meowgon:

support vastly on kickstarter!

i think everyone who follows me knows that i’m passionate about teaching, while also thinking the current way of teaching sucks. pretty sure a lot of you would agree with me. this kickstarter is meant to treat one major part of that: the awfulness of textbooks.

you know that textbooks in the u.s. are hugely influenced by what politicians want in them, not teachers, right? vastly would help change that, taking the power away from politicians and giving it back to teachers AND students.

vastly, at the basic level, is a search engine that only searches vetted sites, then rates those sites by difficulty and allows teachers to monitor student improvement as they read. you can check this out on their site right now. at a more advanced level, it gives teachers with a subscription the ability to monitor students individual learning profiles.

teachers can track student improvement as they read more difficult information, and help teachers create questions catered to what students are learning. the site also creates concept maps to help students connect information and learn more.

i know when i need to learn about a subject i just google it. if i’m interested, i’ll read more. think of following the trail of breadcrumbs on wikipedia, or related stories on news sites, and how much you can read. now imagine if teachers could quantify that reading and watch your improvement. wouldn’t that beat a textbook?

textbooks are controlled by the worst parts of big education business and politicians who don’t know a goddamn thing about teaching. textbooks as they are now massively minimize the roles of women and poc and LGBT people and poor people and disabled people and religions other than christianity and the intersection of all of the above. imagine if students could easily access information about those people, especially students who are part of those groups. 

this could also open up more opportunities for individual researchers and historians to have their work valued because the audience for their writing has grown.

check out the website or the kickstarter for more information. you can even recommend sites yourself if you sign up.

if this website gains support it will be an amazing resource for teachers. tumblr knows full well how much the internet can teach, right?

please share and support!