Teachers need fresh ideas and material to help their classes learn, and each new idea takes time to work into a fully useful learning resource. However, teachers (at least in the UK) are also under increasing pressure to spend more time marking, preparing for exams, filling out forms etc. How can anyone have time to fit it all in and still have a life outside of school?

I had the idea for a new resource sharing site for teachers back in July 2006. It seemed obvious from talking to many of my friends in teaching that the increasing time pressures of modern life meant something had to give, and increasingly it was the class preparation time getting squeezed. What if we could give teachers a simple way of finding the best material produced by other teachers on the subject they want to teach, plus enable them to download and adapt it how they want? Most teachers rely on textbooks for some of their classes; yet the internet allows this kind of sharing of resources to be more immediate, direct and democratic. Teachable.net is a textbook for the 21st century.

We got the site up and running in October 2007, and have been building up the content ever since. We don’t aim to be high-tech; we fit in with the current technology in schools (if you’re looking for acronyms and tech-speak, try http://www.adlnet.gov/!) and don’t require teachers to learn new IT skills. In fact, we aim to be very simple to use indeed. We’ll be building on the features as we go, but the core feature is that you can search for, download and use the right resource / file exactly when you need it – even if you’ve only got 10 minutes before the lesson starts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Teachable.net website, UK teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.