Teach Here, Teach Now: Bing Presents a new Teacher Map app

Tech here icon In conjunction with the launch of the new U.S. teacher resource, http://teach.gov , the Bing team is excited to present our own Teach Here map app. Teach Here presents a veteran or potential teacher with a simple way to search for teacher prep programs, state teaching certification offices, school district headquarters, and local teaching jobs.

A great education depends heavily on having great teachers, and this application represents a first for Bing maps in terms of collaboration with the Dept. of Education and an opportunity to show what mapping technologies can do to help teacher recruitment and support the teaching profession. We had offered them access to Bing Maps data for use in their site, which you will see on teach.gov, but we wanted to do more than that.

As our emphasis on education and education reform emerged in May, the Bing REDU team started talking with the folks at the Dept. of Education about what we could build that would be helpful. We learned from them about the current and projected shortfalls for public school teachers, especially in math, science, special education and English language learners and the upcoming TEACH initiative and teach.gov Web site. Despite the recession, there are thousands of teaching positions available each year and it’s important to encourage smart, innovative folks to this societally pivotal career.

Talks with the teach.gov team greatly shaped our thinking around the Teach Here map application and much of the data is government-sourced. See the About button for information about the data sources. The map application is also embeddable for use on other Web sites.

teach here

Visitors to NBC’s Education Nation event in New York this week will see an excerpt of the Teach Here map application in the Rockefeller plaza pavilion, even as the teach.gov site gets off to a great start. For more information on the Bing REDU project to rethink, reform and rebuild education, please join us at www.bing.com/redu.

Betsy Aoki, Senior Program Manager, Bing