March 25th, 2009 — New York, NY — Business and finance news source “The Deal” recently sat down with TeachStreet’s Founder and CEO, Dave Schappell, who was in Manhattan for the “Hacking Education Conference” put on by Union Square Ventures. In Mary Kathleen Flynn’s interview of Schappell, they discussed the current state of education (both k-12 and lifelong), the impact the web will have on learning, and the increasing number of teachers who are growing and managing their businesses online.

From lifelong learning sites, such as TeachStreet, to video learning sites, such as EduFire, the web has seen an emergence of websites that are fundamentally changing the way people learn.  And with the emergence of more online platforms from which teachers can grow their businesses, we’re sure to see increasing growth in online learning. As Schappell put it, “there are many in the industry seeking to transform the face of education.”

For a deeper look into the Hacking Education Conference see the video of Mary Flynn Boyle’s discussion with Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham and Albert Wenger.

One of the joys of working at TeachStreet is getting to meet incredibly interesting people who are passionate about teaching people new things that they love.  An excellent of example of that was a few weeks ago, when I met Amish Bhavsar, the co-founder of LazyMaths.com.

LazyMaths is the first and only website featuring a comprehensive collection of Speed Math shortcuts and Smart Math techniques. It offers users a unique and fun way to learn mental math, increase their confidence and zoom up their math score.  And, what’s even better, is that they’re happy to teach you their tricks with free samples on their website and also in-person math tutoring, starting at $30 per hour (it helps if you’re in the Secaucus, NJ area, but I bet that you could convince them to join eduFire for online learning!).

Many students face difficulty in Math and have started hating the subject because even after spending a lot of time studying it, they just don’t seem to get the right answer. Moreover, most are so dependent on a calculator that they simply can’t seem to solve even basic math problem without using it.

What’s the square of 89 or what’s the simplified value of the 1/ [1+1/ {1+1/ (1+1/4)}]?
Try solving those in under a minute without a calculator. Most people can’t. That’s where LazyMaths comes in. LazyMaths helps anyone to attempt Math problems in unique ways never before taught in schools.

LazyMaths is divided in two sections – Zappers & Don’t Solve.

Zappers is the home of Speed Math shortcuts. With Zappers, you would learn many interesting shortcuts that will help you master basic math tasks like multiplication, division, squaring of numbers, etc. Zappers is great for those trying to improve their mental math skills.

Don’t Solve is the home of Smart Math techniques. With Don’t Solve, you would learn how to simply attempt a Math problem and get the right answer without actually solving it and save an awful lot of time while eliminating mistakes. Don’t Solve is great for those giving any exam like SAT, ACT, GMAT or GRE.

Whether you love math or you hate it, you would only love LazyMaths.
Whether you are a student, parent or a teacher, you would learn a new math at LazyMaths.
Whether you are taking a middle school exam or the Math Olympiad and everything in between, your score would only improve with LazyMaths.
Whether you are taking the American GREs, GMATs, SATs or ACTs, you would build your skill and confidence with LazyMaths.

Go ahead experience Math in a whole new way.

And, check out some of their awesome math articles and tricks that they’ve written on TeachStreet – we love them!

• Sex and Math
• Speed Math shortcut to Square Any number ending with 5
• Why Maths and not Math?

The TeachStreet community team recently visited the Bay Area to host several meetups for our members and their guests.  It was exhilarating to meet and have conversations with over 60 great teachers and instructors on TeachStreet.

If you missed the events, here are the tips we shared with attendees to help them use TeachStreet to get new students.

Top 5 Tips for TeachStreet:

1. Add photos to your profile and classes
2. Add classes so you can be found
3. Request Reviews from your past students
4. Utilize our Craigslist Tool to promote your classes
5. Showcase your expertise by writing an article

Completing these steps will definitely get you ahead of the game for finding new students.  And, if you have any friends or colleagues who might like to learn more about TeachStreet, please let them know or suggest them as a teacher on TeachStreet.

For those of you on other popular social networks, you can also become a fan of TeachStreet on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

In addition to sharing our favorite “how to’s” for how to use TeachStreet, we also had the opportunity to connect instructors and teachers with one another for support and networking.

If you live in Seattle or the Bay Area, TeachStreet members are meeting up regularly.  So, if you’re interested in connecting with a local group, email me (with “group member” in the subject line) and I’ll try my hardest to get you linked-up with groups forming in your area.

Here’s a great slide show of the events that my colleague Joseph put together:

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions for me — I’m more than happy to help.

You can reach me at: salar@teachstreet.com.

–

Don’t these folks look happy?

They’re our current interns (Amanda, Annie and Gracie), and they just LOVE working for us.

If you’d like to join our team this spring and/or summer, check out our job posting for full details about what we’re looking for and how to apply.

To whet your appetite, here’s the basic overview:

Job Type: Internship. 10 hour/week (minimum), 15-20+ hours desired with 3-6 months commitment (with a two-week “trial” period for us to make sure we love each other). College credit available if school approves. Internships are paid; amount based on experience. All candidates should have their own laptop computer.

Intern Descriptions: Basically we’re looking for super smart, outgoing, Jacks-and-Jills-of-all-trades. All candidates should be optimistic, incredibly flexible and have a just-do-it attitude! (We have a strong “no sniveling” policy here at TeachStreet and we want proven “self-starters”.) Oh, you should also love learning new things.

We’re looking for undergrads of senior standing (outstanding juniors may also apply) as well as graduate school candidates (MBA’s etc.). Focus areas for internship will depend on intern’s background, expertise and the needs of the company. Four main focus areas for internships are: (1) Data & Quantitative analysis, (2) Customer Services/Community/Sales, (3) Engineering and (4) Product marketing, research and business development.

Click here to see the detailed intern description.

Looking forward to hearing from you! (And please feel free to pass this along to all the smarty-pants you know.)

From Rodeo drive to Wall Street just about every car maker, retailer, restaurant owner, and taxi cab driver has been affected by the economy. But there’s one thing people can always do no matter how far the NASDAQ dips: learn.

Whether that means learning how to make jewelry or getting into downward dog, Americans have not lost their thirst for knowledge amidst the greatest economic downturn since the great depression.

Seattle Times Article (click here)

And just as lifelong learners are still learning, instructors are still teaching. In his recent article, Brier Dudley, of the Seattle Times, talks about how TeachStreet is providing a type of web 2.0 stimulus to local instructors who are looking to make a few bucks sharing their skills.

Also, in a related article on TechFlash, Tom Seery highlights TeachStreet as a web 2.0 site that is sure to thrive in the economic downturn.

From salsa dancing to hip hop, we try our best to provide fun workshops for our community to learn new things. We were able to put together a Hip Hop Workshop last Saturday, where students were able to get an introduction to both break dancing and hip hop dancing from some great teachers.

A big thank you goes out to both Daniel Etcheto (Breakdancing Ninja) and Shinji Kasahara for taking the time to teach our community about what they do while providing a bit of a taste of their world of dancing. Along with the teachers, I’d also love to thank Marlo Martin for lending her space at eXit Space School of Dance. Without the help of the community of teachers and schools on TeachStreet, events like these wouldn’t happen, so please give you thanks today with a review or testimonial:

• Daniel Etcheto (Breakdancing Ninja): click here to leave a review
• Shinji Kasahara: click here to leave a review
• eXit Space School of Dance: click here to leave a review

For more photos/videos from the event, please check out our slide show below:

There were a lot of happy, and exhausted, faces when leaving the workshop, which was great. Some fo the students wanted to know when the next workshop or event is going to be in Seattle, so please if you’re interested too — send me an e-mail of what you want to learn. If you happened to have any questions or feedback, please e-mail at joseph@teachstreet.com.

—

If you liked this post, recommend it to a colleague and/or click here to get updates via email or RSS. You can also become a fan of TeachStreet on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Whether you enjoy making music or just listening to it, it’s one of life’s major staples.  Music has been around for arguably longer than religion; that’s thousands of years!  Some folks even link learning music to higher intelligence.  I won’t make the claim that musicians are smarter than the rest of us, but they do have a skill and talent that is worth talking about.  The music they create has the power to move people, and inspire a flurry of emotions that adjust from tune to tune.

#1 Music Teacher in the Bay Area: Rick Alegria

As someone who is passionate about music, I thought I would write this post to highlight the top 10 music teachers in the Bay Area.  This list includes San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto, and San Jose music instructors.

Top 10 Bay Area Music Teachers:

1. Rick Alegria – Drum Lessons
2. Vismaya Lhi – Voice Lesson Instruction
3. Harry Best – Steel Drum Pan Lessons
4. Nika Rejto – Flute Lessons
5. Matthew Heulitt – Guitar Lessons
6. Chris Brown – Private Trumpet Lessons
7. GG Amos – Guitar Lessons
8. Eric Hamilton – Expert Guitar Instruction
9. Karl Goldstein – Piano Instruction
10. Anne Wallace Peterson – Basic Piano for Adults

This is an official call out to all types of music teachers out there in the Bay Area.  We have an amazing music community on TeachStreet, and always looking to add more musical diversity.  If you have any friends or colleagues that teach music, please refer them to TeachStreet to promote their classes, for free!

–

If you liked this post, recommend it to a colleague and/or click here to get updates via email or RSS. You can also become a fan of TeachStreet on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Last month we conducted the first official TeachStreet customer survey. We had an awesome response – over 250 people diligently completed all 25 questions! We learned a lot from the survey – and are excited to share the highlights – we continue to be energized by the enthusiasm and insight of you all! Thank you.

So, who’s teaching on TeachStreet?

• 72.5% have been teaching over 5 years
• 67% work part time
• 95% teach adults (with many teaching youth/children – but we definitely have a depth in adult life-long learning)
• 82% have a website, 26% have a blog
• If you spend time online it is often at Craigslist, Facebook & PayPal.

Are you happy with us? Yes!

• 89% are happy (satisfied or very satisfied)
• 75.6% are “extremely likely” or “likely” to recommend Teachstreet to a friend. YAY!

Many of you had wonderful things to say:

• “I love the concept… I think it has potential.”
• “I like the clean design and usability of the site, the craigslist ad converter is also nice.”
• “Wonderful service, great customer service, increase in SEO results, free marketing”

Of course, it wasn’t all rosy:

• “I am not getting enough students. I like the organization, I like the site, I appreciated the meeting for help. I did what was suggested, but haven’t gotten bites. I will send in an article and hope that helps.”
• “I haven’t received any clients from it yet so I am waiting to see what happens but I would send others as it is a free resource.”

We dove a little deeper into the “Have we gotten you more students?” question – and learned that in many cases students were finding you through TeachStreet – but it wasn’t being tracked! We’re going to make significant improvements to the tools in this area by early summer based directly on your feedback and needs. So look for new metrics, graphs and maybe some nerdy spreadsheets

It was really important to us to learn what we can do better – especially as we prioritize our tool building efforts for the spring and summer. Here’s what you said we can do better:

• Send more students – we need to deliver more students to you, more often and more specifically.
• Share more data – you want information on the page views, site referrals and marketing metrics.
• More tools! – you love the craigslist tool, but you want more!
• Events Calendar – being able to list and browse events in additions to classes is critical.
• Payment options (with Paypal being most popular) – many of you want us to support payment processing – we’re taking a very serious look at this service offering.
• Class booking services (registration, scheduling) – we heard that this was important but that in order for it to be successful, you would want approval tools to make sure classes were loaded and scheduled properly.

We hope you find this information useful – we definitely have. We also selected 3 iPod Shuffle winners (based upon those who completed the survey and entered into the survey contest). The winners are:

Linda McVay in Seattle, WA – Linda teaches dog training!
Suzanne Chasalow in Martinez, CA – Suzanne teaches horn & music.
Ann Dewitt in Portland, OR – Ann teaches parenting skills!

We held our “Tell Us What You Know” contest in February, encouraging TeachStreeters to write articles about topics of their choice. And of our many stellar submissions, which ran the gamut from cooking tutorials to tricks on how to draw, five lucky winners won $25 Amazon gift certificates.

Here are the Winning Articles:

Winner: Fly Away Hang Gliding
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Article: Hang gliding teaching valuable life lessons

Winner: Paul Nowak
Location: San Francisco, CA
Article: 3 Tips to Help You Read Faster

Winner: Shuji Ikeda
Location: Berkeley, CA
Article: Teaching Ikebana Japanese Flower Arranging

Winner: Lori Huett
Location: Denver, CO
Article: How to Find Qualified Pole Dance Instruction

Winner: Jennifer Schneider
Location: Tacoma, WA
Article: What is Clicker Training?

Great work you guys. Really, the articles were fantastic. We’re looking forward to seeing what you and everyone else publishes in this month’s March to the Beat Contest!

Whether you’re a seasoned gourmet or an aspiring yogi, there are hundreds of articles across hundreds of topics on TeachStreet. And though we’ve always had thousands of local instructors, with the new articles that’ve been published, there’s now more to discover than ever on TeachStreet.

To make it easier for you to find the most interesting listings in the subjects you’re most interested in, we’ve made improvements to the site. Here’s a brief summary of how you can more easily find the teachers, classes, and articles you’re looking for.