Serendipity35

Yahoo! Teachers is a new tool and it's free for all teachers, administrators, and education specialists. It hasn't been released yet, but there's a sneak peek online. It looks like an interesting platform, and appears to be aimed at K-12 since it was built in collaboration with some of their Yahoo! Teachers of Merit.

I signed up for their email update about the launch. I also signed up in the peer network area. Sadly, I seem to be the one and only in Newark, NJ to do so so far - but I won't get too upset because all the suburban districts i checked also had zero participation. Maybe it's just too new.

They seem to be behind on launch. This blog post from March talks about it and gives a summer launch date. the blogger is Bill Scott and he is listed as "Ajax Evagelist at Yahoo!" so I'll assume that he's the official word.

The product seems to have emerged from another project called Gobbler

The gobbler is simply a widget that you can popup on any web page and just grab text, images and links from the page and drag and drop them into your Y!Teachers projects. (You can also bookmark the site as well).

Its a little like Google Notebook, bluemark, clipmarks and other clipping services but it is a little unique. First, you can simply tear things off the page with drag and drop. Second, when you drop things from the page into the gobbler you are dropping them directly into your projects within Yahoo! Teachers. They get immediately saved there. Third, the assets you drop are thus brushed with meta data from the project itself (like grade level, subject, state standards). Fourth, the projects (and the assets) are then shared with any teacher anywhere in the world that is part of Yahoo! Teachers.

The combination of gather (gobbler), organize (projects) and share (teacher network) creates a powerful combination.

Yahoo! will be offering educators free workshops about using the service. Stay tuned.