We Like:
- Anything that has taken more than 2 hours to pull together. It really does show when you’ve spent time sourcing useful images, building animations in Powerpoint, devising imaginative questions or trying out a new style of lesson. Our members are only willing to pay for stuff which truly saves them time.
- Highly interactive Powerpoints. Yes, ‘interactive’ is often overused, but in this case we mean presentations that involve the class, rather than pitching facts to a sleeping audience. Often that means building animations and hyperlinks into the slideshow. Generally, resources that can be presented are more popular than resources that are printed out and photocopied (and that fits with our green agenda)
- Packs of material for a series of lessons. We like fully worked through lesson ideas, so that you include everything from a plan through to the Powerpoint for the whiteboard, handouts for the class and worksheets for homework. Often the value of these collections is that other teachers can use particular parts to improve their own scheme of work
- Resources designed for a particular course / exam board. Most teachers are looking for a very specific lesson, so a lesson designed for AQA Maths B GCSE, module 2 is much more useful than a general introduction to data handling.
- Original yet replicable ideas. You’d be amazed how often we see exactly the same material on the periodic table. But if you have a unique way of teaching a certain topic, and it doesn’t rely on some special talent you have, then please do share it with others here.
- Self-explanatory resources. Please include all the background material another teacher would need for your lesson. “Hand out worksheet from the red file” might make sense to you, but it’s useless to all of us.
We don’t like:
- Single worksheets. It takes no time at all to pull together a worksheet on a particular topic if you already have the ideas, images and structure of a topic. We’d far rather you submitted these along with the lesson plan, presentation or other material you would have used to make up the lesson.
- Wordsearches, crosswords or flash cards. These kind of Word documents can all be generated in a few minutes by freely available software, and are of no real value to other teachers.
- Highly derivative or copied ideas. If you’re not sure whether your idea is useful for other teachers ask yourself two questions: a. ‘Did you have to pull together lots of original material to build up the resource?’ and b. ‘Is there similar material already on Teachable?’. If it’s No and No then your stuff is useful.
- Sloppy presenting. Fine if it’s just a lesson plan or activity guide for the teacher to read, but not if its designed to printed out or presented. Our editors try to correct basic formatting, grammar or spelling mistakes, but they won’t rework the entire submission for you.
