According to Bill Scott, Ajax evangelist for Yahoo!, and Karon Weber, principal designer, Yahoo! Teachers started as one of the company's 24-hour "hack days" that turned into a two-year project. A combination of bookmarklet, archive, and collaboration space for educators, Yahoo Teachers was originally meant to be a research tool for trip planning. The designers soon realized, however, that there was another audience that was hungry for these tools. Their presentation at the recently concluded UX Week on the web application, while still revealing a few rough edges, was an intriguing look at high-tech solutions for the most unglamorous side of teaching: the lesson plan.
Setting the background, Weber noted that tech use in education falls across a wide gradient—while students are generally more wired than ever, teachers may be tech savants, total Luddites, or anywhere in between. In their discussions with educators, Weber said, they heard that teachers must spend large amounts of time outside of their workday working on lesson plans and preparation, and they feel disconnected from other teachers; after all, they can't just walk out of the classroom to chat around the water cooler, particularly at lower grade levels.
To address these problems, the Teachers application aims to make assembling and sharing lesson plans easier, using two components. First, the gobbler (Scott has posted a video on his personal blog that shows how it works) is a widget similar to other clipping services, which sits on the right side of the browser. It has three slots, or "buckets," which contain preassigned metadata for a given lesson. Users can simply drag highlighted text, images, or entire web pages into one of the buckets, and the material is automatically formatted and saved to the Yahoo! Teachers portfolio, which is the second part of the application.
Once in the portfolio, the clippings and objects placed in the Gobbler can be pasted into a rich text editor to quickly assemble worksheets, lessons, and handouts. Those documents can then be tagged and shared with other Yahoo! Teachers users. Scott showed the searchable library of lesson plans on everything from solar systems to volcanoes that teachers have already put together, filtered by grade level. Perhaps more important in the wake of No Child Left Behind, lesson metadata includes detailed learning standards from each state, so teachers can plan their strategy for meeting federal testing requirements. The process of assembling those standards was filled with its own special challenges, according to Scott, but it's easy to see how anything to navigate the controversial testing process would be welcomed by teachers. 