Announcing New Site Features for Teachers!

With the launch of TeachStreet in Portland, Oregon, we also sneaked in a number of improvements (err… fixes) to functionality for the wonderful teachers who are building their businesses on TeachStreet.  (Note — here’s a post about all of our student-specific TeachStreet updates)

With no further ado…

1) Craigslist Ad Templates are now free and easy to get, for all teachers — you’ll find links in the right column of all of your Class pages, and also in the right column of your Profile page — click on the Craigslist Ad link, and follow the easy instructions.  We even included our first ever ‘screencast’ to show you how easy it is (and pasted that below as well, to show you how to get started).

Here’s a screenshot of where you’ll find the link on your Class and Profile pages:

Screencast to show you how to use the Craigslist Ad Tool:

2) Featuring Teachers on our new ‘Subject Pages’ — teachers have been asking for more ways to be discovered on TeachStreet, so with our latest Subject Page updates, we’ve included additional ways for teachers to be featured.  Now, we aren’t sharing the secret formula for how we pick our featured teachers, but it has a lot to do with claiming your profile, adding images, getting reviews, and just being an active user (no, it has nothing to do with ‘paying for it’… although, we can be bribed with jelly donuts ).

Here’s a screenshot of what the Featured Teacher section looks like on our new Subject pages:

3) New ‘Subject Selector’ tool on the ‘Teacher Tools‘ or ‘Add-Class’ pages — teachers told us (loud and clear!) that it was often difficult to find the right category to post your classes in.  So, we created a tool that tries to help with that problem.  When you now go to add a class (by clicking on the ‘Teach’ tab), you can type in a word that describes what you teach (say… “Piano”) and it will show you the recommended categories where you can post.  We hope this helps!

Here’s a screenshot of what that section looks like on the ‘Teach’ or ‘Add-Class’ page:

4) New ‘Location Options’ on the ‘Teach’ or ‘Add-Class’ pages — teachers hollered at us that our Location and Address Box on the Class-Add form wasn’t very smart.  We found it similarly difficult — the explanation has a lot to do with things like geocoding, but you don’t want to hear about that any more than we did.  So, we fixed it!  You now can list classes without specific addresses — want to list a neighborhood?  No problem.  Or, a point of interest like your local Library?  Go for it!

Here’s a screenshot of what that section of the ‘Teach’ or ‘Add-Class’ page looks like:

5) Joint Ownership of Classes — finally, we KNOW that we messed this up with our first launch, and for that, we’re sorry.  But, teachers in Portland will never have to know about this flub (nor will new Seattle teachers) because Schools and Teachers can now ‘share ownership’ of classes.  That is, if you’re a teacher on a class that is listed at a school, you now have the ability to go in and edit or delete that class — hopefully, this makes it easier on everyone (including our Customer Service reps!)

Here’s a screenshot of what a ‘jointly owned’ class looks like: