KidBiz3000: being 'pushy' helps integrate tech into teaching

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, July, 2002

Push technology got a lot of play in the business world a number of years ago, but fizzled out as companies struggled to find ways to make it profitable. Now, a relatively new company called KidBiz, Inc. (Howell, NJ, www.kidbiz3000.com) is using its KidBiz3000 product to push content to schools. According to founder and ceo Saki Dodelson, push is the perfect vehicle to get teachers to integrate technology into teaching, because it delivers a daily lesson right to your desktop. And if the 18-month old company s financials are any indication, Dodelson may be on the right track. During the six-month period ending in May 2002, income from subscriptions was over $1.2 million, while expenditures during this period were a little under $500,000.

The idea behind the subscription-based website, KidBiz3000, is to make web content manageable and safe for teachers and students, and to engage them on a daily basis. KidBiz3000 includes daily news from Reuters and CNN that is geared to eight reading levels and matched to state standards, as well as an interactive stock market game that teaches both math concepts and financial literacy. Kids can check their stocks online daily, buy and sell stocks, create their own portfolios, earn enough 'money' to choose from a wide assortment of merchandise and practice purchasing goods, and even pit themselves against other kids a la' Louis Rukeyser to see who's the best at picking stocks.

The product also includes an 'Intranet-like' email system, according to Rivki Locker, vice president of curriculum and product design. E-mail is 'parsed' for children at a variety of reading levels. The daily e-mail includes news articles that feature maps, supplemental materials, and customized dictionaries. Dodelson believes that just getting an email every day is a great motivator for students to develop reading and language skills, particularly in schools where students don't have daily access to a computer at home. Because kids in the same classroom receive e-mail geared to their individual reading levels but covering the same topic, teachers know that students will all be reading the same basic information despite a disparity in learning levels. This means creating a lesson plan is far easier. Email is also used to send customers a portfolio of student achievement on a 60-day basis, giving a mini-assessment to keep everyone on top of what kids are learning. In fact, KidBiz is currently working on implem enting a pilot with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA, www.nwea.org) that would use NWEA's computer adaptive testing as an assessment tool for students' reading levels and progress on an ongoing basis.

Tech Teachers Like It, Too

Dodelson explains that the design of KidBiz3000 includes a separate technology section that allows computer and technology teachers to work with existing classroom curricula, rather than giving random assignments that are unaligned to regular classroom work. "We were hearing from technology teachers, who felt as if they were working in complete isolation," explains Dodelson. "They just didn't have a way to learn what classroom teachers were doing on a day to day basis."

The KidBiz3000 approach allows tech teachers to work in conjunction with classroom teachers on advancing the core curriculum. For instance, the tech section features tutorials and 'cheat-sheets' designed to get kids up to speed on basic computer and keyboarding skills, such as Microsoft Word, Power Point, and Excel usage. By working with the same daily news stories being sent out by KidBiz3000, Dodelson says the computer work now becomes integrated with the daily lesson. What's more, the technology projects are fully aligned with national standards, and revolve around common educational themes. Dodelson believes this is one of the big selling points for schools, since it allows computer teachers to assign a project that will teach kids not only how to use a spreadsheet, but how to use a spreadsheet for a specific class assignment.

The big idea, Dodelson continues, is to integrate the whole learning package, allowing students to gather knowledge at their own proficiency level, for teachers to align their assignments to state standards and individual learning levels, and for curriculum to drive the technology assignments to give them true relevance. KidBiz is now looking to partner on an assessment package that Dodelson says would be similar to an HR(human resources) testing package, assessing both grade level and technological proficiency.

Revenue Redux

The KidBiz revenue model is diverse. Revenue is generated primarily from subscriptions, starting at $15 per student, and going down as the number of students increases, and for multiyear contracts. Subscriber setup and maintenance costs are less than $1 per user, and the KidBiz3000 core content remains the same regardless of the number of users. The company currently has a subscription base of over 200,000 student and teacher users in New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Washington, DC, Florida, and Chicago. Content can also be customized -- for instance, New York has implemented a cross-curriculum approach to a specialized art program it uses.