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I’m finding this story about the insurance giant AIG and its bonus payments hard to believe. It’s similar to the Sir Fred Goodwin pay scandal only bigger and more puzzling. For most of us it is astounding how such bonus payments can be ‘guaranteed’, but i’m especially concerned about the lack of care shown by government investors.

The facts of the matter are:
1. AIG makes some stupendously stupid better on the credit markets, using its once great credit rating to take on huge risks.

2. Falling markets and huge derivative losses make AIG totally bust. Bankrupt, not just slightly into the red.

3. US government agrees to bail out AIG, because the alternative seemed to be global financial meltdown.

4. Even though every man, woman and child in America is in effect investing $600 into AIG, no-one bothers to check the employment contracts…

My question is, if it was your $600 (let alone $170bn) going to save the world wouldn’t you want to make sure that no-one was profiting from this kind of failure? For professional investors this is just the most obvious thing to check – that the management team isn’t taking all the cream.

And it looks like the UK government repeated the mistake with RBS. Just what is so tricky about inserting a clause saying that due to ‘change of ownership’ the bonuses will all be cut?? It’s not as if they’re all going to leave to become teachers…

While we’re on the subject, I can assure you that there are no rewards for failure at Teachable. As Managing Director I won’t be taking a salary (let alone bonus) until we are established as the most useful download site for teachers. If we get it right, and everyone benefits, then I will certainly get paid… but then there is no way I can mess up like those boys from AIG.

Teachable is proud to support a free website to bring together teacher-generated resources from across the UK at the Association of Teacher Websites. You’ll find links there to a range of quality-checked amateur websites developed by other teachers.

Since the relaunch of this site in October, we have been running a survey for visitors to the ATW. The results from the 50 teachers responding confirms our recent views on how teachers spend their time.

• A solid 79% agree that ‘having adequate preparation time is one of my top concerns’
• But only 20% develop the majority of teaching materials in paid working hours
• That means the vast majority are spending evenings and weekends staring their screen for ideas!

You are all quite specific about what could help:

• 73% of teachers thought that ‘websites that provide specific teaching materials can be a real benefit to teachers’
• 69% of you value reviews left by other teachers on these sites
• Of the sites used, Teachable was unsurpassed in the reviews you gave, with 85% of those surveyed finding the site useful.

I hope we can continue to do more to free up teachers’ weekends and allow you to spend more time and energy on the busy week in the classroom.

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 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.

We’ve been reading a lot of articles in the TimesEd these last weeks about how teachers’ work-loads haven’t really reduced, in spite of regulations in England trying to limit working hours. The results from a survey of 3,453 UK teachers suggests that over the past five years:

• Under 4% thought the workforce agreement had reduced their workload substantially
• 38% through their workload had reduced slightly
• Half thought there was no difference
• And the rest actually thought their workload had increased

In fact, judging by the response to the article, the problem is even more severe than that. As one teacher puts it:

In my present job we have an entire afternoon’s PPA time AND an entire hour set aside for subject co-ordination. You’d think this would help… How wrong I was. I have more time, and now I have more to do … I have always longed for the day when I could use plans developed in one year for the next year, but constant innovations and curriculum changes have always prevented this from happening. I have had to do new plans each year… These were unchanged ideas re-jigged on to plans that stretched to 3 sides of A4. So I still have to do the bulk of my planning on Sunday…. The basic rule of thumb seems to be more time, more work.

Government meddling and bureaucracy aside, the more-than-obvious point made in the article was that ‘somebody has got to do the work’. Although classroom assistants and extra central admin staff can pick up some of the burden, tasks like marking and lesson preparation have to be done by the class teacher. But that is where Teachable is trying to help.

We haven’t come up with a way to halve marking time YET, but we can halve your preparation time by providing all the material you need on one easy to use site. The question is: is there more we can do? What else would save you time?

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!

If you binned all the other brochures for expensive software that dropped into your pigeon hole recently, or you live somewhere sunnier than England (yes, that would include Scotland this week!), you might not have heard that English schools still have a stack of eLearning Credits to use up. This government scheme ends in August 2008, so it is really free money up until then: it is estimated that the average school still has over £500 to use.

However, there’s probably a good reason that you haven’t spent the funds by now (over-zealous finance officer, control-freak ICT coordinator etc). But the good news is that getting full access to Teachable.net is affordable without the subsidy. From only £49 for a single teacher (the price of a single hefty textbook), it should fit into the most threadbare of school budgets.

If you do want to use your eLCs, or you are that control-freak ICT coordinator (sorry..) then please contact us.

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.