XPlane Empathy Map

Recently, students in entrepreneurship began utilizing an amazing tool to assist the development of a business model; The Business Model Canvas. 

The Business Model Canvas focuses on visually depicting core elements of a business model in an effort to establish clear and consistent communication between all stakeholders of the business.  The model itself is an extremely effective teaching tool and encompasses many elements of the Learning Focused Schools model.

One foundational concept of the BMC is putting people first.  The model's first building block defines Customer Segments.  In the past, the challenge has been to provide a tangible method of understanding buyer behavior, and customers' pain points.  This is where the BMC, specifically the XPlane Empathy Map enhanced student understanding.

The empathy map forces a student to recognize and understand what truly matters to a potential customer.  I chose to utilize projection technology to emphasize this concept, and to create a concrete example of its use.

The empathy map was projected on the whiteboard and students were prompted to think of a potential customer for Microsoft Office products.  Then, using sticky notes, students responded to the prompts of the empathy map and placed the notes to the whiteboard.

Following this practice, students composed a customer profile using the data created by the class.

In addition, students were permitted to take pictures of our class-created empathy map and can use it as they prepare to develop an empathy map for their own businesses.

Project Based Learning

After dedicating substantial time to learning foundational marketing concepts, particularly market segmentation and evaluating potential target markets and their respective buyer behavior, students in Sports and Entertainment were ready for a challenge...

Create a brand new Major League Baseball franchise.

The entire project required the successful implementation of technology resources.  Initially, students had to establish benchmarks that described the average MLB city and its inhabitants.  Students composed a multiple page report on these findings and evaluated a United States city to determine whether or not it was a natural fit for an expansion franchise.  Students collaborated by storing all meaningful links to a todaysmeet back-channel for everyone to access.

Students studied their chosen community and completed market segmentation to determine if the target market represented a meaningful market and could successfully compete with current MLB markets.  Through this research, students gauged the heritage and culture of the community and creating branding for the franchise by establishing a team name, logo, color scheme, and uniform.  The uniform design was completed using the Riddell.com custom uniform design program.  Once designed students utilized the screenshot feature of MS Word to place the uniform into a presentation software program, Prezi.

The final tech. piece stemmed from Google Maps.  Students identified prime real estate in, or around, the metropolitan area.  Satellite images of this location were captured and placed within their presentation.

The FAFSA

Found this easy-to-follow tutorial to help you and your family with the FAFSA.  Hope it helps.

Prezi

Prezi isn't necessarily a new technology, however, I have noticed that students seem more engaged when viewing content through a Prezi lens. 

I created a Prezi to illustrate a supply and demand schedule and how to develop supply and demand curves from these schedules.  Students were able to access the slides at their convenience as it was posted on their class website.