TeachFor.Us News

Proposed changes to federal funding procedures would reduce the corps size by 30 percent, and Teach For America wants to mobilize its supporters through the use of text messages.

According to a post on their site, Congress is considering a change from the direct allocation model to a competitive grants process. The site reports that the new funding cycles would cause Teach For America to cut the corps size by 1,350 in 2011, a reduction impacting 86,000 students. (That’s a lot of potential bloggers!)

The really interesting thing is that Teach For America’s main mechanism for activism is through text messaging.

We found out the widget (highlighted by us in the red box) is powered by Mobile Commons. Basically, to get involved, a visitor needs only type in his or her cell phone number, zip code, and email address. The system will automagically look up your congress-people and give you a direct line for contact at some point in the future.

So maybe this isn’t exactly about TeachFor.Us, but it’s up our alley since it’s about social media (we think text messages count as social media). We also like that Teach For America is embracing social media (like us) more and more.

[We would also like to point out that there are several silly phone puns in this post.]

If you follow us on Twitter, you get all the blog updates in your tweet stream. The coolest part is you can always be sure that you’re being pointed to a story on the TeachFor.Us site because our links are all shortened into the format tch4.us. We think that’s pretty awesome.

While all our awesome bloggers supply the content, it’s a company named awe.sm that powers the link-shortening for us. Thanks awe.sm, you’re awesome!

We’re excited to report that January was the first time we noticed that we had more than 20,000 visits to the site. Emphasis on “first time we noticed” since, after reviewing our site stats a little more thoroughly, we discovered this first occured during October. We like this trend… that’s for sure.

Digging in a bit more, what’s really cool is that we’re still being discovered by lots of new people (who then come back to read some more).

Keep blogging, keep sharing the posts on Facebook and Twitter (do it automagically with TwitterFeed), and keep reading!

We discovered last week that TeachFor.Us received an honor. We’ve been named the best blog for “News from the Trenches” by Scholastic’s “Instructor” magazine. Scholastic is no small player in the world of education, so we’re really excited that they even know we exist let alone think we’re the best.

Here’s how they describe us:

The lowdown: Teach for America teachers share the ins and outs of the sometimes controversial program.
Why We Love It: Whether you want TFA dirt (like how tough the boot-camp training really is) or warm fuzzies (like one blogger’s quest to get her student to love books by reading with her nightly over the phone), you’ll find the goods in this collection of blogs from TFA corps members working all over the country.

Thanks to the Scholastic editors and to you, our bloggers, for being open and honest about your experiences.

You can read the original article on the Scholastic site.

Report cards likely went out to many students in the past few weeks detailing achievements of the first semester of the 2009-10 school year.

We’d probably get an F for “regular updates,” but later is better than never, right?

So, we proudly present the most popular blogs of first semester, measured by the number of visits 06/01/2009 - 12/31/2009.

1. rubinc in nyc!
2. A Blog Covering D.C. Education [ABCDE]
3. Purpose-Driven to New Orleans
4. Miss Bennett in the Bay
5. A Phila Science Saga
6. jeffpmanassero
7. mollyinthedelta
8. PLVS VLTRA
9. the projectionist
10. Gary Rubinstein’s TFA Blog

Not on this list and want to increase exposure for your blog? You can push them out as status updates to Twitter and Facebook via TwitterFeed.

Since we’ve been so bad at publishing stats like this, maybe we can get some extra credit by telling you the top ten blogs of the decade (even though we started in 2006, but hey, the title sounds nice, right?)….

1. rubinc in nyc!
2. Miss Bennett in the Bay
3. ms math las vegas (now called “math lover grows up”)
4. In the Lou
5. Sara in the Delta
6. Purpose-Driven to New Orleans
7. Dispatches from the Delta
8. here and now
9. A Blog Covering D.C. Education [ABCDE]
10. the ferrous wheel

We’re happy to give you, the bloggers, all the credit here. The more you blog about Teach For America, the more people visit! Keep up the hard work.

We’ve been hearing some reports of spam comments becoming a problem again. PLEASE read this post which explains how to turn on the spam filter. We’d turn it on for you, but we’re not allowed. This is a five-minute fix to get rid of all spam!

Our awesome hosts at ibiblio think they’ve figured out a way to increase the site speed. It involves a minor change to how some information is processed on the server. We’ve made a temporary adjustment to see if it works. This change went into effect on Thursday, January 22, and no one has reported any problems, yet.

If you’re posting this weekend and the site starts giving you errors about expired tokens, please let us know via email.

And, since some of you are wondering, no, these tokens aren’t good for arcade games. Don’t be upset that we’re not letting you keep them longer.

We’re happy to announce two things:

• The first of the 2010 corps has started to join TeachFor.Us within 24 hours or so of their acceptance. We are, of course, happy that this signals more people joining the community to share their story, but it also signals a huge accomplishment to those people for their admittance to the corps. Some new blogs are Bre in the city, Cajun in St. Louis, and Ready 2 Teach. No pressure at all to keep your blog going now that you’ve been publicly announced!
• The second is a congratulations to us, well, to all of you. Hmm. To all of us who are part of TeachFor.Us. For the month of October, the site registered more than 20,000 visitors for the first time in one calendar month. If you want to be really precise… 21,361. The real story behind the numbers is that this is up 36% from the same period last year. That’s a lot of year-over-year growth! Our continuous growth in readership is thanks to all of the great content that each and every person posts on here. Your work is making a difference in the lives of our nation’s children, and your stories about your work are inspiring many many people.

We made some changes to the server software today. If you’re trying to do anything normal (write, edit, comment) and the site seems to act up, please shoot us an email so that we can take a look.

Additionally, we added a toolbar to every page at the bottom that allows visitors to interact with each other and the content of the site. We hope that you find this useful. We’re interested to get your feedback.

We’ve migrated the entire TeachFor.Us site to a new server within our data center. You should notice that the site is much snappier now.

Other than increased performance, this should impact not the site. If you experience anything out of the ordinary, please let us know.

Thanks to CMP over at ibiblio for helping us with the move.