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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’re going up to Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow on the 22nd / 23rd September. After a glance at the 26 page show guide, and the hugely complex exhibitors map, we realised we could help visitors out with some Teachable simplification.

We’ve produced a one page show guide to print and take the show – please download and share.

DOWNLOAD THURSDAY’S GUIDE

We’ll be updating it again on Wednesday 22nd when we’ve been around the show. We’ll also be producing a series of video blogs interviewing the best exhibitors and speakers at the show. Those should be live by 4pm on Wednesday 22nd.

We hope you enjoy the trip if you make it to Glasgow, or save yourself some time if you don’t

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.

Last week the announcement came that Daniel Kinge, founder and manager of Sparklebox.co.uk, has been convicted of a second count of downloading and storing child pornography. Although there have been rumours and chatter since 2007, it seems most were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. As one forum post puts it:

Basically its a nice chap who was a teacher but quit to do Sparklebox full time. He makes teaching resources which you can download for free.

I’m afraid not, fellas. He did it to make money out of advertising (so yes, every time you click on you are boosting his income in jail), and possibly to build a profile and reputation to approach children.

One comment Teachable is tired of hearing is that because we charge our users for access to files, the service is somehow less useful to teachers. At the Teachmeet BETT 2010 meetup last week we got a couple of comments along the line of “chargeable product = bad, ad supported = good”. Every teaching website out there needs funding, either from:

1. Advertising
2. Government subsidy
3. Charging end users

We believe advertising alone is both insufficient to run a good service, and can lead to conflicts of interest when trying to impartially offer educational content. Government subsidy is likely to run out in the UK pretty fast in 2010, leaving 3 as the only viable business model. We are proud to charge our users for teaching resources and half that money goes to contributors.

Unless, like Sparklebox, it’s not really a business at all, but something altogether more murky.

Teachable was shortlisted for two start-up awards in 2009: Seedcamp, a pan-European venture capital competition, and Inspire for businesses in Hampshire. We were proud to be part of both, but it’s our New Year’s resolution to win one in 2010!

Today we’ve changed the Teachable site layout to make it cleaner and make more of our thumbnail preview feature of the teaching resources.

We’ve listened to a cross section of members, and you said we could make it even easier to use and less full of distraction. The orange bar is still a bit Marmitey (you either love it or loathe it), but let us know if there are other aspects that frustrate or confuse you.

From:

To:

P.s. If you like a more ‘hand-drawn’ style for websites, have a look at this tennis coaching for children website.

We really seem to be getting around now Teachable is growing, and last month I was in India as part of the British delegation for the Worddidac India 2009 show in New Delhi.

We now have nearly 1,000 members in India, and a couple of pilot schools. What struck me most on my visit was the vibrancy of the low-cost private schools starting up across every state. Demand from aspiring parents for a better education for their children, but no state subsidy on offer, has let to some imaginative ways of delivering good classes cheaply over long distances.

There were many providers there offering to really ‘substitute’ local teachers with video streams and computer-based learning, but we felt the longer term need is for training and inspiration for the teachers themselves. Something Teachable hopes to get into.

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!

Teaching is more than just educating; sadly, government directives, tests and endless new ‘frameworks’ also fill up the working day.

Creativity though, is what makes every day rewarding for pupils and teachers alike. At Teachable we realise that blue-skies thinking and time for creativity is often squeezed out; by sharing excellent resource files in the online ‘cloud’, teachers harness creative ideas from around the country and save themselves time in creating lessons.

However, we still find scepticism surrounds sharing resource files; it is often seen as cheating or plagiarism. Yet using established, creative, interactive resources crafted by other teachers is the essence of many of the Governments directives. Our resources are edited by professionals and fully adaptable by the teacher.

We do exactly what it says on the tin; helping teachers share resources. And that is why our membership has risen 10 fold over the last year.

We want to introduce you to Eric. He’s the newest member of the Teachable.net team. We realise there is no such thing as a typical teacher … but then Eric is imaginary. He epitomises the struggle teachers often have trying to keep teaching materials fresh and engaging.

Eric faces the same dilemma over and over again. He is sitting in front of his computer late on another Sunday evening. He is no stranger to the internet and often finds himself spending hours searching endless pages looking for ideas and fresh interactive resources to help with his lesson preparation for the coming week. His latest class are proving a nightmare. Nothing seems to get them engaged.

As the hours tick by Eric looks through resource site after resource site and tries to filter out the dross. The solution was just one click away. It is the only resource site that has the quality and range of resources that is needed to get his class back on track: Teachable.net.

Eric can rest assured that the resources that he downloaded were quality-checked, teacher-developed and can be easily adapted. What he can offer his students is a creative set of materials that other teachers have used successfully in their own schools. Perfect.

Teachable.net has had a bit if a re-vamp to ensure that our teacher Eric is at the centre of everything we do. His presence symbolises that we put our members first and give you what you want. Eric loves to hear Teachable.net members comments and suggestions. Feel free to drop him a line, eric @ teachable.net.