive what teachers and professors advocate for their students, along with price. This has led to our working on digital texts, acquiring authors to create digital textbooks, and developing content that fills these needs. And yet, we love our print products just as much!

Open source options are finding their way into our bag of tricks as well as this market continues to form actively and “disruptively.”  We don’t think open source options are disruptive; they are innovative and are changing the way we all view access to content and our expectation of how it’s built.

Join us on this educational digital journey; draw upon our knowledge and excitement; let us bring you forward with us!

Susan

In Attendance at EdNet2012

Earlier this month I attended EdNet2012, a major networking conference for professionals involved in the educational market-space. There were lots of technology organizations there. Large organizations such as Kno and Overdrive, and up-and-comers like us, iD8-TripleSSS, who were there to learn and make new contacts. Although the conference saddled the educational market-space, the sessions and companies were dominated by players in the K-12 market.

Several promising connections were made at EdNet, especially with technology partners that build or have functional products essential to our future service offerings.  We had meetings with companies that have state-of-the-art platforms for e-learning, m-learning and everything in between. We also met with some fun companies that may not be a direct fit, but have really wonderful products meant to engage kids of all ages-including me. The company that particularly stands out is FableVision.  Check out their Mayan Mysteries social studies adventure that is hot off the press.

iD8-TripleSSS has always been strong in higher education and, the vocational and career markets. We have a smaller, but steady flow of business in K-12 including key areas such as STEM and several of the health professions. We are currently creating content for the lower grades for a 2013 App release and some other smaller products. Perhaps our biggest take-away from EdNet is that it has motivated us to move swiftly towards some new business initiatives in the K-12 area that will transition some of our services into a “service- as - product model” - stay tuned for more on this in later posts.

There were specific themes that came up over and over in EdNet and I want to share them:

• Implementing the Common Core on a state-by-state basis
• New online models
• Digitally enhanced learning
• Assessments, data, analytics
• Adaptive testing
• Interactive textbook platforms
• Blended learning solutions
• School options
• Solutions for the special needs population
• Models of instruction and design

Over the next few months we will elaborate more on these themes and bring in some guest bloggers to share their thoughts. I continue to be excited, motivated and grateful to work in educational publishing at a time when there is so much opportunity to innovate and set new standards in learning. 

Marion