As our colleague Stephen Sawchuk reports over on the Teacher Beat blog, the American Federation of Teachers today announced its entrance into the online content repository field, a $10 million collaboration with British publishing firm TSL Education that aims to be the most extensive and teacher-friendly repository created yet.
That’s no easy task in the rapidly expanding world of educational repositories. But the AFT’s name and its focus of the “Share My Lesson” platform on resources pertaining to the common standards could potentially mobilize teachers to participate at rates not seen before.
Of course, there are still some questions, most notably how the program will be funded after the initial $10 million investment runs out. Potentially, the site could evolve into a two-tiered platform where users pay for premium content but have free access to basic content, Sawchuk reports, a model that is very popular in public education right now.
There’s also the issue of whether there are actually too many concurrent repository efforts, since the idea is to unify digital resources, not segregate them. But then again, how many of us participate in Facebook, Twitter, Google+, MySpace, Flickr, and LinkedIn all at the same time?