Yahoo! has launched a new Web 2.0 site for teachers. The site namely as Yahoo! for Teachers is aimed to be a place for educators to find, create, and share standards-based classroom materials, and most important, it is free and without any charge. At this moment, visit to this site required a login ID and password, you can use the user name and password as provided by this blog (click here). After you login, you’ll be prompted to register with this site by keying in your own Yahoo! ID, or navigate this site by explore the projects initiated by the registered teachers there.

On the landing page, you’ll find all the relevant information pertaining to schools, subjects, or even educators. Put an example, if you want to find a school located somewhere near your house address, simply use the Peer Network Map developed by Yahoo! will solve your problem. The Peer Network Map list all the schools available in a single particular zip code, and beside each icon of the school, you can also find who else was already joined the school, the teachers’ profile/portfolio. From the teacher’s portfolio, you can browse her recent project, or any public document available on the portfolio. One of the projects I found on the site is relevant to a Southeast Asian countries, i.e. Singapore. It list all the information such as fact sheet, Website, and text clipping about Singapore. Of course, these type of data are also available if you googling on the Web, but this project present a teacher’s viewpoint on what she believes will interest the readers. For instance, the document in this project is about Sungei Buloh Wetlands. This is a place where you can find a very unique flower, or bird. For each project, you can find the comments made by other teachers.

One notable feature I found on this site is the introduction of Gobbler. Upon you install the Gobbler, it help you easily organize Web pages, images and text clippings from other Websites on the Internet by the offering of the drag and drop functionality. You can thus drag an image you came across from other site and drop it to your project within a single click.

Overall, I find this site showed the creative innovation of Yahoo! towards the education industry. However, there’s still not clear on this site’s business operating model, not like infiLearn (now GlobalScholar). Other than creating a teachers’ network, it’s not easy for Yahoo! to generate revenue from the purpose of this site.