Teach For Us News

Nominate your favorite blog to be featured

Webmaster — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:10:33 +0000

We have a nifty way to feature our blogs on the homepage and we need some suggestions. The only requirement is that the blog have some good content and the author update with some consistency/frequency.

Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Snap previews re-activated

Webmaster — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:34:50 +0000

After a short hiatus, we’ve reactivated the Snap shots plugin that adds previews for external links. Here’s what it means:

If you link to anything on teachforus.org (like Our Supporters), there will be no preview bubble.
If you link to anything external to teachforus.org (like Teach For America), you’ll notice that there’s a little bubble to preview the site before visiting.

We had this on the old site, but it took some time to get it up on the new site. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Would you take a look at that!

Webmaster — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 13:17:59 +0000

It’s no secret that we’re fans of Teach For America. But, now it’s no secret that Teach For America is a fan of us. Our site is now linked from the Teach For America homepage in addition the Our Corps Members page. Check it out.

Answering your questions

Webmaster — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:29:17 +0000

We had some questions about using the site since the relaunch. We wanted to answer some of them here:

It is not taking my email address as an acceptable email address.
You must use your TFA-issued email address.
What happened to the static “pages” bloggers used to include?
The static pages are now located in the top right area of the blog (across from the title) in green.
My placement has changed and I can’t figure out how to edit it on my “About this Blog” section!
To edit your placement information, you’ll visit the “Blog Types” option under “Settings.” To edit the actual “About me” page, you must be logged in. If you visit the page, you can click the edit link at the bottom to jump right into editing.
Some of the customization stuff for our blogs seems to have been launched without much for us to actually do to customize. Am I missing something?
You can customize your header image and even add widgets from the “Appearance” menu. If there’s something else you’re thinking about, shoot us an email using the contact form.
Just clicked on a region and no blogs came up.
This may be caused by no blogs existing in a particular region. Definitely a bummer, but we don’t really have control over that.
Is it possible to search via multiple categories?
This isn’t currently possible due to the technical complexity involved in such a function. In theory, this is possible, but you’ll have to get some friends to click that donate button in order to pay for the development time.
When I click the “read more” button, it would be nice if it could just expand the current page instead of going to a new one.
That’s a pretty cool idea. We’ll put it on our list of things to think about for the future. We will need to raise some money to hire the developers, though… help us out by clicking the donate button.

Totally refreshed

Webmaster — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:53:02 +0000

That’s the feeling we get when we see our new site. Hopefully you feel the same. There’s tons of new features that we’ll post about soon. And, for those wondering how we pulled this off, thanks go to the team at Crowd Favorite who helped us throughout the design and deployment process.

Please leave comments with compliments or concerns.

Planned outage

Webmaster — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:56:25 +0000

TeachFor.Us will go offline late Thursday night, July 15, 2010. When we come back online… it will be a whole new Teach For Us. Please plan your blogging and visiting accordingly.

Revving up for a relaunch

Webmaster — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:31:41 +0000

A little more than three years and 11 months ago TeachFor.Us launched to the work. A little less than three weeks from now, Teach For Us will completely relaunch.

Get ready for a set of significant improvements to the site design and functionality. Here’s a short list of things you can expect:

Better branding. We’ll now be operating under the name Teach For Us. This is to help avoid confusion among many that would interpret us at the “Teach For” project. This site is about America (ala U.S.), but it’s meant to first say that this site is by us, the people of Teach For America. We’ll even have a spiffy logo.
Better design. Our current site design is very, um, simple. We’re getting a new design that helps visitors to the site access the content more easily and in a more visually pleasing manner. Additionally, our new design will help all bloggers maintain a great looking blog without need for technical know-how.
Better features. Our new site will incorporate features like image suggestion for bloggers, social media sharing and a way to browse blogs by region, grade, or subject.
Better software. Underneath the hood, we’re fullly transitioning to the just-released WordPress 3.0. This is will add a better experience for bloggers and a create a more stable system for serving the content to visitors as we continue to grow.

We’ll continue to post more about the process as we get closer to the date.

Blogger selected for education policy panel

Webmaster — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 04:17:39 +0000

Who says a blog on Teach For Us won’t get you something cool in life?

Wookie Kim, the corps member behind [ABCDE], is an invited panelist for the Education Sector event Finding the Link: Teacher Evaluation and Professional Development. Way to go Wookie!

ABCDE has been has been a consitently popular blog on Teach For Us. Education Sector’s own (popular) education blog The Quick and the ED has featured posts from ABCDE in the past.

Education Sector is an independent, nonpartisan, education-focused think tank based in Washington, D.C. Think “friends of TFA.”

Update: Read more about the panel on The Quick and the ED

Second Semester Statistics

Webmaster — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:32:34 +0000

It’s been a busy busy busy spring semester for us at Teach For Us. Lots of new blogs, lots of visitors, lots of great content.

We wanted to take a moment to let you know about some of the top blogs of the semester based on number of visits:

rubinc in nyc! (second semester as the most-visited blog!!)
A Blog Covering D.C. Education [ABCDE]
math in az
Gary Rubinstein’s TFA Blog
A Phila Science Saga
molly in the delta
call in baton rouge
math lover grows up (one of our most veteran blogs)
Floating down the Delaware
Not much, just chillin’
Miss Bennett in the Bay

This is a very short list… and even the top blog on this list represents a very small share of our overall visits to the site.

Just for full disclosure, we have decided to exclude blogs that do not have any posts made during the time-frame for these stats. So what, you might wonder, might make the list that wasn’t an “active blog.” Some blogs have great content that’s particularly juicy for people from search engines. A great example: posts about the application process. But one post from a while back does not a popular blog make.

In an effort to offer some more goodness, we present these extra-credit statistics:

Visitors who read A Phila Science Saga spend the most time on average on the site.
Visitors who read world on fire looked at the most pages per visit on average.
We had visitors from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. New York barely edged out California for the top spot; Wyoming and North Dakota sent us the fewest visitors.
People visited the site using Firefox most often, but Playstation 3 was the most interesting.
The iPhone was the most popular mobile device used to access the site.
Facebook was our top referral source.

Generally speaking, all signs point to good. Visits are up 56%, unique visitors are up 39%, and we had a 62% increase in pageviews compared to the same period last year.

Keep up all the hard work. We’ve got some exciting changes in store that will be announced soon. One of the changes is even hinted at within this post. (so sly, we know)