A leading education expert has hailed a Derby inventor’s innovative online lesson-sharing platform after seeing first-hand how it has boosted teaching at a city school.
Ty Goddard, co-founder of the Education Foundation, described Paul Rose’s online product, YouTeachMe, as “an extremely powerful educational tool” during a visit to the Royal School for the Deaf Derby. The school has started using the system to help its students to learn maths, drama and music.
Mr Rose launched YouTeachMe last year to enable teachers to film their own lessons and share them with other colleagues and pupils via the internet.
The system, which has been adopted by 30 mainstream and SEN schools across the UK, has already been nominated for a number of awards. It picked up its biggest accolade this year when it was named in the EdTech50, a list of the country’s best people, projects and products using technology to shape and improve the education sector.
Mr Goddard is also director of EdTechUK and spent a day in Derby to see how YouTeachMe was being used at the Royal School for the Deaf, where maths teacher Cathie Birch has filmed a number of videos featuring herself teaching using British Sign Language.
She said: “It’s very early days at the moment, but the system is really helping the students because it gives them a visual learning aid that they have never been able to access in their own study time before.
“Other teachers have asked me about it because they are starting to see the benefits of YouTeachMe. The potential for the system in this school and elsewhere across the wider industry is massive.”
Mr Rose launched YouTeachMe last year to enable teachers to film their own lessons and share them with other colleagues and pupils via the internet.
Mr Goddard said: “We have already recognised how far-sighted YouTeachMe is and how its focus on improving schools right across the educational spectrum will help professional educators to do their jobs.
“It is proving to be an extremely powerful tool in this school and I have no doubt that it will prove itself to be an extremely powerful tool in other schools as well.”
Mr Rose has spent seven years developing the system and there are now 2,500 videos online, with its users able to follow contributors whose content they have found particularly useful. He is also preparing to launch a version of his product for parents, called YouTeachMeToo.
He said: “There are still very many developments in the pipeline but the numbers of subscribers and uploaded videos is being added all the time, and so it’s wonderful to see a project that I have worked on for so long starting to realise its potential and have a significant effect on people’s professional development and learning.”
For more information visit www.youteachme.co.uk
