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You may have noticed the ratings for previous contributions on Teachable have changed, and therefore where they appear in the lists of resources. This is to correct two flaws with the way we displayed overall rating.

1. Anything above a rating of 4 (e.g. 4.2) was being displayed as 5 stars. Now you only get 5 stars if the rating is more than 4.5 and rounds up to 5.

2. We previously gave resources an extra star if they’d been downloaded more than 20 times, to confirm that they were popular. That now seems unnecessary since more popular resources tend to get lots of positive ratings and reviews.

We hope you feel these changes are fair. Our intention is to be as open as possible with peer review.

Thank you to all those that took part in our survey on science revision tools last month. We ran the draw to pick a winner for our £50 worth of Amazon gift certificates, and the lucky winner is Melanie Cook at John Hanson school in Andover. Congratulations Melanie!

The results were pretty positive, and we’ll keep you posted on the development of our new product later in the summer.

We are proud that our contributing members earn rewards from their approved content on Teachable, but we realise some of you would prefer the rewards to go towards a cause you support.

As part of our aims as a social enterprise we want to go further, and can add a promise that if you want to donate your rewards to an educational charity we will match your donation pound for pound. So we’ll give our 50% of the net download revenue to the charity you choose.

Just email us at contribute @ teachable.net with the details of the charity when you claim your rewards as cash.

Teachable has partnered with a new lesson creation tool, The Learning Score, to bring you this month’s competition. Any lesson materials uploaded with an accompanying Learning Score (.lsz) file, using a free trial copy of the software will be judged by our editors for a chance to win one of three full versions of the software to use in school.

Two personal licences for the Learning Score will be given to the first resources entering the competition to get two 5* ratings for our contributors. Hurray to get there first!

Terms and Conditions

P.S. You can now upload any resources in ZIP format, although they won’t be as easy for members to preview and check before they buy. We hope to bring the ability to preview ZIP and LSZ files by February – please let us know if that would be useful.

We went through the curricula for GCSE and A-level science courses last week, and there are still a few topics where we are lacking content. If you think you have content to contribute in those areas, and it gets approved, we’d be happy to feature it in our next science email (earning you extra royalties). It will also be much appreciated by our other members

• Chemistry of cooking – the chemical changes to food during cooking
• Food additives – different types of flavour and functional additions, and issues around their use
• Food contamination – how to ensure food does not contain chemicals that may be harmful to health
• Perfumes – how these products are developed, ethical issues with animal testing
• Plastics and polymers – the structures that give these materials useful properties
• Risk – the difference between a popular and rational / scientific model of risk
• How do scientists develop explanations of the Earth and Space?

Along with our main aims of saving time for teachers, and improving the quality of lessons everywhere, we are also proud of paying 50% of our earnings back to the teacher community.

We’re pleased to announce our ‘silver anniversary’ today; we have paid royalties of £25,000 since launch to our teacher contributors.

So here’s to all our hard working teacher supporters, and we wish them every success in the future!

I was pointed to a fascinating talk this morning by a California maths teacher who nicely illustrates how spoon-fed learning from textbooks destroys pupil engagement and creativity.

The principles here can he applied way beyond maths; here’s a science teacher who has experienced a similar class buzz from unstructured problem solving.

Lot’s of teachers on his blog commented that they loved the idea, but they just didn’t have the preparation time. That’s where Teachable comes in…

After gathering feedback from our moderators and lots of other members we have decided to award the £1000 Most Creative Teaching Resource prize to Simon Perkins of for his KS3 Physics Revision presentation, making use of the Deal or No Deal idea.

Simon has been teaching science in Manchester, UK for the last 8 years, and is currently at Stockport College. You can browse his other creative teaching resources here. We look forward to seeing more material from him in the future, and we hope his college benefits from unlimited Teachable access over the next year.

We have always believed that a wide variety of quality reviews on Teachable was the key to a better service for teachers.

Over the last couple of months we have been changing that process to encourage more reviews for members, and to make it faster for regular contributors to get their ideas live.  This involves an On Trial step where a small number of members can download the files for free in order to review.

The other big change is that contributors now have the power to decide whether to publish files in the light of feedback from the community.  We realise not everyone is confident their idea will be a winner, and may want to get some feedback before it goes on to become chargeable.

Once a contributor has proved their ability by having more than 5 resources approved on the system, we can skip the ‘Pending’ stage so their files go live quicker.

Teachable now allows a greater range of filetypes (Flash, ActivStudio, Smart Notebook) to be uploaded, and we are hoping to capture some of the creativity these software packages allow for class resources.

We have a good range of materials for secondary science and maths, but we are particularly looking for more creative material for:

• Primary-level science
• Primary geography
• KS3 History

Good example of the possibilities of Flash used in class is from IBoard or Furbles for primary age , or this CellsAlive animation for A-level.

If you’re not sure what our members would find useful then have a look at our further guidelines, or email us with some samples.

Of course if Powerpoint and Word is what you are comfortable in, then teachers are definitely looking for that as well.