Snow Kidding

Just a quick post to point out two articles in today's Denver Post. The first article is about how Colorado Ski Resorts are leveraging technology to get the word out about ski conditions.

"The snow message is absolutely as important as it has ever been for us," said Vail Mountain's senior vice president and chief operating officer, Chris Jarnot.

What has changed is that everyone with a mobile phone can be a snow reporter — and everyone with a mobile phone or computer can be the instant recipient of the latest snow news.

Not even a year ago, resorts' hopes hinged on snow during televised Broncos games. Resorts issued snowfall totals a day after the snow fell. They bought powdery ads in magazines six months before the season began.

The idea was that resort reservation desks were inundated with calls when football stadiums were frosted white, and last year's photos of untrammeled snow were good enough.

But by 5 a.m. this frosty Christmas week morning, the news of new snow was posted on websites for Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone, the four resorts that host more than a third of Colorado's roughly 12 million annual skier visits. It was waiting in the inboxes of thousands of skiers. Newspapers, radio and TV stations had it ready for morning reports.

Copper Mountain and Sunlight have eliminated the middlemen like Semrow — allowing Web surfers to check the snow themselves via webcam.

"Now we see that blip (of vacation interest and bookings) as soon as the first flake flies," Jarnot said.

And here's the quantification of that shift:

Vail Resorts held back about 80 percent of its multimillion-dollar winter marketing campaign by skipping the traditional one-page ads in national magazines like Outside, Men's Health and Conde Nast Traveler. Instead, the company joined the social-networking revolution and now e-pitches its powder.

The company took the money it would have spent on those pricey magazine ads and kept it for up-to-date campaigns issued through e-mail, newspapers, search-engine display ads and online banners.

It's a plan that works with skiers' changing habits: Where they once booked holidays months in advance, today they are increasingly apt to book the week before.

80 percent. Wow.

The second article was a brief report on the accuracy of ski resort snow total reports. The interesting thing here was not that resorts in New England (the study didn't look at Colorado) tend to inflate their snow totals slightly, it was this:

Ironically, during the study period, a new iPhone application emerged that allows users to report their own snow observations at various resorts.

Suddenly, according to Zinman and Zitzewitz, "exaggeration falls sharply, especially at resorts where iPhones can get reception."

So, perhaps nothing profound here, but another indication of two of the shifts that I think we're seeing.

First, a shift away from traditional marketing and broadcast advertising to more targeted, passion-based, direct-to-those-who-are-interested-when-they-are-interested campaigns, with the resultant elimination of various middlemen (including traditional media). It's also a "just in time" information delivery service, which allows people to much more easily adapt their plans at the last minute ("they are increasingly apt to book the week before"), which I think is an interesting emerging meme that we'll see a lot of discussion about in the next few years.

Second, the continuing rise of user-generated content, in this case real-time snow reports, that - at least in a small way - continues to democratize access to information and transfer some of the power from businesses to customers ( and governments to citizens; and producers to consumer/producers). As transparency increases, behaviors change, which is also another interesting meme I think we'll be talking about.

So, this post is mostly just to point you to those two interesting tidbits, but I do wonder about the potential impact to educational institutions. Passion-based, just-in-time delivery of information and the importance of transparency and users generating relevant and meaningful information for each other - I wonder what we can learn from that?

Macbeth: The Musical

Well, okay, maybe not a musical. But Anne Smith and her students are doing some creative interpretations:

I decided that rather than me creating the piece of music, it would be a great opportunity to connect music with literature. Gary gave me the suggestion of having the kids connect the piece of music to something they have written. Since we are reading William Shakespeare’s Macbeth in class, we had just completed two papers dealing with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth while watching three film versions (Royal Shakespeare Company -Ian McKellan, Dame Judy Dench, English Shakespeare Company- modern version, and Roman Polansky version) of the first act comparing what each director was trying to show through their interpretations.

My students were quite excited to begin the process of composing a piece of music to fit a character. In period 2, we started talking about Lady Macbeth and her personality. What would we want to show in the song? We decided that we would show her in three stages from act one. We would show her elation at seeing her husband return home, her decision to not let King Duncan leave the castle by killing him so that Macbeth would become king, and finally her anger at Macbeth with his ambivalence about killing the king. We had some students who are as musically inclined as I am and so they worked on the lyrics (a.k.a. quotes) to fit with the music as well as finding visuals to support. The other kids, worked on the song. Amazingly, they all worked so well together testing sounds, putting together measure after measure, playing the notes, time and again. They decided the instruments that would best describe Lady Macbeth (flute) and how her tone would change into a French horn through her change in personality. Then they picked the instruments that would best accompany the sounds of Lady Macbeth. A few different kids took turns running the computer with other kids shouting up their thoughts. It seemed like organized chaos. One thing I must add here is how much I learned by watching and participating with them. I learned all sorts of vocabulary words about music (crescendo, decrescendo, staccato) and how to semi-compose music (you really have to pay attention to the notes you select with each instrument). But mostly, what I am hoping period two took away from today, and what they learned, is that music is a part of literature. When talking with them about the song, they asked my opinion about a particular part. I said it needs to sound like murder. Tristan responded that murder is an A and C sharp. And then another student, John, responding that we need to put in the key of death which is apparently E flat? As my department members were listening into our conversation they were enthralled with what these kids were doing. They were connecting Lady Macbeth’s descent into evil with music. You can hear the three distinct parts which they had mapped out at the beginning of class. It was amazing that I had kids come in on their off-hours to finish the song - and better yet, these were all boys! Boys that were asking to continue the learning. One even asked me at the end if we could do this for every book we read. Tomorrow we are going to play it for the class, make changes, and add the lyrics and visuals.

There's plenty more to read, including period 5's approach,

What was really interesting about the different approaches between my period 2 and period 5 is that it reflected how they have approached learning challenges in the class so far. Period 2 approached it collaboratively all working together, where period 5 broke into groups of music creators and lyrics composers.

examples of what they've created so far, a Picasa web album with pictures of them working,

and Anne will upload the final versions for each period once they're finished.

So, what have your students created today?

And A Child Shall Lead Them

At the risk of turning this into the "Did You Know" blog, I wanted to share a quick story with you. As a result of the Did You Know presentation going a little bit viral, I've been getting lots of emails with some interesting stories. I may eventually blog about some of those, but this is probably my favorite.

Quite a few folks in my school district have been getting one of the emails with the link to the presentation - and most of them don't know that it was created here. Some of them are forwarding it on to other folks that do know where it came from so they send it on to me. I then sometimes ask about who sent it to them, just to get a feel for how it's spreading. Here's a response I received today:

Interestingly enough, [another teacher in her building] sent it to me. It was sent to her by her daughter who is a sixth grader here.

Now, I'm probably reading too much into this, but to me it's somehow apropos that a sixth grader is informing the adults around her about this presentation.

What Will You Publish?

Both Will Richardson and Christian Long included this picture in a post, but I wanted to pass it along to my staff as well. (This is the version from Will's blog, so I'm assuming he gets the photo credit.)

I'm thinking of asking Tracy (our librarian) for some shelf space, and creating a "virtual" shelf somehow on our school website to highlight some of the digital works that our students are doing (since for some reason everybody doesn't read The Fischbowl).