Instead of doing an open house at my school we hold an annual Parent Symposium. The idea is that our staff comes in and gives presentations to our parents about whats going on at the school. All in all it’s a pretty neat way to get in-touch with our parents. Next year I think I’d like to get some students involved in the presentations, but I digress.

One of the presentations that I put on was about using social software with our students to help foster collaboration and complete projects. As it turns out one of the parents runs a company that has workers around the world which is making a pretty neat LED product. While he was watching my presentation about what we’re doing with kids he began thinking “holy crap, my company needs to be using these tools”. Shortly after the symposium he sent me an email asking if I would come down and talk to his people. A short five months later we got together.

On Monday I met with all of the heavies from this company. More-or-less what I did a needs assessment. His company needs a quick way for people to work together on word-processor documents and spreadsheets. Let’s see. Hmm. Which tool would totally take care of what they need? How about:

As I began to show them the functionality in Google Docs and Spreadsheets questions started to come up. How much space do we get? (that one I could answer, 25GB per user) How much does it cost? (got that too, $50 annual per) Can our employees have our url as their email address? (on it, yep) Can we work offline? (well, they the just announced Google Gears for Apps. Like today. Pretty cool, huh?). Do the spread sheets have functions like Excel? (I don’t know, let’s check it out. As it turns out, yes) How secure is it? (I don’t want to speak to that too much, but there are several Fortune 500 companies using it. See what they have to say.)

So, they’ve asked me to come in and do some professional development. Hints were made about full-time employment opportunities (which I don’t want), pay (how about a stake in the company instead of cash?), and how often (probably once a week for an hour).

If nothing else this should be an adventure, but to spin this back to kids; if I can get some people in the private sector using these tools, and using them successfully, perhaps they will start to demand that schools use the tools. Maybe. Possibly. Could be in some way good for kids.

Graphic Credit: SaaS and Office 2.0 evolving towards Enterprise 2.0? no suing, please.

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