As we are rapidly getting closer to the end of 2011 which has been quite an exciting year for the education startup scene, I want to take a quick look at the current state of affairs in the vertical that caters to teachers.

Not long ago there was no real vertical for this group in education though it is clear that teachers are probably the most important people to target besides students. Why no one was interested in creating products for this group might have had a variety of reasons. Probably, the vertical was seen as too difficult to cater to and there was a notion that teachers in general were not open enough to new technologies in their classrooms.

Maybe, the market wasn’t there two years ago when a small group of teachers started their weekly Twitter chat under the hashtag #edchat. Starting with only a handful of teachers it quickly became a phenomenon, drawing in more and more teachers who wanted to connect with like-minded colleagues and were eager (if not even desperate) to talk about the things that really mattered to them. And though I still think that Twitter isn’t the right tool for this kind of use as it is in many aspects too limited to handle all this information, those teachers found creative ways to make it work for them by adding other free tools like TwtPoll and such.

The other big story was probably Ning, a platform that enabled anyone to create a social network. Classroom 2.0 and EduPLN are amongst the biggest ones with tens of thousands of teachers and principals as members. When Ning decided to axe the free plan that most teacher and school networks were built on, there was quite an uproar resulting to Pearson stepping in and sponsoring educational Nings in the US.

So the main problem was that teachers needed to use services that were not created to meet their needs which often resulted in situations were both sides, teachers and startup entrepreneurs, clashed as their philosophy did not match. That’s mostly based in changes in the business model like turning into a paid service or adding advertisement.

But that situation has changed dramatically over the last one and a half years and today the Internet and dedicated sites and services for teachers are popping up like mushrooms which means that the web is becoming more and more a crucial part in the daily life of teachers.

One of the earliest ones, Edmodo, just raised a new $15 million funding round from from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital. This round also added two Silicon Valley stars to the board: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Matt Cohler of Facebook which could become crucial for the growth of the network.

Collaboration is one of the major driving forces behind the rise of websites like BetterLesson where teachers can share their lesson plans with others. It even created a new revenue model for them as teachers can decide to sell their lessons to their colleagues.