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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.