The American Federation of Teachers plans to announce today that Share My Lesson, the site it helped to develop to share common-core resources, has attracted half a million teachers and parents, up from just 100,000 two years ago.
Share My Lesson, begun in 2012 with the for-profit TSL Education, offers a repository of lesson plans, activities, quizzes, and other materials for users, who can crowdsource and rate posted materials. About a tenth of the site’s 300,000 submissions are said to be aligned to the common core.
The site now has 500,000 registered users. It’s not clear how active they are on average, but overall the site has had 5.5 million downloads, the union says.
The announcement comes as AFT, particularly its New York affiliates, have complained that states and districts aren’t providing enough supports for implementing the common core.
Elsewhere, the National Education Association has begun its own partnership to get common-core-aligned materials into its members’ hands.
One thing to keep an eye on: Some observers have raised questions about the intellectual property of the materials teachers submit to lesson-sharing sites like this. According to Share My Lesson’s terms and conditions, teachers maintain ownership of their content, but TSL education gets an irrevocable license to use, modify, and publish what they submit.