Resource sharing between educators using Pedagogle.com

About a month and a half ago I did a presentation for my fellow teachers on "Application of the Open Source model to Education". The presentation itself was a bit long-winded and focused too much on the theory behind the application, rather than some practical examples. My presentation skills aside, the idea itself has merit.

We have a number of problems in education, not the least of which is the lack of an institutionalized memory that anyone can access. It would be nice if we had a common place to store and catalog our digital resources.

Every day teachers search for resources to use with their classes on the world wide web with little success. There are a lot of websites out there providing lesson plans and worksheets for teachers, but the quality of most of these resources is not high. The other issue is that these worksheets and lesson plans tend not to be easily editable, which means that a resource which is almost-right is what the teacher ends up using.

There are a number of ways a common "storing ground" for our resources would be helpful.

1. New teachers would have an immediate resource available for worksheets and lesson plans.
2. When older teachers retire, their work would not be lost with them.
3. Teachers in developing countries with poor educational infrastructure would have access to quality resources.
4. Schools would save money as expenses for external resource books would drop.
5. The common cataloging system and custom search engine makes it easier to find resources.
6. Automatically gain the ability to back-up your resources and take them with you when you migrate between schools.
7. Creative commons license allows you to modify the resources without penalty

Since I saw all these points, I decided to take it upon myself to create such a resource, which I call Pedagogle.com.

There are other similarly functioning websites out there but I think Pedagogle.com has a number of improvements that are worth mentioning.

1. You can find resources more easily using our custom search form.
2. Process for uploading resources is simplified, no HTML required, just attach a file, categorize it, and give it a description.
3. Site is meant to be maintained by the members, so more control given to each user.
4. Creative commons attribution non-commercial share-alike license protects each resource from commercial use, while at the same time encouraging users to modify and re-share the resource.
5. Users can rate resources, and higher quality resources automatically float to the top of search results.
6. The site is free to use.

This is a very new site. We need contributors to add their resources and funds to keep up with our expected rate of growth. If you want to learn more about Pedagogle.com, you can view an (low budget) informational video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q3eKbB2uWo.