Blogs As many will do at this time of year, we’ve been reflecting. Thanks to you, it was a terrific year for Teaching Channel. First, our audience continued to grow, and today we have over 645,000 registered educators in our community. This is incredibly important because it signals that teachers find what we are producing valuable. Your registration influences foundations and corporations who are sponsoring new video series and tools for us. In addition, it matters to school districts, the Department of Education, and to many of our partners who care about making sure educators are getting the support they need.
In 2012, we launched Teaching Channel Teams, an interactive, collaboration platform that we license to districts, schools, and PD organizations to foster educator collaboration around video. We think video is important in two critical ways:
- It helps all of us see ways to teach that we may not be familiar with, and
- It helps us see what we’re actually doing in the classroom when we examine our own teaching practice.
The Teams platform allows teachers to form study groups of all kinds, and to use video as a central tool in growing teachers’ skills, so that they in turn can lift student achievement. This year, 2014, 100% of our existing customers renewed their contracts with us, and we doubled the number of educators who chose to work on the Teams platform for professional development. We now have over 50,000 educators using the Teams site.
In addition, we launched a new professional services business to help districts and PD providers use the platform to its maximum capacity. Teachers are watching and analyzing video, video recording themselves as they learn new strategies, giving and receiving feedback on these attempts from their colleagues in a non-evaluative environment, and examining samples of student work in collaborative groups.
It has been a fantastic year for Teaching Channel, one that gave us a glimpse into a future where teachers work together every day in order to improve their skills so that they in turn can lift student achievement. If we can do this successfully, teachers will have managed to do more for our country’s economic health than any of the politicians and policy makers put together! Thank you so much for your support, and we hope you have a wonderful holiday.
