Blogs Today is a GREAT day to celebrate! TeachingChannel.org is officially one year old. Our vision to revolutionize the way educators learn, connect, and inspire each other is well underway! Like a rough and tumble one-year-old child, Tch talks, it walks and it reaches out! And you all appear to be paying attention. How great is that?
I’ve spent many hours in classrooms during our inaugural year talking to teachers about how best to help them succeed, to ensure that their students succeed. Teachers continue to tell me how much it means to them to be able to see how other teachers create safe and orderly classrooms, highly engaging lessons, handle hard-to-teach subject matter. I have spent 100s of hours watching Tch videos and I have been inspired myself and have used a number of the strategies I am learning from the great teachers who have allowed us to film them in action. I must say, my own teaching is getting better because of it!
I want to take this day to celebrate Teaching Channel’s first anniversary, but first I should tell you what we thought would happen when we launched the site one year ago today. When we pushed the button to go live, we all hoped that teachers would find us, that they would watch and appreciate the careful way in which we were filming in classrooms, the fact that our video crews made sure that you could hear students. We hoped that teachers would use the videos to improve their practice. We hoped that they would recommend us to their friends. We started the year off with 90 videos, easy download and upload capacity and an annotation tool called Notes. During the course of the year, we added a calendar tool, and nearly another 400 videos and made plans to expand our capacity to help teachers learn from one another. While we were working to improve the site and holding our breath to see if you would come, here’s what actually happened:
The numbers astound me! Thank you for embracing Tch so quickly! Thousands of hours of videos viewed, millions of people watching on public television.
Honestly, it has been so rewarding to watch.
I’ve asked two of my colleagues to help tell the story of our first year. Our Director of Educational Programming, Marie White, has contributed a wonderful blog post that looks at our growing video library—and includes a Top Ten list of the most watched videos in the past year. Don’t miss it.
And, our Tch Teacher Laureate, Sarah Brown Wessling shares her thoughts on her first year as part of Teaching Channel. We’ve spent many wonderful hours with our film crews in her classroom.
Let me close by sharing the other reason I’m celebrating today. I have the distinct honor of being named the new Chief Executive Officer of Teaching Channel.
I feel as if I have been given a tremendous gift: the gift of sharing what great teachers do across our country.
I would like to ask you to help me run this company and I am dead serious. I need your help to create an authentic, social network of powerfully engaged teachers. We need to hear about what you need to move the needle on student achievement and we need your help to create the kinds of tools that enable you to be more successful next year than you were this.
As the staff at Teaching Channel mashed our first birthday cake into the carpet, just like a messy kid, we want to thank you for a great first year. We hope that Year 2 is even better!
