The internet provides educators with access to tens of thousands of free interactive lesson resources for use in the classroom. The problem is that educators generally have to spend hours previewing and selecting suitable materials and this waste of time deters most from their searches.
Xorro-ed is a free on-line community designed expressly to address this problem and make finding relevant resources faster and more efficient.
In discussions with users, we determined that the following would be essential characteristics for Xorro-ed to be useful to its user community:
– Free and immediate access to all users, regardless of the brand of hardware and software being used. Ideally, content should be translatable between brands;
– Searches should include keywords and titles, as well as text content in the documents themselves. Filtering by subject and age group is a requirement;
– Content must be moderated by educators from the same discipline as the intended users of that content;
– Sharers (or contributors of content) need to be rewarded through recognition, added value from the site’s services, prizes, or a combination of these, in proportion to the content’s usefulness to its users.
Xorro-ed provides an on-line venue where educators can upload lesson content they have created. This content receives feedback from downloaders (other educators intending to use the content). Based on that feedback the content is ranked in user searches.
To add improved relevance of search results, every community member is required to indicate their specific teaching interests. When performing searches, the feedback from other downloaders with similar interests has the highest impact on rankings of content. For instance, a teacher indicating that a subject interest in science will receive search results ranked y other science teachers’ feedback on content. In this way Xorro-ed can deliver far more relevant and useful search results to users searching for content.
It goes without saying, that Xorro-ed’s value relies on its users identifying their subject interests accurately and maintaining this in their profiles, and on users being attracted to the proposition that they share their work with the community. Furthermore, downloaders are required to provide instant feedback on content based on a scale of usefulness to their subject area.
Xorro-ed is a completely non-profit undertaking for its members. Discussions are currently underway to advance sponsors from the commercial arena, who will provide prizes for content contributors in proportion to the content’s popularity with the community (as determined from downloader feedback).
Over the summer Xorro-ed has had initial resources loaded into its library from donated materials at hand. We hope that members will quickly augment this with further contributions to make Xorro-ed a valuable source for all educators, of relevant lesson materials.
Join Xorro-ed here.
