edYOUcator: 3 Months

This week marks 3 months since the launch of edYOUcator. Over the past months it has seen thousands of unique search topics and even more searches. But as the edYOUcator community continues to grow so does edYOUcator. We’ve received lots of feedback and plan on implementing some new features in the near future to help out our educators!

Since its launch in February, educators from around the world have been searching not only for lesson plans, but assessment help and instructional help as well (such as how to deal with cyber bullying and differentiated instruction). edYOUcator has become much more than a lesson plan search, it’s becoming more of a community every day.



The most popular subject areas for searches have been English and Math - especially math. Not a day goes by that someone isn’t searching for fraction help!

Speaking of which, the most popular search with the greatest number of lessons visited has been fractions - and any form of fraction, fraction multiplying, adding fractions, fractions to decimals, etc. Next to fractions, Africa came in a close second.




Many have been searching for upcoming holiday activities, lesson plans, and unit plans as well. This is a perfect example of why edYOUcator is so useful. All you have to do is type in the holiday. No need to type lesson plan or scour through the Internet looking for legitimate sites- edYOUcator does that for you. It also comes in handy with current events such as the Japanese Tsunami and Osama Bin Laden’s death. When you’re not planning on teaching about time sensitive events like these, a quick search can go a long way.

There have also been a few really unique searches, one being the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. (For those of you who might not know the fire happened 100 years ago. It was the single most deadliest industrial disaster in New York City until the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 2001.)
Another unique search was aphorisms, which, according to Princeton’s Wordnet means: a short, pithy, instructive saying. Here's an example: One today is worth two tomorrows. - Benjamin Franklin.

There is no limit to what you can search for on edYOUcator! If your search doesn’t give you the results you’re wanting please, please, please tell us about it! We thrive on feedback, so we’d love to hear from you.

Or if you'd like to figure it out on your own, take advantage of the video overview we posted last week. You can find it here. In it we give a quick overview of how to use edYOUcator and the advanced search options. It also shows how to utilize the help options while searching. If you still can’t figure it out, it shows you how to contact us from the site as well.




We hope to do more video tutorials on edYOUcator in the future, so if you have any questions or comments on what you’d like help with tell us about it!

edYOUcator has been spreading like wildfire. The more that people hear about it the more feedback and exposure it seems to get. James Gubbins, a self proclaimed EdGeek, and host of the blog Zenodotus, focused one of his posts on edYOUcator last week. You can read it here. This is what we love to see: People spreading the word and helping out the educational community.

To celebrate 3 months of edYOUcator we’re also introducing a Facebook Question for the edYOUcator community to vote on what feature you’d like to see next. Keep an eye out for it later this week (we’ll be tweeting about it and will post another blog when we post the question.)

This is just one of the many things we have planned for edYOUcator, so keep searching, submitting lesson plans, and telling your educational friends and family about it. The bigger it becomes, the more resourceful and useful it will be to you!