After a few days of downtime, we have the blog and other various internal tools up and running again. We transferred our domain to our new host which caused most of the downtime. Thanks for your patience.

Hello all. We are in the middle of upgrading our servers. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you haven’t signed up for our future private beta, please do so at www.teacherhubs.com!

Wow! Last week was a crazy one. Traveling from Abilene, to Miami, to Boulder, and back has taken its toll. We had a great weekend in Miami at Future of Web Apps. Several leaders from the web-o-sphere spoke about the future of the web. They were all very friendly and more than happy to answer questions. While in Boulder, we attended several tech-related events, including Boulder Open Coffee Club, Boulder New Tech Meetup and TechStars for a day. It was fast, furious and snow-filled week.

Here at TeacherHubs, we are really interested in finding out how we can make the lives of teachers easier. What are the things teachers are asking for to make their, already underpaid and overworked, job easier? We want to know, so we can help!

During my usual reading of technology in the classroom educational blogs, I ran across a Del.icio.us post of CoolCatTeacher, Vicki Davis. One day Vicki had found the Pulse of Open Source and thought it would be really neat if there was a pulse of educators. On my past week of firsts, I was able to find some time to knock out the code. All in all, Pulse of Education was born. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Here at TeacherHubs, our sole purpose is to empower you, the educator, to do your job more effectively and to broaden your horizons and expand your social network among the teaching community. Admittedly, none of us are teachers. We have little experience in schools, except as students, so we readily admit that we do not have all the solutions. We do, however, have a great desire to help you to be the best teacher you can be. We want your feedback. We hope that you will choose to contact us and tell us what you need to make your job easier.

What Teacherhubs can do for you

At its core, TeacherHubs is an organizational tool for your lesson plans. You can create and edit your lesson plans in a user-friendly interface and insert everything from Word documents to YouTube videos to Flickr photos. We hope to give you the tools to incorporate any type of media into your lesson plans for easy and fast organization and retrieval.

The hope is to give you a tool to organize your entire semester into an easy-to-use calendar interface. You can currently set the lessons to any date and see all upcoming events and lessons in list view, but in future versions we plan to incorporate a Google Calendar-esque look and feel so you can drag and drop lessons and events and see your semester laid out visually.

We know that as a teacher, the relationships that you have with other educators, at your school and elsewhere, are very important to you. That is why we have incorporated a social networking aspect into the site. We encourage you to fill out your profile information, give yourself a short bio, and befriend other educators. We foresee the true value of the site being in the relationships you can form and the feedback you can give and receive on lesson plans.

There is a lot of additional functionality built into the site and being added daily. We encourage you to sign up for a free private beta account and explore the possibilities for yourself.

Why we need your feedback

As stated above, our lack of teaching experience leaves us with a lack of personal insight when it comes to teaching. We have relied heavily upon the relationships we have with educators across the state of Texas to give us the feedback necessary to create the site thus far. However, further improvements can only be made with your feedback. We truly want to know what you need.

We are three college students with a passion for serving the teaching community. We consider the work we’ve done to be worthless if it cannot aid you in your job. Your feedback will give us the encouragement to continue in development and the direction to make it the best website possible for educators. Let us know what we can do for you.

chad@teacherhubs.com

We have been making some great progress lately. Development is coming along nicely, and we get ever closer to a tangible release date. We now have our email up, so if you would like to contact one of us individually, you can reach us at chad@teacherhubs.com, jon@teacherhubs.com, or jordan@teacherhubs.com.

I have become increasingly encouraged in our endeavor as I have interacted with people and told them about TeacherHubs recently. I had one particularly productive conversation with a faculty member in ACU’s Education department a week or so ago. She was really excited about the idea and gave tons of positive feedback and possible additions for us to work into the site. From that conversation and a few others, I have also been given a number of other contacts and references to get in contact with and pitch our ideas to. Hopefully I will be able to continue along a branching path of leads to gain a good local market base by the time we launch.

At this point in the game, I think one of the most valuable things we can be doing is gaining as much feedback as possible; both positive and negative. If you are reading this, hopefully you are at least somewhat intrigued by our idea, and I want to express to you how much we value your feedback. If you are an educator, we are making this site for you. We want it to be exactly what you need it to be. No idea is too small. We are extremely eager to hear anything and everything from anybody with anything to share. What would make your life easier as a teacher?

As Jon previously wrote, we are getting closer by the day to releasing our latest version of TeacherHubs. As we come closer to the end of development work with our new functionality, we will give any educators who are willing a chance to help us improve our product even more before we release it to a broader audience. If you are an educator and you are interested in what we are doing here, please sign up at TeacherHubs.com.

Little by little, we are getting closer to our dream of TeacherHubs. It’s funny and exciting to see how the idea has changed and evolved over the months. TeacherHubs will be an organizational and collaboration tool for educators of all levels. Over the next few months, we’ll be migrating our current users at WISD Teachers to the new and improved TeacherHubs. While it will initially not have all features and functionality we envision, it will be a world of difference and a huge improvement on usability, functionality and simplicity. Our passion and excitement grows each day as we see the site progress. It may be slow progress right now, but we’re working hard on it despite having to manage time with our fiances, going to school full time, and working.

Other things we are planning and excited about are applying to TechStars, attending the Future of Web Apps conference, and TechStars For A Day. TechStars applications are due March 31, but we should be getting our application in pretty soon. We met and hung out with some great people earlier this month in Boulder, CO, and just wanted to give a shout out and say thanks to Matt, Brian and Ben at socialthing! for letting us stay at their place. We got to sit down and talk with David Cohen, the founder of TechStars, and greatly appreciated his time. We loved the environment of Boulder and the people, and it just made us so much more excited about TeacherHubs and we look forward to seeing them again on March 5th for TechStars For A Day. We’ll be at Future of Web Apps on February 29th, and after attending Future of Web Design in New York this past November, we’re stoked about being in Miami.

All in all, the next several months will be very exciting and have the potential to be life changing.

Finally, I have had the time to sit down and really make some headway on TeacherHubs. Some of you may notice (probably just Jordan, Jon, and I) that the main page and the blog actually have some sort of design and continuity. Once we find us an awesome designer, I am sure things will shape up even more.

TeacherHubs is still in development, and will soon be in a private alpha stage. If you are interested in what we are doing here, feel free to contact us at info@teacherhubs.com. We are just three college students trying to fulfill a dream.

All through high school (2000-2004), the web was picking itself back up from the dot-com bust, with MySpace (gross) and Google leading the way. During those high school years, I heard whispers of teachers wanting their own websites. They didn’t want anything special, just something they could call their own and be able to post a few word documents on.

Well, back in 2005 (ha, an eternity in web years), I started a website for one of the teachers at my alma mater. All Mr. Young wanted was a simple way to post his assignments on the web. If a student were absent or if a parent wanted to know what was going on in class, he could point him/her to the class website. Not to mention, now all of his assignments are globally accessible to himself whenever he needs them.

A little more than a year later, I had another approach. Why not generalize things a little more so the concept could be extended to multiple teachers in a single school. WISD Teachers is just that. At this time, several teachers in the Whitehouse ISD use the service for a small yearly fee to post their assignments, handouts, and links on their individual websites available to students, parents, and other teachers.

After gathering feedback from several teacher over the past few years, there is a larger idea coming together, and it is here where TeacherHubs is going. TeacherHubs will be the future hub of teacher collaboration on the web.