New Education Website Teachfind.com Saves the National Strategies and Other Popular UK Education Sites

London, United Kingdom, July 04, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Becta, National Strategies, QCDA, Teachers TV - all extremely popular sites with UK teachers, are in the process of being decommissioned by the Government, with no clear strategy for their preservation. Most of them are quietly being mothballed and placed into the National Archives – as only partial versions of their former selves. Indeed, the Department for Education admit that “Some functionality and features previously available on the National Strategies website will not be available in the National Archive."

Mark Harrop, a director of Axis12 Limited, the company behind Teachfind.com, explains. “Having worked closely with UK teaching professionals for years, we knew how much time, effort and money had gone into creating these teaching resources and could not just stand aside and watch as they were shut down. So we came up with a strategy to save them. Using low cost cloud storage, and clever open source search and index technologies, we’ve created a solution that is proving very popular with teachers. It’s basically a very specialised search engine: The search works very much like Google’s – and it also offers suggestions a bit like Amazon does.”

“We know that teachers are busy people, so we have worked hard to provide easy to use and powerful search tools to let them get to the content they need, irrespective of what site it might be on. As we add more sites, the content will become even more comprehensive. We are asking teachers to suggest sites they think we should support.”

“Our aim is to not only saving great content from being shelved, but also to combine that content with resources and content from some of the best sites around the world to provide a one stop digital directory for teachers.”

“We’ve just added the National Strategies, and are already seeing a massive demand for our version of the site, which is the only version available that is 100% functional – for example, it supports the most popular area of the site – the Primary Learning Objectives, while the National Archives does not.”

Teachfind continue to seek the best resources to add to their site – currently 60,000 pieces of content and growing.

References

http://www.teachfind.com

http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/toolsandinitiatives/nationalstrategies

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