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Teachable is primarily a community organisation aimed at rewarding teachers for sharing their most useful teaching materials. You’ll be pleased to hear we are doing just that.

We’ve just done the quarterly calculations, and we have 15 ‘super-contributors’ whose files have been downloaded over 100 times on Teachable.net.

The top 5 contributors have all earned over £500 from their files so far, and will earn hundreds of further pounds (or credits) as we grow.

We want YOU to join them, and from now on we are going to keep you more informed about what kind of contributions we most need. We will post a monthly update on what is most needed, and some subject specific guidance.

Generally we have two simple tests for contributed files:

1. Would they save another teacher more than an hour of preparation time (even if they do have to be adapted a little?)
2. (If they are paid-for) Would you pay for these files? Are they polished enough?

Perhaps the best way of finding out what our members like is to look at the top most popular files so far:
1. States of Matter (contributor: Simon Ball)

2. Generating Electricity (contributor: Barnaby Grimble)

3. Investigating Current (contributor: Joanne Holloway)

4. Digestive Enzymes (contributor: Abigail Laing)

5. ‘Nothing’s Changed’ – Tatamkhulu Africa (Teachable Team)

6. Heat Transfer – Fun Quiz Game (contributor: Henry Cordy)

You can also still take advantage of our Buried Treasure competition.

Happy Contributing!

We have rapidly expanded our range of science resources over the last few months, and we are now having to be stricter about what gets accepted.

There are still a few areas where more is needed. We would be particularly grateful for material that covers:

• Safe operating of lab equipment (bunsen burners etc)
• Microscopes and images of microscope slides
• Infection diseases (and TB especially)
• Arteries, nerves and other basic anatomy (for A-level)
• Any videos of exciting chemistry experiements

Some of you have asked what are minimum standards are for accepted files. On top of the basic formatting guidelines we have a really simple rule of thumb:

All our files are supposed to save our members AT LEAST an hour of time. If the presentation or worksheet wouldn’t take more than an hour to put together then it is not worth paying for, or uploading to the site.

In essence, if you have put a long time into making your files, sourcing images etc, then they are exactly the sort of contributions we will accept. Keep them coming!

We have a good starting range of historical material, but there is so much scope for more graphical, textual and video sources to bring the subject to life. We are particularly interested in hearing from motivated historians with their own resources to contribute.

At the moment, our top requested resources for history are:

1. Dr Barnado
2. Lord Shaftesbury
3. Victorians
4. Egypt
5. Isambard Kingdom Brunel

If you have something on these subjects, there is a bonus 10 credits for every accepted file that you contribute.

Teachable will be going to the Historical Association Primary Conference in Leeds on Saturday 1st November, so we might see some of you there. Otherwise, we also have a position open for an experienced history teacher to advise us on how to expand the offering we have on Teachable.

A recent survey by the TES found that most teachers are spending a lot of their own evenings

• Nine in ten teachers believe the creativity and quality of their lesson planning is being hampered by a lack of time, research suggests.
• A survey of more than 4,000 teachers found that almost half (45%) are spending more than a day a week (eight hours) preparing lessons.
• Up to three-quarters (73%) work in the evenings and weekends and more than 60% say they occasionally plan lessons at the last minute.

This is what we’ve always known, and is really why we set up Teachable.net – to save you time. There’s no doubt there’s a demand for online help for teachers, and that many teachers spend hours of their own evenings on class preparation. Teachable.net gets its highest traffic from the UK at around 10pm!

However, it’s possible to waste a huge amount of time on the internet, sifting through all of low-grade and inaccurate content out there. TES’ claim that over 2.9m files were downloaded is a bit misleading: you have to download any of their files to check their quality, and many are not immediately useful for lessons. As the volume of teaching material out there grows, the time wasted in discarding the dross increases.

Teachable.net takes a different approach: by rewarding our most useful contributors, and editing all the material we accept, we ensure everything on the site is instantly useful and relevant to the curriculum. We want teachers to share within the network, but we believe it’s most useful if our members can spend as little time as possible using our site as possible: if one download saves a whole weekend of work, so much the better!

I’d be interested to hear your views? How can we save you more time?

We’ve done a major reworking of our homepage this month, which we home will help you all:

• Find out what’s new and interesting on the site.
• Go directly to the subject you’re interested in.
• Spend less time getting your own work uploaded.
• Sign-up for a free account and get downloading more quickly.

Please let us know if there is any other features you would really like to see on the site by emailing support@teachable.net; we’ll do our best to accommodate them.

Are you starting to count down the days until the summer holidays?  If so, your class is probably even more likely to be drifting off into thoughts of Euro 2008 and beyond.
But all is not lost on the creative resource front.  Teachable is running a campaign this summer, to promote the benefits of using sports-themed lessons to teach everything from maths to history. With the usual great range of sports on this summer (football, tennis, etc), plus the Beijing Olympics, we believe now is the time to engage your class with topical presentations and activities.

We will be developing a few themed resources ourselves, under the Summer of Sport banner, but we would very much like to see more contributions in a similar vein. Read more about contributing here.
Alongside that we will be running a series of sports-themed competitions for our members. Watch this space for more!

‘Art’ was the single most popular search on Teachable in May / early June.  We only have a handful of Art resources at the moment, so any contributions in that area would be welcome.

After that the main searches were for science related resources:

• Cells
• Dinosaurs
• Age of the earth
• Analogue vs digital
• Capacitors
• Antarctica
• Global Warming
• Symmetry

We like to give our users what they want before they have to ask, so anyone with presentations or worksheets that cover these areas would be doing everyone a favour.

We’re promoting an offer that we’ve had open for a few months, but we’d like to see more people taking advantage of it. For every file you upload on Teachable.net, and our moderators accept as useful, we will pay out £5 at the end of July. Honestly. That’s around US$10 or €7 if you’re outside of the UK.
Sounds like there’s a catch?

No. Just that you’ve got to dig out your best files and get them to us by the end of July.
In the future, we will pay out according to how many people download the files. But we accept that while we get off the ground that is difficult to predict. We expect that by September 2008 we will have enough people downloading the files to stick to our standard 50:50 split of any income we get.

We’ve noticed there are a few areas where science teachers are looking for resources, but where we don’t have any great files at present. We would really like to see more contributions in these areas, and you would certainly be looked on favourably for our July competition if you could produce files for the following (in no particular order):

• Mitosis and Meiosis
• The skeleton
• Immunisation and infectious disease
• Polymers and their uses
• Biological pest control
• Cells and their organisation into tissues
• Catalysts
• Moments and turning forces
• Nuclear reactors and nuclear power
• Biofuels and renewable energy
• Emerging energy technologies (e.g. fuel cells)
• Electromagnets (KS3 level)
• Effects of human activity on the environment
• Human behaviour and basic psychology
• Drugs and their effect on long-term physical and mental health

Get digging on your hard drives!

We recognise that is still takes a little while to upload each useful file you’ve got – especially if your school isn’t on the internet mainline (you’re not the only one..). We’re working on an even quicker way to contribute online, but in the meantime either put the kettle on and settle down while you upload your files, or we can do the waiting if you’re in a rush. You are welcome to burn a CD of your best files and post them to us. We’ll do all the tedious bit of editing, tagging and uploading … and still give you your Reward.

Just email contribute@teachable.net for more details.