June 29 - Teachers.Net Tip of the Day:
The Faces Behind Teachers.Net
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THE 30 DAYS OF TEACHERS.NET is a special mailing to subscribers of the Teachers.Net Mailring. Help us celebrate this special month, by passing along this tip to your teacher and administrator colleagues.
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For a decade, Teachers.Net has been a dominant force in online teacher resources. Today's tip for June 29 gives you a short history of Teachers.Net, and introduces you to the people who help develop and maintain it.
 

In This Issue:

English Center Math Teachers Science Teachers Social Studies/Geography/History Music Teachers Art Education Language Center PE/Coaching Health Education Lessons by Subject Area Mailrings by Subject Area

Teachers.Net has dominated teacher search results for years - but it wasn't exactly easy getting there.  Behind the scenes of Teachers.Net a small but busy group of teachers and web developers have invested countless hours making this website what it is.

Our Gazette web magazine and live chats feature the work of a number of exceptional authors familiar to every educator, as well as your longtime colleagues and friends in the Teachers.Net Community. 

Dedicated volunteers assist with monitoring incoming sources and live events, helping maintain and protect this sprawling network. 

Thousands of other teachers have donated their gift of lesson to our Lesson Bank, now featuring 4177 great free lessons.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers have offered answers, advice, and consolation on our 150 Teacher Chatboards, a the most effective professional peer support network we've ever found.

As you can see, Teachers.Net is a group effort, networking the talents of nearly a million educators through time and around the world.

Teachers.Net was founded in 1996 by San Diego teacher and surfer Tony Bott.  Tony had watched with amazement the Internet and emerging technologies of the 90's.  He realized these technologies gave him tools to transform his teaching, and ability to interact with the student and parents.

Tony's love of these technologies - computers, networking, and the Internet - earned him recognition as the tech guru - the tech guy who always gets called over when something doesn't work right!  Tony quickly realized that not every teacher was having such an easy time integrating these cutting edge technologies.  Many couldn't even figure out how to send an email!

Tony had an epiphany - why not create a website for teachers, designed to help them understand and integrate Internet technologies?  He discussed the idea with his colleague, Bob Reap, a San Diego lawyer and the founder of Counsel.Net.  In March, 1996, Tony registered the domain name "Teachers.Net" and launched what would become the first name in teacher websites!

Teachers.Net's beginnings were very humble - just a single teacher chatboard, and one email discussion list.  For some reason, the site exploded almost immediately, and within months the main chatboard had split into clone chatboards for grade levels, then subject areas, and finally, for every state.  The email discussion lists (Teachers.net's "Mailrings") also grew to include one for every chatboard, or over 150 in all.

The chatboard, created by hand by Bob Reap, proved to be a handy script for cloning and morphing into other resources.  It was made into a job posting board (called the Job Center).  It was edited to upload and archive lesson plans, which we found our teachers were very generous in contributing to our free database.  It was fashioned into a Christmas card module, which we feature every year in December.  Singing the Teachers.Net Christmas Card is a tradition that thousands of teachers have joined over the years.  The chatboard was hacked into a classroom projects network, and most recently, into free teacher classified ads.

Teachers.Net has taken a decade to get where it is, but that's not bad considering its development was entirely by teachers and developers who never had any formal training in the web programming.  At Teachers.Net, we're currently finishing up work on a number of exciting projects giving teachers options they won't find anywhere else online. 

I hope you'll have an opportunity to see them in the month's ahead.  If you haven't already, check out our Teachers.Net Mailrings webpage, and be sure to sign up for the mailrings that apply to your teacher interests.  We'll be revealing these new developments and resources on these mailrings in the weeks ahead.

I'll leave you with a few words about some of the folks who have helped bring you Teachers.Net.  If you'd like to volunteer and join the team, please submit your lesson plans, read and contribute to the Teachers.Net Gazette, post to the teacher classifieds and chatboards, and join and participate freely on the teacher mailrings.

Short bios follow - thanks to all those who helped make Teachers.Net, and I hope we can add your name to our laudations next time!


Bob Reap
Site Developer
Teachers.Net


Tony Bott (Founder, co-developer)
Tony Bott is a teacher who grew up in San Diego, a city known for innovation and enterprise.  In 1995, Tony traded in his surf board for a Mac computer, and founded one of the oldest websites for teachers, Teachers.Net.

Tony joined forces with Bob Reap, a San Diego lawyer, and together they started analyzing the offerings in online teacher development.  In these early days of "irrational exuberance," they saw many new Internet companies daringly ransom their future to the legions of eager venture capitalists.  Most marketing plans were riding on hot air, since almost nobody was really making money yet on the Internet.  Tony determined that he would reduce his risk in growth, by adopting a development philosophy which stressed minimizing costs through automation, in turn, never having to charge teachers for anything offered on the site.

The approach worked - as the "Internet bust" consumed the websites that foolishly purchased company helicopters or flew first class, Teachers.Net concentrated on making every system on the site practically run itself.  It is amazing to many today, that the bulk of Teachers.Net's development and maintenance falls to just one or two people.

These days, Tony has concentrated most of his energies on developing the Teachers.Net Job Center, an ambitious teacher career center project that will offer features and performance that rival even Monster.com.  If you get a chance to see Teachers.Net at one of the teacher conferences around the country, look up Tony Bott.  He'll be the one gushing about the latest innovations in education technology!


Bob Reap (Site Developer)
San Diegan Bob Reap knew Tony from years earlier, and they often jammed music together.  Bob had graduated law school in the early 90's, but before the legal community could get its claws into him, the Internet bug had bitten him.  Without any formal technical training, Bob decided to leave his job and took work as a webmaster for a legal website (Lawinfo.com).  In the meantime, he developed the successful website for attorneys, Counsel.Net.

Bob brought his experience with website development and marketing to Teachers.Net, and to his joy, watched the project explode with teacher traffic, sometimes increasing at a rate of 20% or more a month.  Bob developed all of the programming for the site, teaching himself with a quickly expanding library of do-it-yourself tech manuals.

Today, Bob is the chief site developer, maintaining over 15,000 webpages and helping 1/2 million teachers a year connect through the Teachers.Net Project.


Kathleen "Kat" Carpenter (Editor-in-Chief, Outreach Director)
Kathleen "Kat" Carpenter, M.S., taught grades K-6 for 28 years. Her undergraduate majors were elementary education, English and psychology, but an interest in early childhood education led her to do her graduate work in that field, a dramatic departure from her original plan to be a cowgirl... an aspiration that was crushed when her first grade teacher informed Kathleen's mother that girls were not allowed to wear Billy the Kid slacks to school. (This proved to be a seminal moment, opening the door to an interest in journalist/activist Nellie Bly - who wore dresses most of the time and was therefore a more suitable role model - though knowing Nellie, she probably wore slacks under those long dresses.)

With her energies diverted from horses and holsters to pad and pen, Kat wrote for the Edwin O. Smith University High School (go Panthers!)  newspaper and literary magazine. At age 16 she taught a second grade First Communion class and the die was cast... Kathleen (who by now had mastered Typing I & II and Steno in prep for her Nellie Bly career), decided to become a teacher. She raised two daughters while attending college and teaching, worked for several political campaigns, served as president and political action representative of her NEA affiliate, was Director of Religious Education for her church, and participated in many school, church, civic, political and social organizations. Kathleen was honored as her school district's Teacher of the Year and received several state level awards for innovative curriculum projects.
 
Kat stumbled upon and fell in love with Teachers.Net during its fledgling year and immediately became involved with site promotion, professional development chats, and everything else that Bob Reap could throw at her.  She unwisely declined to complain and soon found herself indispensable to Teachers.Net.  Over the years, Kathleen has successfully brought legendary names in literature and education to Teachers.Net, hosting live interviews and workshops, developing continuing education programs, public relations, and a thousand other tasks too lengthy to begin to list.

Kathleen once learned of a Teachers.Net teacher with a child in desperate need of not one but two organ transplants.  Kathleen helped set up a foundation which succeeded in helping to fund the crippling costs of this lifesaving procedure for this unfortunate young man.  Kathleen has a great compassion and energy, and no matter how many things I say here, she will remain one of the unsung heroes of the Teachers.Net project.
 
The daughter of two members of the Greatest Generation who were role models of hard work, integrity and charity, she lives in New England with her husband, a retired school principal. She enjoys spending time with her two daughters, their husbands, and 4 of the most wonderful grandchildren in the world, and her kitty, Miss T. Kathleen's favorite place to be: anywhere within sight, smell and earshot of the ocean - wearing jeans.


Mary Miehl (Gazette Layout, Technical Consultant)
Mary E. Miehl is now retired after 36 years of teaching kindergarten and first grade children. Being the second of nine children, she has 17 nieces and nephews, 3 great nieces and one great nephew...so far, so she has spent her entire life surrounded by children. She has lived in Northwestern Pennsylvania her entire life.

With a Masters in Education she specialized in Early Childhood Education, and Reading, both remedial and developmental. She is a trained Reading Recovery teacher and spent 11 years teaching Reading Recovery. She also attained several hours of technology training and was a member of her district’s technology team. She maintained her school’s web site for several years, taught technology classes to community adults, conducted in-service training for district teachers, and taught interested children during summer enrichment school.

In addition to her teaching duties, she was very active in her local and regional NEA affiliates holding positions ranging from building representative to president. Grievance chair was her longest held position lasting many years.

She enjoys hiking with her dogs, knitting, sewing, yard work, and doing home repairs. She also enjoys tinkering with computer related hardware and software.

Besides her two dogs, Iggy an American Eskimo who was a stray that showed up for school one day and Ollie, a Samoyed that was a rescued dog, she has two cats, one as a small kitten showed up on her porch one cold evening and the other adopted from the local Humane Society. In addition to these hairy house mates she has two feathered friends. A Timneh African Grey that was purchased over twenty years ago and the cockatiel that hatched right a home almost 20 years ago.

Mary found Teachers.Net in June of 1996 and has made it a part of her daily routine ever since.


Number404 (Chatroom Monitor)
Number404 aka Ronda F. is a retired teacher of first aid, lifeguarding, and swimming at a YMCA and retired Aquatic Director at a summer camp. She also worked several years as an optical coatings technician in industry doing optical coatings on fiber optics and laser mirrors.

She lives one county away from Philadelphia,PA, a city that is the same size as the county it is in, where she is a serious amateur artist. Number404 mostly paints in oils but works in other media as well. She takes art classes during the year at the local community college. She participates and sometimes wins in local art shows and is an active member of the show committee of the local Arts Alliance.

Number404's handle, based on the error message, came from another site that had lost her former rf(PA) registered login. She picked the error message to replace it as a joke, but because she used it long enough for people to know her by it, she kept it when she came to Teachers.net after the other site closed. It is also an obscure reference to the 1960s T.V. show, "The Prisoner," which starred Patrick McGoohan.


Dave Melanson (Chatroom Monitor)
Dave Melanson of Montreal is one of several chatroom monitors who keep an eye on the Teachers.Net Chatroom to ensure a safe, happy and secure chat experience. Dave is a consultant who conducts inservice training for classroom teachers who have visually impaired students in their classes. He enjoys several hobbies including ham radio communication.


YENDOR (Gazette contributor)

Hi there! My name is YENDOR and I live in Alabama, the land of good Looking women and high humidity.

 

I was a traveling piano picker for about 25 years, a radio jock and then backed into teaching. I taught sixth grade one year and then fifth gradefor twenty-seven years.

 

My hobbies are computer, collecting old radio shows from the 30's-50's, classic OLD TV shows, Asian horror movies, reading, collecting  autographs, and music. My favorite singer/songwriter is Michelle Shocked. If you don't like her you don't like me.  My favorite comedian is W.C. Fields. My favorite author is Mark Twain.

 

I play the piano, bass guitar and drums. I sometimes wish I had done that for a living.

 

I have a freakish sense of humor and rarely agree with anyone on anything. I love practical jokes and only play them on people I like... which is a short list.

 

I retired from teaching two years ago and don't miss it a bit. People come up to me all the time and say, "What do you DO all day?" I simply tell them that I retire.

 

If you are ever in northern Alabama, come by and see me. If you don't drink sweet tea you will be shot at the door. If you put a lemon in it you will be beaten but not shot... the first time.

Look for YENDOR's contribution in each month's Teachers.Net Gazette, The Lighter Side of Teaching.

Harry & Rosemary Wong (Guest Columnists)
Harry and Rosemary Wong are teachers. Harry is a native of San Francisco and taught middle school and high school science. Rosemary is a native of New Orleans and taught K-8, including working as the school media coordinator and student activity director.

Harry Wong has been awarded the Outstanding Secondary Teacher Award, the Science Teacher Achievement Recognition Award, the Outstanding Biology Teacher Award, and the Valley Forge Teacher's Medal. He was selected as one of the most admired people in the world of education by readers of Instructor magazine. Rosemary was chosen as one of California's first mentor teachers and has been awarded the Silicon Valley Distinguished Woman of the Year Award.

Harry Wong is the most sought after speaker in education today. He has been called "Mr. Practicality" for his common sense, user-friendly, no-cost approach to managing a classroom for high-level student success.

Nearly a million teachers worldwide have heard his message. Because he is fully booked for two years, he has agreed to and has invited his wife to join him in doing a monthly column for teachers.net so that more people can hear their message.

         Harry & Rosemary Wong Column


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June: The 30 Days of Teachers.Net

1. The Teachers.Net Gazette
2. Teacher Mailrings
3. Harry & Rosemary Wong
4. The Lesson Bank
5. Teacher Tech Center
6. Teacher Classifieds
7. State Teachers.Net Network
8. Live Teacher Chat & Live Meetings
9. Free Teacher "Printables"
10. Classroom Project Center
11. Teacher Chatboard Network
12. Share Teachers.Net
13. Build Teachers.Net with Your Feedback
14. Interest Groups
15. Administrators.Net
16. Teachers.Net Chat Center
17. Streaming Teacher Video
18. Teachers.Net Tutor Center
19. Academic Grant Resources
20. Teachers.Net Bookshelf
21. Tips For The Chatboard
22. Grade Level Resources
23. Teachers.Net Staffroom Flyer
24. Teachers.Net Archives
25. Hot Topics
26. Language Arts Center
27. Subject Area Resources
28. Teachers.Net Quick Links
29. The Faces Behind Teachers.Net
30. Teachers.Net Summer Job Fair