Advertisers Beware!

While browsing through one of my favorite lesson plans exchange sites today, a quick tour of the recent additions page, I noticed over half of the posts were from a particular educational software site. I clicked on one of their lesson plans and quickly discovered the instructions consisted of two lines.

1. 1. Subscribe to their site
2. 2. Check out this great resource, with a link to that lesson on their site

But not much more to tell you anything about it or how to integrate it into the classroom.

Please excuse this rant, but, when I log into a teacher exchange website, I'm expecting to see posts from other teachers, as opposed to spam. If I wanted spam, I could log into Facebook more often, or revisit an old chatroom I used to hang out in.

If you are an advertiser/software vendor, please post only a few posts in teacher exchange sites telling us a little about your site and ways it may be helpful to us as an educator, rather than dominating the site with useless posts of links to your site. These are not helpful to us, and I find these to be quite a turn off! I've learned much more by a month of two in Twitter communicating with other educator and learning from them about sites that I can really use, and ways they are useful. These are the sites that I repost in emails to my staff, and write about in this blog. Rest assured, if you are an advertiser that posts nothing more than links to subscribe to your site and a resource page on your site, I will avoid your site. An advertisement is supposed to entice the viewer to your product, not turn them off from it. So spend a few extra minutes telling us about your site and what it can do for us rather than simply posting links to pages in your site.

Just my thoughts. Who am I? I am the consumer you are targeting, and I am the consumer that can make or break your business through all of my contacts, and their contacts.