TeachBC – The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Online Resource Repository
For many years the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) ran a successful Lesson Aids program which allowed for teachers to either come to the building to buy vetted, paper-based teacher-created resources at a low price or order them, from a catalogue, though the mail. As the federation moved to an online presence, the catalogue was moved to the website, but the service remained paper and mail based. The usage of the Lesson Aids program declined significantly, and the resources featured had become outdated. As a result, a decision was made to discontinue the Lesson Aids program, leaving a void in the BCTF’s offerings to members.
Based on feedback from their members, the BCTF Provincial Specialist Association Council proposed the creation of an online resource sharing portal to fill the gap and once again offer quality resources to members. A committee was formed to research and design an online platform and from this work, TeachBC was born.
TeachBC functions an open online resource repository of teaching materials, lessons, and research relevant to the K-12 BC curriculum. The website is public and open to everyone through the generosity of BC public school teachers. It was created to help BC teachers find teaching materials and research relevant to the BC K-12 curriculum.
Are you looking for new teaching ideas? Or feeling like your lessons could use a refresh? Need teacher-ready resources to match the new BC curriculum or to use to support other Canadian curricula? At your fingertips is TeachBC which is online 24/7 to help you discover resources that are useful right away. Teachers and organizations can share their teaching resources or educational research by registering and uploading their materials or providing links. Anyone can browse and download the resources for classroom or professional use. Browsing is easy. Users can search by subject, grade level, resource type, title, description, language, and download free of charge. Teachers who make use of the resources are advised to use their professional judgement when utilizing the materials from TeachBC.
Please help us build our growing resource inventory. Get published by uploading your own original resources. Or you can even build, modify, and reorganize this shared knowledge and then consider re-uploading it onto TeachBC. It is a quick and collaborative way to engage in professional development online. If you wish to upload resources, a user login must be created. An email address is required for account creation and verification purposes.
It is important to note that since TeachBC is a not-for-profit service, resources which link to a site where payment or membership cost is required are not permitted. Any resources published on the TeachBC site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Teachers are free to share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Once downloaded, one may adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material obtained from TeachBC.
Come and check out the wealth of resources and materials that are available to you on TeachBC at teachbc.bctf.ca.
Henry Lee and Grahame Rainey both work as Assistant Directors in the Professional and Social Issues Division of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation.
