[tokenadult]

United States copyright law matters where I teach. (Most countries these days have somewhat similar laws about what the United States calls "fair use" and the somewhat different concept of what teachers are licensed by law to do for preparing classroom materials, but that can vary a bit from country to country.) Because United States law is reasonably generous to teachers,

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf

http://www.teachingcopyright.org/curriculum/hs

I do make use of copyrighted materials to prepare class handouts (especially), but because there are restrictions of reproductions of materials even for teachers, I generally prefer to use materials that have been put on the Web specifically for use by other teachers. That's because then I know there is a license from the copyright holder for the use I intend.

There are at least two organizations now for sharing classroom materials, one a commercial service that charges fees,

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/

and one coordinated as a nonprofit organization, for sharing free materials,

http://www.sharemylesson.com/

but when I visit those sites, I rarely find anything suitable for my classes, so I usually do direct searches by subject on Google, sometimes site-restricting to sites of educational institutions, to find suitable materials for my classes.

[glimcat]

"I rarely find anything suitable for my classes, so I usually do direct searches by subject on Google, sometimes site-restricting to sites of educational institutions, to find suitable materials for my classes."

Can you clarify why they're not suitable? Or are there any patterns in your unmet needs?

Which issues are most frustrating for you, or take up annoyingly large chunks of your time?

There are lots of people here who are interested in working on educational problems, either in a commercial or non-commercial context.

[japhyr]

Can you clarify why they're not suitable? Or are there any patterns in your unmet needs?

Most lesson-plan sites I have seen are poorly executed. Organizing educational materials is a difficult problem:

- For example, consider Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a simple rule that there can only be one article per topic. This focuses people's thoughts around building one high-quality article for their favorite topics. You can't do that for education. There are a number of different ways to teach most skills and concepts, and we need that variety if we want to offer high-quality education to everyone.

- Once you accept that there are a number of ways to teach any one topic, you can see how hard it might be to collect "unit plans", or whatever you'd like to call them. A good approach would probably involve defining "pathways" through a series of topics.

- Many lesson plan sites are just plain incomplete as well. People see the need for improvement, build a site, and expect teachers to magically fill in all the content.

- Every lesson plan site I've seen has been poorly organized, incomplete, over-commercialized, or some combination of these.

If anyone thinks there is a site that addresses these issues effectively, I'd love to hear about it.