Through audience research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation identified an underserved need for K-12 teachers: connecting with verified peers to share lesson plans and resources. We built and maintained TeachersDo—a web-based product created with social feeds and sharing in mind, but offering both privacy and academic legitimacy absent within mainstream social media. SheerID integration was used to create a peer-to-peer community exclusively built for and by K–12 teachers.
Users
K-12 teachers
Product Strategy
Create a frictionless system for sharing and finding lesson plans and educational resources relevant to individual classroom needs
Process Highlights
A paid advisory committee of teachers provided weekly input into feature development
Weekly coordination with the Foundation’s marketing team to surface new content and features to users
Ongoing team reviews of user-submitted bugs and feature ideas
Outcomes
Alpha: hundreds of users, thousands of lesson plans covering a full spectrum of K-12 subjects
During Beta, Gates Foundation handed over source code to PBS for further evolution
About the Features
Reduce the hunt for quality lesson content. Help teachers collect and improve lesson ideas from each other and across the internet, and make it easy to get through tagging, feed customization, and quality in-site search returns.
Reduce peer isolation. Many K-12 teachers, particularly those in more rural areas, have very few peers within their practice areas. Even teacher in higher population areas have limited time during the day to connect with other teachers. We added features to search for peers, connect with them, give feedback on shared content, and post questions.
Improve the practice of teaching. The entire TeachersDo online community was built on the idea of quality content, maintained for and by teachers (no publishing or digital content companies allowed).