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Share My Lesson
The AFT executive council approved our joint venture to start an online resource bank for educators. The AFT, with Britain's TES Connect, is launching Share My Lesson, an online community for U.S. teachers to collaborate and share teaching resources and innovative ideas. This initiative, undoubtedly, is the single most important tool for improving the teaching profession that the AFT has launched in more than a generation. Check out www.sharemylesson.com right now.
The AFT and TES Connect will unveil Share My Lesson today at Stanford University's Global Education Conference. Read the press release.
When I visit with teachers, they uniformly tell me they're craving the tools and resources to help their students succeed. They want to collaborate with other teachers and share ideas for creative lesson plans, for classroom strategies and, especially now, for implementing the Common Core State Standards. Teachers are being asked to do more, with less. What they really want are the resources, tools and time to do their jobs, and sadly, for the most part, states and school districts are ignoring them. So the AFT is stepping forward.
Share My Lesson creates an online community for teachers to get and share instructional resources at no charge. It's by teachers, for teachers—preschool through college. The website will allow teachers to upload their own resources, review and rate resources on the site, and download anything for their own use. Additionally, there will be tens of thousands of resources from hundreds of content partners.
We couldn't have a better partner for this joint venture than TES Connect, the world's largest network of teachers with more than 2 million registered users and more than 400,000 resources.
There are other sites out there, but Share My Lesson is different: It's by teachers, for teachers. It's absolutely free. It's large in scope (in both the variety of materials and the range of content). It's a one-stop shop for all educators. And it has an algorithm that processes teachers' ratings and the number of downloads so that the "best" resources, as rated by teachers, rise to the top of search results.
I hope you get the word out to your members about Share My Lesson. There is a promotional toolkit available on LeaderNet.
Also, read today's New York Times, Washington Post and Education Week articles.