Teach For Us
Encyclopedia
Teach For Us is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 non-profit organization
Non-profit organization
Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 that works to educate the public about the challenges faced by recent college graduates and professionals who agree to teach for two years in low-income communities throughout the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 as part of the Teach For America
Teach For America
Teach For America is an American non-profit organization that aims to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting the nation's most promising future leaders to teach for two or more years in low-income communities throughout the United States...

 program.

History

The organization was founded by Adam Geller, who himself was a Teach For America
Teach For America
Teach For America is an American non-profit organization that aims to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting the nation's most promising future leaders to teach for two or more years in low-income communities throughout the United States...

 teacher starting in 2006, after he developed the idea for a blog community when he could not find an appropriate place to create a blog to update family and friends about his experiences. Since starting in 2006, Teach For Us has grown to host more than 1200 blogs written by Teach For America teachers, also called corps members. Teach For America
Teach For America
Teach For America is an American non-profit organization that aims to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting the nation's most promising future leaders to teach for two or more years in low-income communities throughout the United States...

 started publicly recognizing Teach For Us as an independent source of information about the program starting in 2008 and acknowledges the site from its homepage and several sub-pages.

Teach For Us was originally launched under the name TeachFor.Us, but in April 2010, Teach For Us filed with the Missouri Secretary of State and incorporated under the current name as a nonprofit corporation in the state of Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...

. Teach For Us is a recognized 501(c)3 charity by the IRS.

Media Coverage

Teach For Us has been featured in media across the United States and is the subject of educational research set to be published Fall 2010 by a Georgia State University
Georgia State University
Georgia State University is a research university in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Founded in 1913, it serves about 30,000 students and is one of the University System of Georgia's four research universities...

 doctoral candidate.
  • In January 2007, the Los Angeles Times
    Los Angeles Times
    The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....

     covered the Teach For Us blog In the Lou in its School Me! blog, which covered a range of local and national education issues.
  • The education periodical Instructor named Teach For Us as "Best blog from the trenches" on its list of Top 20 Teacher Blogs
  • Rasmussen College
    Rasmussen College
    Rasmussen College is a 110-year old for-profit private college offering Bachelor's and Associate's degrees at multiple campuses in Minnesota including Blaine, Brooklyn Park, Eagan, Bloomington, Lake Elmo, Mankato, Moorhead and St...

     named the Teach For Us network to its list of "Top 50 Blogs for Teachers."
  • Author Joanne Jacobs, who wrote Our School, links to content on Teach For Us in her blog focusing on current education issues.
  • Popular New York City
    New York City
    New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

     education blog Gotham Schools covered Teach For Us in 2008 and links to bloggers periodically in its regular coverage.
  • A Teach For Us blogger was invited to speak at an Education Sector policy panel exploring the link between teacher evaluation and professional development.

Audience

Teach For Us does not post firm numbers of visitors, though they report significant year-over-year growth in visitors. Based on this information, it's estimated that monthly visitors top 42,000.

Audience analysis from Quantcast
Quantcast
Quantcast is a California based company that provides publishers and marketers with the ability to understand, deliver and reach their best audiences at a massive scale...

 reveals Teach For Us reaches a balanced male/female audience that is overwhelmingly US-based with good distribution across ages and ethnicities. Teach For Us has above average market penetration in the 18-34 and 35-49 age brackets. The site also shows above average exposure to African American internet users and has a high index of college and graduate-level-educated visitors.

Software platform

When Teach For Us launched in 2006, social media was in its infancy. Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 was still limited to a select set of college campuses, and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 was not yet a household term. As such, there were only two experimental offshoots of the popular blogging platform Wordpress
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...

 that could support a network of blogs. Teach For Us partnered with ibiblio
Ibiblio
ibiblio is a "collection of collections," and hosts a diverse range of publicly available information and open source software, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. As an "Internet librarianship," ibiblio is a digital library and archive...

 and deployed on Lyceum
Lyceum (software)
Lyceum is an open-source blogging platform based on WordPress. It was developed by ibiblio, though is currently inactive.-History:Lyceum was first made public in February 2006. It originally began in mid-2005, and development is synchronous with WordPress...

.

Lyceum stopped development when Wordpress MU started to merge with the official Wordpress source code in version 3.0. As such, Teach For Us made the decision to transition to Wordpress 3.0 in 2010 in order to meet the technical needs of running a network of blogs while allowing users a more familiar experience found with Wordpress.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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