Yahoo! Teachers, currently in beta, is a collaborative tool enabling teachers to easily collect, create, and share teaching materials with others. Yahoo recently opened up the site to beta users for educators wanting an early look at the new tool. Most of the information on the Yahoo! Teachers site and in recent news articles describes the Gobbler. This browser add-on allows educators to quickly grab content, media, and and even entire sites; organize that material easily into projects; create handouts and other teaching content from the gathered material; tag this content; and share it with the rest of the world. (View video demo of the Gobbler here.) Yahoo! Teacher looks promising as a fledgling social networking site for educators.
Howdy folks! I’m an Instructional Designer at UT Dallas. I have a Bachelor’s in Elementary Education from Angelo State University and a Master’s in Computer Education and Cognitive Systems from the University of North Texas. I’ve been working in edtech for 11 years. Hmm… what else? I’m a *huge* fan of that little Irish band called U2, and I’m a bigtime Firefly/Serenity advocate.
Looks promising. Two things I wonder about this:
Very interesting service, but like Matt, I also wonder about copyright. In order to get by with Fair Use, wouldn’t Yahoo need to restrict access to the service to only verified educators? I don’t see a lot of teachers jumping on the bandwagon if it’s a real hassle to join.
Maybe Yahoo is planning on playing the ‘we just offer a service’ card and leaving the teachers to justify their own fair use?