Yahoo! Teachers social network

Yahoo! are launching a social network for teachers at teachers.yahoo.com. Given the plethora of such grassroots networks on Ning, this had better be something special…

Unfortunately, it’s US-centric. You can’t actually join the network yet, only ‘sign up for an invitation’. Once you do so and are invited to add yourself to a map of members, you’re prompted to ‘Enter city, state and zip code’. It didn’t understand any of the UK locations I tried to enter. 🙁

There’s a sneak peek video which highlights a feature called ‘Gobbler’. This allows teachers to drag-and-drop web content into a portfolio file ready for lesson planning. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but may help teachers less familiar with tools such as diigo, Google Notebook, etc. Apparently it fits in with the ‘state standards’ – so again, not much use for teachers elsewhere in the world; and there’s no UK version yet.

Overall, it looks fairly slick, and anything which cuts down teacher preparation time is a bonus. I just hope that Yahoo! open their eyes to teachers beyond the USA… 🙂

(via Mashable)