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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.

One of the headaches of running an interactive file sharing site is that there are two major file types for whiteboards.

You may well have had the frustrating experience of developing material for Promethean ActivBoard and then finding your new school has Smart, or visa versa.  That’s exactly why we encourage Powerpoint – because almost everyone can read and edit the same files.

However, it looks like a solution might finally be in sight in the form of a common whiteboard file standard.  Becta in the UK is trying to push all the main whiteboard manufacturers into allowing import and export of a standard type of file (a bit like the interactive version of Rich Text Format).  If you are responsible for buying equipment for a school, then you can do your bit by asking the supplier if they will support a common file format.

If this gets off the ground we’ll be able to offer convertors to take your existing Smart / Promethean / other files and convert that to something everyone can use.

In the meantime, do email us any whiteboard files you think you could contribute.  We are seriously considering supporting Flipchart and Smart files in the near future.

Written by Edward Upton, Teachable founder

We certainly have the former on Teachable, contributing their best ideas and inspiration for others to download.

The question is how can G&T pupils benefit. What G&T resources do we have on Teachable.net?

Founded by a group of ‘talented’ students, we try to make sure a lot of our content is challenging for the higher ability learners.

• Firstly, our contributing and moderation guidelines ensure that all the files are designed to encourage thinking, not spoon-feed learners. Most of the 5* resources also have extension activities to go with them.
• Secondly, we tag all the files by ability, so you can find files marked as Advanced within a particular strand of the curriculum, which means they go above and beyond the requirements of that exam / curriculum.
• Thirdly, we are always on the lookup for fresh, topical material that will stimulate and engage. We would even welcome contributions from star pupils whose insights might spur on others to new heights.

Speaking for myself, the things that engaged me as a student were the innovative lesson styles and zany experiments. Ten-year-old lessons or videos used as padding always stuck out a mile off. Opening minds relies on having an open and creative mind yourself.

G&T teachers meeting G&T pupils.

I’ve been banging on about in in various training sessions, and I do believe that there are really basic errors you can avoid to stop boring your class. The two presentations below (from a business slideshow sharing site, Slideshare), both make the same points.

However, they do also make the two same mistakes. Too many images, flashed up in sequence, can be distracting. Sometimes a well worked through page of text (just not too much text) really does get the point home.

It’s that manic time of year rushing from work to shops to home to work, to get everything done before Christmas. So our members are more than ever looking for quick-to-adapt resources to share in their classes.

Special requests this month are for:

• Anything about English grammar, especially for ages 8 – 12. There are a lot of schools teaching English as a Second Language who are in real need of material here.
• Excellent lesson plan templates – we’d like to put some up on on our Freebies page for newly qualified teachers to use and adapt. If you have a real cracker (and not too complex) please upload it or email it to us.
• Again, anything that is specifically designed to teach How Science Works to KS3.
• History – especially presentations or schemes of work teaching historical techniques or using interesting source material.

And remember, it’s your last chance to enter this term’s contributing competition. A bottle of rum is up for grabs to top off your Christmas pudding.