Blogs Let me begin by saying: Congratulations on completing the school year, I hope you are able to get some well-deserved rest. Because we knew most of you would be starting your break this month, we decided to focus our most recent Tchers’ Voice survey on how we can best help you over the summer. We asked a number of questions about planning for the next school year, newsletters, and new features you might like to see when you return to the classroom in a couple of months.
Let’s start with our weekly newsletter. We gave you a number of options for things you may want to read about and watch over the break and we got a clear signal you want more Common Core!
As you can see by our chart, nearly 70% of you would like to see newsletters focused on Common Core resources.
And, you are also interested in strategies for student engagement and classroom management. Well, Marie White, who heads up our newsletter every week, is happy to oblige. She’s got lots of ideas in the pipeline—so keep an eye out these topics in the weeks ahead. Thanks for telling us what you need.
We also wanted to find out just how much of a “break” those of you in our community actually take. And, I’m relieved to see you all seem to take a bit of a breather in June, but by July—you’re kicking it into gear for the new school year.
In June, nearly half of you spend less than three hours per week planning. By July, a strong majority is spending 3 to 9 hours…or more. And, by August, almost all of you are putting in a lot of hours prepping for the school year, at least half of you spending more than 10 hours a week.
Finally, let’s talk about new workspace features that would make your life easier. Here’s what you are asking for:
A majority of you picked the ability to build a personal playlist of great resources as the most important new feature. Many of you also asked for the ability to upload and share documents. And our third most popular new feature option is a calendar-based reminder service for all your saved resources.
ALL of these are in the works and should roll out starting this fall. In the meantime, check out our Lesson Planner because it already has a great reminder service, and we are currently working on improving it. (Note, this is a great feature to use now to remind you of great videos on Tch you’ll want to use when school starts).
We want to build features that you want and need, so thanks for filling out the monthly Tchers’ Voice survey.
It’s wonderful to see the Tch community developing and working in partnership with all of you to make it happen.
