Last sunday eduFire.com was hosting the second eduConference under the headline “Turning Teachers into Rockstars”. This great and inspirational meeting was followed up by a very interesting and even a bit frightening presentation of Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire.com who talked about “Connected Consumership“.
Koichi of tofugu.com asked me on friday if I could hop in for a presentation as another presenter cancelled his appearance on the eduCon. As I am a quite spontaneous person, I said “count me in” and then started thinking. Not always the best order but I came up with a title for my presentation very quickly: “It’s a long way to the top, if you wanna Rock’n'Roll”.
In this presentation I described the possibilities and the hurdles on the way of becoming a teacher rockstar. According to the quietness in the text chat during my presentation and the positive comments afterwards, I think people liked it which makes me happy, of course.
Me, explaining how to become the teaching Bono 
The second presentation was held by Joseph Sunga of TeachStreet.com, a cool start-up based in Seattle, USA. TeachStreet.com is basically the virtual flyer you once received in your mail but much better, of course. Teachers can set up their own micro site on TeachStreet.com describing their services etc. The great thing is that the customers have the opportunity to rate their services (which brings us to the topic of “connected consumers” of Jon’s presentation later on).
Joeseph Sungs of TeachStreet.com
Joe’s presentation was about “Empowering Teachers” so how to turn your hobby into a real business. He talked about how to be an expert, how to market yourself and how to grow your business.
I hope Joe and me were able to show the attendees a bit how to become a teaching rockstar. I had lots of fun and I am looking forward to the next eduCon on eduFire.com!
Here is the review of the eduConference of eduFire.com and TeachStreet.com.
But, as I said, this was only the first part of an inspirational evening on eduFire.com. After the eduCon Jon prepared a presentation on the connected consumer. It is a really interesting topic.
As I am not an expert yet, I will qoute Jon here:
One of the biggest shifts in modern society is the shift towards connected consumerism. What is connected consumerism? It’s when I buy something not because I see a mass market advertisement but rather because a friend or tastemaker mentions it. Tools like Twitter and Facebook amplify the effect of connected consumerism and this trend has intensified dramatically in the last couple of years.
The most shocking but also interesting point for me was to imagine a world without advertising. I’ll have to talk about this with Jon again, when I made up my mind about this.
