The Guardian Teacher Network: The Teacher As Consumer
Jinfo Blog

By Katie Roden

Abstract

Providing exactly what the user needs, in the format and at the time that works best for them, should be the ultimate aim of any website or web app. In her article about the Guardian Teacher Network website, Katie Roden demonstrates how having a Twitter strategy can lead to engagement of users so that a website provides a tailored user experience and evolves as needs change.

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Among the most-cited frustrations of many teachers are a lack of time to develop innovative new teaching resources, and a lack of school funds to buy off-the-shelf ones. That’s why, in February 2011, we launched the Guardian Teacher Network – teachers.guardian.co.uk – a free bank of resources for 4-18 year-olds.

The site has at its core an extensive bank of interactives, animations, online lesson packs and revision activities which contain over 70,000 pages of specially created content. These resources were previously available only behind an institution-based subscription paywall as learn.co.uk, costing up to £2000 for a large secondary school. These resources are now available for free to registered users, who can display them full screen to classes, download individual components for use in their own materials and add them to a personal lesson schedule that they can return to year after year. They can also upload their own materials to share with their peers and rate and comment on resources, and use our database of over 20,000 questions to create bespoke tests for their class.

A key driver in moving from a subscription-based to a free site was to consider teachers as individual consumers, rather than institution-based – short of time, keen to innovate and spending much of their home life working, planning and thinking for the benefit of their class. The Teacher Network aims to be both useful and personal, and to support teachers while giving them quick access to quality resources.

We developed our Twitter strategy to reflect what we wanted our site to be – friendly, supportive and personal. This presented a challenge for a site aligned to such a powerful brand – it would be all too easy to sound corporate or distant and thus alienate potential users from the start.

Our Twitter account has two key aims:

1.  To spread the word about the site and encourage registration and engagement.

2.  To introduce potential and existing site users to the breadth of content available on the site, by having the confidence to answer specific queries (so far we’ve always managed to find something!).

@GuardianTeach was introduced shortly before we launched, when we tweeted and retweeted education-specific items and articles that we felt would be of use in lesson planning and preparation (based on our three-strong team’s experience as a teacher, education journalist and educational publisher). We followed key influencers in education and began to reply to conversations where we felt we could add value, always trying to sound human and personal, and disseminating information from a wide range of content providers.

At launch, we embarked upon our strategy of calling out for direct resource requests, encouraging individuals to ask us for specific content at the very point at which they were planning lessons. This is still at the forefront of our activity today:

When we receive a reply, we respond as quickly as we can with links to specific resources. These can be either directly relevant or contain elements of content that may be of use within the subject area:

For the user – and for us – such exchanges make our Twitter activity fun, satisfying and beneficial. We have seen significant numbers of retweets of similar conversations, while many users have told us that they have recommended us to friends and colleagues as a result.

As our activity has increased, both on Twitter and on the site, we have monitored carefully the daily peaks in usage. Not surprisingly, we see traffic on the site and Twitter mentions increase at non-contact times for UK teachers – 8-9am, 10-1.30 and 12.30-1.30 (breaks) and 3.30 pm onwards during the week. At weekends, we see a significant uplift on a Sunday evening. We have altered our Twitter activity accordingly, and try to cover these times as often as possible.

As a new site, we have faced the inevitable glitches and needs for enhancement and upgrade. Much of our feedback on the site has come directly from Twitter users, including comments about a range of bugs. Rather than answer such feedback offline or by DM, we have made a point of engaging publicly with the users concerned and seeking more detailed comments from them. Their input has been instrumental in our enhancements releases. We try to respond promptly and honestly and always acknowledge their input in changes we have made (and continue to make). This approach has elicited an overwhelmingly positive response. We are still engaged in debates with our followers on registration point, search and sharing, and we have recruited many of them to work alongside us as bloggers on our forthcoming discussion pages, as a peer review panel for new and existing resources and even to write an article for the Guardian itself.

In addition to individual followers, we have also found Twitter to be a fantastic forum for meeting and chatting to third party organisations with whom we are able to content share – charities, NGOs and other content owners looking for a platform for their resources. Mutual tweets and linking have increased traffic to, and awareness of, all our sites.

It’s still early days for teachers.guardian.co.uk and for @GuardianTeach. We have a long way to go and a lot to get right. But we’re determined to stay close to our users and to listen to what they have to say – that’s how we’ll keep on getting better. And, let’s face it, what could make anyone happier than reading something like this when you get to work...?

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