25 Wild Ideas For Your School District
Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA students were asked to come up with a list of business ideas. Each student (there are 9 of them) came up with 111 ideas and posted the ideas for free on their blog. The point of this was to show that, as they put it, “Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution.”
It’s an important lesson… and especially important to our mission here at SocialMediaSchools.com. What this means for our schools is that nothing is going to change until some of our schools step up and act on the ideas we are discussing here on the site. Our schools need to build up some courage, sign up for these various social media websites, and start interacting with their communities online.
Of course, some schools will receive criticizm for their online actions… and others will have great success. But we won’t learn a thing until we start to act!
Now, the 999 ideas these students came up with don’t all have to do with education and schools, but many of them do.
I went through the first 500 business ideas on their list and pulled out just a few of the school/education oriented business ideas and have listed them below. Maybe there’s an idea in here that you could implement today?
- Prepackaged school supplies based on the lists from the school districts .
- Tutorial videos for technological skills (word processing, internet applications, email) for people who don’t know how to navigate technology but need it.
- Web-based language tutors leveraging Skype and Google Docs for curriculum.
- Web package for a school system that allows parents to see their kids’ school schedules, grades, lunches, sports activities.
- Application to sell to universities that allows students to access their transcripts online.
- Monthly subscription service for unlimited ebooks on your ebook reader device. Rhapsody/Netflix model for ebooks.
- “How to live on a small budget” website written by college students for college student for all sizable college towns sponsored by local merchant coupons.
- Spring Shadows – program where kids can shadow business people for a short two weeks internship to see what they want to major in once they go to college and what they might want to do once they graduate.
- Artists’ Playground. This is a building that has rooms setup for ceramics, painting, silk screenings, theater, writing, open mic, dance, photography, etc. This building will also have social areas for people to mingle over coffee and healthy foods. People pay a monthly membership to have access and it is also rented out for events.
- Internet and webcam set up for seniors to communicate with grandkids.
- School real estate rental company – Company that specializes in renting out underutilized school rooms during the summer.
- IP Scanner. Scans images straight to flickr or similar service. Great for archiving family pictures or kids drawings.
- Clipping service for high school athletes parents.
- Retro-fitting older school buses with seats with seatbelts.
- Book packaging for great college writing and emerging writers.
- For younger students, nap time is often hard to relax and in a bright room. There should be a company that creates comfortable nap time products for kids.
- Creating a website community for freelance professors (professional educators with a specific expertise; different from tutors in the sense that they are not preparing students for a certain test or “actual class”) to connect with students who want to be educated via an alternative route. The ideal site would essentially be a hub for professor profiles/portfolios with a variety of mediums for conversation between the students and the professors for hire. Comments/rating system (no anonymity including a record of that person’s comments rates so you can get a better picture of who is saying what). The idea is similar to something like pick a prof. that most college kids use now to pick their classes; however, the emphasis with pick a prof is typically to pick easy classes to graduate where as this would be an effort to allow professors and students to negotiate the value of the education without going through the university as a middle man. Monetization routes: site advertisements, membership fees for students and/or profs, selling books written by professors for commission.
- Build Your Own Back Pack Shop.
- Online mentoring program for students of all ages (Pen pals that teach each other skills online.)
- Citizen journalism website.
- A website that teaches kids how to do quant trading. The site would come with a data feed, dozens of pre-packaged statistical tests that could be deployed or combined in various ways, and the ability to do backtesting to see if this strategy would have been effective on previous data.
- Children’s school that finds the right balance between Marine Corps boot camp methods, Montessori methods, and liberal arts education – located half the year in big cities worldwide and half the year in wilderness camp setting.
- A website for elementary and middle school kids that helps them build a portfolio of their best artwork, writing, sports accomplishments, etc.
- Web cam at school events so you can see your kid when you can’t make it.
- A high school homework site that markets to the schools and teachers who want to know what their neighbors require and post best-of results.
To view the entire list of ideas Seth Godin’s students came up with, just head on over to www.sixmonthmba.com.
