Lynn How
Lynn is the Editor at Teacher Toolkit. With 20 years of primary teaching and SLT experience, she has been an Assistant Head, Lead Mentor for ITT and SENCO. She loves to write and also has her own SEMH and staff mental health blog: www.positiveyoungmind.com. Lynn…
Read more about Lynn How
Could you be the next blogger for Teacher Toolkit?
Ross Morrison McGill started blogging in 2001, and through a mixture of life-changing events, started writing content on Teacher Toolkit 12 years ago. He soon moved over to WordPress in 2012; evolving and coding the TT website as you see it today.
After writing 1,000+ blogs Ross opened up Teacher Toolkit to other teachers in January 2017 and two years later, we had 75 teacher-bloggers. This number dropped when the pandemic was upon us and now we are in a position, alongside @TeacherToolkit’s new editor Lynn How, to again take on some more educational writers – four of our bloggers are now published authors. It is a great place to showcase your writing talents. Here are 5 reasons why it’s a good idea:
1. Established Voice
The TT website offers one teaching blog per day and has become a collective voice for the profession. We proofread everything before publication, protecting new teacher-writers from the ‘grammar police’ as much as possible, offering them a huge platform to be seen by our 450,000+ followers and 50,000 weekly readers.
2. Influence
Very senior people in U.K. education read this site – people in very high places – which is all very flattering, but to keep this engagement flowing, we will ensure support with writing and deal with any social media feedback from readers. There is nothing to be nervous about; we can publish your views and teaching ideas anonymously if needed.
3. Getting Technical
Five years ago, this website was operating on a ‘bog-standard £99 per year annual licence’ to use a WordPress.com site and had a unique website .me domain name. As the website has grown, sharing one blog post to thousands of followers generated a large ‘surge’ of clicks and made this website crash. It’s a great problem to have, but having large social media audiences requires much love and attention.
It has taken 8 years to develop the backbone of this site into a blog-come-professional website that you see today – to ensure there is no downtime (that means, to stop it from crashing!); money and extra support has been required from a small group of people. It was a decision Ross made in 2013/14 to start taking the website seriously after a huge spike in traffic. As the team has grown, we’ve been working hard on our values and vision and any income made on the website ensures a lot of content and resources remains free for teachers, forever.
4. Worldwide Reach
TT has reached all echelons of the education sector; from the Department for Education, OfSTED, think tanks, schools and school leaders to thousands of teachers and parents. Many blogs have flopped, but some have trended on social media, shaped policy and dialogue – even the start of national conferences. Our reach is beyond imaginable.
Over time, because many ‘eyes and ears’ are reading grassroots opinions on this site, many companies have wanted their resources and logos on our site too. This was something that was somewhat trial and error at the beginning but has now become a full-time feature of this site. This helps fund the website and any technical support that is needed.
5. Write for TT?
We now have an established team and a core group of writers, from most sectors of the profession – although there are always other voices to be heard. Our content is viewed by over 200,000 people each month and we have surpassed 17 million overall views. Our long-term goal is to see TT offer a platform of opinion and resources for teachers, but also parents and students.
Why not consider writing for us in 2022?
If you want to be part of our grand plans, then read this further information file: Writing for Teacher Toolkit and fill in this online form.
