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.

On 23rd July the one bright spot in an otherwise grey July took place at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Teachable held it’s inaugural meetup for employees, editors and top contributors. After a successful year expanding the service Teachable offers in a range of subjects, we wanted to take the opportunity to get a number of people closely involved in the site together to discuss what features we should add next

There was general agreement that we need to:

• Give the ability to preview files on-screen (and especially animations)
• Make the search more intelligent, including some user-specific preferences
• Add more detail to the reviews to make them as unbiased as possible

We also announced the winners of our ongoing competition for Slide of the Month. The winner of the Summer Term slide (and a £50 prize) went to Tandi Clausen-May, a maths contributor:

Her winning slide (from the Angles as a Turn resource) is so animated that we have actually captured it as a video:

You can view more of Tandi’s maths teaching resources.

Slide of the Spring Term went to a longstanding contributor, Toby Tufton, who produced an original and beautifully presented drag-and-drop Powerpoint worksheet on human digestion. Well done Toby!

I’m intrigued by the disconnect we see between ICT advisors we talk to and the teachers who use our site. People who advise schools on ICT use are usually concerned about whether our content is compatible with a virtual learning environment; the teachers are just concerned that it is high quality and easy to adapt and use in the class. All our files are licenced to use on a VLE (for our school subscribers), but we don’t provide them along with complex metadata – it is often simpler for teachers just to drop them into the online courses / folders of their choice.

My personal view is that the ‘SCORM’ standard adopted by a lot of digital content producers to fit into a VLE is just not suited to most primary and secondary school situations. It was developed by the US Military to make stand alone eLearning modules more compatible, and so many of the tags are not that relevant to school presentations and worksheets. In a way that only military equipment can be, it is also insanely overspecced for the job it is trying to do.

We’d be very happy to comply with a simpler common standard, and we are looking at ways to standardise some of tagging.

I’d be interested in hearing if anyone things we should be providing Teachable files in ‘VLE compatible’ ZIP file format. At the moment our development priorities are elsewere.

Teachable.net is offering schools the ability to use their existing digital teaching resources to generate extra funds as an entire school/department. 

File sharing helps fellow teachers improve their classes, keep ideas fresh and save themselves valuable time.  Schools accrue vast amounts of knowledge, ideas and resources which, we believe, should be rewarded financially if shared with others.  Our site allows teachers to share their digital resources with the wider teaching community – while getting paid as they are used. So, if some of your teachers have developed their own resources (Powerpoints, worksheets, SOWs etc), then gather them together and read on…
 

Teachable is offering 50% of any download income we make out of selling your departments files. Therefore, if your teachers upload at least 60 resources to Teachable.net this term, we can guarantee you rewards of at least £500 for the first year.
 

This means everyone benefits. The more resources uploaded, the more rewards are available.  There’s no hidden exemptions, other than the quality of the files is acceptable, and your school gets the benefit first-hand.   
 

There are 3 simple steps to getting started:
1)    Sign up for a free account and upload your files online – www.teachable.net/contribute.aspx.
OR post us a sample selection of your files on a CD to the above address (which we will only use once we have discussed with you).
2)    Our editors check the files for accuracy and any copyright issues.
3)    Every time one of our 18,000+ members chooses your file for their lesson, your school earns a reward.
 

Help us build a site that helps teachers take advantage of the most useful collection of teaching materials on the web, while making them available at low-cost to teachers all over the world.
 

Fed up of the textbook and the questions it poses year after year. Even the latest software is unlikely to have included recent local or world events. Challenge yourself to apply “The Credit Crunch” to as many aspects of maths as possible. When you have devised a cunning and inventive lesson, send it in to Teachable to share with others.

To get you in the mood, have a look at “The Credit Crunch Song”:

Here are some Credit Crunch issues to get you started:

• House prices down our way – data gathering and handling
• Renting or buying – calculating yields and basic cash flow
• Jobs and unemployment – calculating how much you have to earn to be better off than collecting unemployment benefit. You could draw a graph to show the intersect.
• Cars (buying and selling) – how about calculating percentage commission for the seller?
• The Budget & Cost cutting – even your lowest ability class can probably do better than Gordon at this!

Hopefully this should give some food for thought. The list is by no means exhaustive. For those of you who aren’t interested in the Credit Crunch, what about the New Flu Pandemic from Mexico!
Finally, there are a selection of animations from Microsoft Office Clipart (search MONEY) – could be handy to save time for your Powerpoints.

We promise to keep you informed about what Teachable members are searching for. This month have selected the most common queries for resources that we do not have. Please go ahead and submit any files you have in these topic areas – we can guarantee they will be well received. You can contribute by uploading online or emailing contribute (at) teachable.net.

Generally, the most queried term was ‘Easter‘. We have a couple of Easter-themed quizzes, but it would be great to see more RS material on the festival of Easter itself, and also Easter-themed material for other subjects for the end of term.

In History the top most wanted are:
ww1
evacuees
explorers
imperialism
mammoths
napoleon
pirates

In Geography the most wanted are:
china
ozone
pesticides (and pests)
limestone

In MFL, the most wanted are:
songs
environement (environment)
imparfait
passe compose

In Science the top most wanted are:
chromatography
antibiotics
cancer
diabetes
extinction
immunisation
redox
woodlice
alkane
contraception
fermenter
forensics
microbiology
relativity
skin
alloys
ammeter
antigens
biofuels
bunsen burner
chemistry
elasticity
gravtational potental
menstruation

In other subjects there were requests for scattergraphs and symmetry in Math, Buddhism and the New Testament parables in R.E., and Frankenstein, paragraphs and conclusions in English (not necessarily in that order!)

Yesterday I was hearing at the annual Naace conference (an organisation responsible for promoting educational technology) about how many teachers actually get involved in creating different types of material for their class.

Our experience at Teachable is similar to the show of hands in the conference – although it was a very tech-savvy audience.  At one end is Word and Powerpoint, which almost everyone has created themselves, and at the other end is Flash and online video, which most people just watch without getting involved in creating.  In my experience it is all about time: producing our new 1 minute Flash animation for Teachable took over 2 days, whereas a good worksheet can be pulled together in a few hours.

If you have got involved in creating material on the left hand end of this spectrum then give yourself a pat on the back … and read more about contributing to Teachable.  The reality is that your material is likely to be very useful to the majority of teacher ‘consumers’ who really don’t have the time to produce this themselves.  We’ve seen some great Flash and video material, especially stuff that can be used on a mobile phone or handheld device.  But we’d love to see some more.