If you have children in primary or secondary school who are stuck with a question at school, you can now direct them to 1800-Teacher.com – a new portal dedicated to the various aspects of Singapore education. From a forum for questions to free e-books and workbooks (produced by 1800-Teacher), to games and even a real-time chat client, 1800-Teacher is quite an eclectic site with many elements.
Asking a question.
The two key possible trump cards of 1800-Teacher are their forums and free e-books. The forums are for confused students, parents and perhaps even teachers to post school questions and are hopefully answered by other users of the site. The forum is conveniently sorted by level and topic (Primary 1- Secondary 5; English, Math, Science) and you can even subscribe or favourite a question.
There is potential for the education-focused forum to really grow, much like the likes of The Grad Cafe though with two major topics strands: (1) test or exam questions and (2) discussions on schools in Singapore (think major dishing out of good and bad from anonymous kids and parents).
Free e-books and workbooks.
1800-Teacher also produces their own content in the form of e-books and workbooks for students to practise. They are free for now, but perhaps this might be one of their revenue streams in the future whereby students pay to download (they currently run many ads, many of them in-house, for now). As the team at 1800-Teacher is made up of a few ex-teachers, you can be reasonably assured of the quality of the material. In any case, they welcome notifications of any mistakes spotted.
The rest of the site itself is a bit haphazard, with all sorts of content like videos on cartoons, blogs from users with posts on anything from travel to deciding where to study, and they even have a section of embedded flash games!
Seems like they are attempting a portal/have-something-for-everyone strategy. I’m not too sure if this haphazard nature benefits them though I think with a site named like that, visitors are expecting an education-centric experience and content. And as you can tell, the site is very traditionally built, no jazzy AJAX stuff and none of the usual ‘web 2.0 clean-cut user experience’. Some of you might baulk at this, having deemed the new web as made up of the clean web, but jazzy experiences may lead to nowhere; while simple forums that are targeted and attract audience might.
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