World’s fastest-growing online teaching community hits record numbers

Promethean, a global leader in interactive education technology solutions, announces even more record breaking figures, with its world renowned teaching and learning community, Promethean Planet, celebrating membership surpassing 400,000. Other figures reveal that downloads of flipcharts, Promethean Planet’s interactive teaching content, exceeded four million in one year, while September 2009 hosted the busiest day for site traffic with nearly 30,000 visits in 24 hours. Highlighting local growth, UK membership of the site has increased by over a third since January 2009 to over 80,000. To address the growing demand, Promethean Planet has recently launched four local language sites, with a further four becoming available by the end of September.

Promethean Planet is the world’s fastest growing online interactive whiteboard community, designed to provide teachers with the ability to share new and innovative lessons, access a wide variety of professional development materials and connect with each other from every corner of the world. Supplying content that works across major operating platforms (Mac, PC and Linux) and with all leading interactive whiteboards, Promethean Planet is a virtual library accessible to all and completely free to join. Membership is on a voluntary basis with a range of benefits designed to support, develop and inspire educators of every age and ability. New members can choose from nearly 14,000 flipchart and resource packs available for download which contain literally hundreds of thousands of images, activities and media files. Flipcharts are easily customizable and can be quickly adapted to suit individual class needs; greatly reducing the amount of time needed for lesson planning.

Promethean Planet’s success is attributed to its huge wealth of educational content which is a unique mix of teacher supplied content, strong partnerships with leading education publisher names, such as Dorling Kindersley and Oxford University Press, thought leadership articles, a range of forums and an ‘ActivEducator’ blog. The recent launch of an iPhone™ application proved instantly successful, with over 3,000 downloads since launch and an entry into iTunes top 100 free educational apps in August.

Over the past year Promethean Planet has witnessed a surge in membership and site visits, with the period between August and September 2009 showing almost a 50% increase in visits compared to the same period in 2008. Responding to the increased demand, Promethean Planet rolled out four new language sites – German, French, Italian and Portuguese, and launches another four this month – Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

Brent Taggart, Head of Promethean Planet and Strategy, explains: “The phenomenal success of Promethean Planet is testament to its members’ dedication to modern-day education. We aim to provide a platform where all educators, whatever their preferred platform or technology, can share ideas, voice opinions and help to shape teaching and learning in the 21st Century classroom.

“Our strong connections with industry thought-leaders allow a dramatic insight into the future of technology in the field of education for teachers through a range of podcasts, interviews and blogs which members are able to comment on and discuss. In turn, these thought-leaders are provided with valuable feedback from those in the field which can be incorporated in decision making. It is the facilitation of these ‘open’ conversations combined with the variety and rich educational content of our flipcharts available for download that have led to our success.”

As part of Promethean’s ActivClassroom offering, Promethean Planet also provides step-by-step training, smoothing the transition to 21st Century learning for newcomers, enhancing the skills of more confident users and allowing every educator the opportunity to unleash their true teaching potential.

Promethean Planet will be introducing a range of new functionality over the coming months to further address the modern-day educator’s needs. For further information please visit www.PrometheanPlanet.com <http://www.PrometheanPlanet.com>