Teachers.Net…One Teacher’s Dream!

Couldn't find a picture of Tony, but here is a picture of Bob Reap

 

Tony Bott is a teacher, founded, co-owner, and advertising executive of Teachers.Net, an online support organization for teachers.  Teachers.Net provides a one-stop shop for all of teachers’ needs including information, resources and networking. 

Founded back in 1996, Teachers Net was the idea of Tony Bott who envisioned a site that would emancipate teachers from their isolated islands and build an active virtual network that would support a community of teachers in sharing and enhancing their professional knowledge.  He wanted to create a site that would allow teachers to harness their collective knowledge and benefit from teacher driven content and dynamics.  Through his enthusiasm and vision, he was able to convince his roommate’s friend, Bob, to see the benefits of building the site.  Although Bob Reap had little knowledge of computers and programming, his highly educated mind in advertising and law enabled him to teach himself webpage programming and Perl scripting.  From there, everything started to fall into place and, with the help of some funding and a lot of volunteer work, Teachers.Net became real.  After creating the initial website, Tony went on to study the benefits of virtual teacher communities as part of his doctoral dissertation at UCLA providing Tony with evidence of how virtual communities could influence teacher growth and development.

Consequently, this site’s services include 4500 + lesson plans from all levels of education from early childhood to high school, most curriculum areas, and provides extensive networking affordances, including  blogging, e-mail discussions through “mailrings”, live and archived chatrooms, online seminar meeting rooms, and discussion boards.  Teachers.Net offers it all and it is free to teachers.  Originally deriving its funding from “principal contributors” and endless volunteer hours from Tony and his buddy Bob Reap, the site now relies on onsite advertising whether from big companies like Pearson and Starbucks to classifieds posted by teachers or school districts for jobs and other teacher related services or products. 

Currently, TopTenLinks.com lists Teachers.Net in its top 3 links in education.  Although not in first place, the two leading sites are unlikely to compete directly with Teachers.Net as they offer very different affordances and are more likely to appeal to parents.  Now that Teachers.Net has grown to servicing over 150,000 teachers, Tony has many co-directors including Bob Reap and many teachers that provide their own expertise and contributions to the site.  Despite the fact that both Bob and Tony appear to have quit their day jobs to run Teachers.Net, it is unclear if the venture has formed a board or group of advisors.

Personal Reflections:

Overall, a single teacher created a website that is probably the number one site for networking teachers within UK, Australia, New Zealand, and North America.   They have been up and running since 1996 (ancient in terms of online sites) and have recruited an excellent group of supporters and advertisers.  Although, I think they may be trying to do too much on their site with on-site hosting of all the affordances including their dream to host video.  Likely, they would be better served to farm some of these affordances out, especially with the advent of cloud computing and district servers that would allow teachers to host content for free thereby allowing the site to simply host links instead.  They are not as glossy and visual as some education sites and often provide too much text for one page.  They also focus on reaching a global market rather than specific states that have different needs and curriculum standards.  Overall, a great site but needs to sync with the next generation called Web 2.0.

 

Posted in: Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp