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After a very successful Teacher Meetup at Magdalen College, we are again organising another meeting in July!

Teacher Meetup @ Winchester College
Time: 5:00 – 7:30pm
Date: Tuesday 5 July 2011
Venue: Winchester College, College Street, Winchester, SO23 9NA
The Cost: FREE

TeacherMeetup’s are the new way of helping share examples of inspirational learning and classroom practice spreading across the country. The aim of the TeacherMeetup events (like a TeachMeet) is to learn through example, provide access to inspirational educators and provide an informal setting to network. By providing a relaxed environment you can discover new technologies without disruption to your school day. Learn something you never knew before, never thought you could do, or never thought possible in your school.

The focus of the TeacherMeetup @ Winchester College will (loosely) be about upper primary school learning, but like all TeacherMeetups there are sure to be usable examples presented on the night that can be used across all age groups and disciplines.

Come along and see how the college works, with examples on the evening from a few college presenters and a selection of other like-minded Teachers from around Hampshire sharing their success stories. No pressurised learning, no pushy sales people. This is an informal gathering of Teaching professionals that have an interest in keeping their classroom activities fresh and innovative.
Would you like to get involved? If you have an example that you want to share on something that works well in your school then we would love to invite you to make a presentation. You don’t have to be an ICT guru to present. Just tell us if you would like a 2 or 7 minute presentation slot and the subject of your presentation/talk/ demonstration and you can share your success story to help fellow teaching professionals.

Please register at: WWW.MEETUP.COM/TEACHER-MEETUP or email us to register or present at the event – allyson@teachable.co.uk.

Thank you to all those who entered our competition to win a £1000 prize for Most Creative resource and Best Junior science (KS2) resource.

The entries closed at the end of January, but we are waiting another week before the results are announced – just to give time for a few outstanding contributors to publish their work.

In the meantime, here are a few already shortlisted for the two categories:

Most Creative Resource

• KS3 Physics Revision (Science)
• NMR Spectra (Science)
• Superbugs (Science)
• Atom Economy (Science)
• Introduction to pH (Science)
• Guide to word processing (ICT)
• Of Mice and Men Characters (English)
• A Valediction Forbidding Mourning (English)

Best Junior Science

• Harry Potter and the Variable Traits
• Quizzes for teaching compounds
• Science investigation starters
• Frankie’s Science Lab
• Describing Habitats
• Science Lab introduction

I’ve spoken to a number of teachers over the last few weeks who would love to contribute online resources to Teachable, but are unsure what we are looking for. Our policy has always been to encourage variety and creativity from our members, but I thought i’d help you out with a few likes and dislikes.

We Like:

• Anything that has taken more than 2 hours to pull together. It really does show when you’ve spent time sourcing useful images, building animations in Powerpoint, devising imaginative questions or trying out a new style of lesson. Our members are only willing to pay for stuff which truly saves them time.

• Highly interactive Powerpoints. Yes, ‘interactive’ is often overused, but in this case we mean presentations that involve the class, rather than pitching facts to a sleeping audience. Often that means building animations and hyperlinks into the slideshow. Generally, resources that can be presented are more popular than resources that are printed out and photocopied (and that fits with our green agenda)
• Packs of material for a series of lessons. We like fully worked through lesson ideas, so that you include everything from a plan through to the Powerpoint for the whiteboard, handouts for the class and worksheets for homework. Often the value of these collections is that other teachers can use particular parts to improve their own scheme of work
• Resources designed for a particular course / exam board. Most teachers are looking for a very specific lesson, so a lesson designed for AQA Maths B GCSE, module 2 is much more useful than a general introduction to data handling.
• Original yet replicable ideas. You’d be amazed how often we see exactly the same material on the periodic table. But if you have a unique way of teaching a certain topic, and it doesn’t rely on some special talent you have, then please do share it with others here.
• Self-explanatory resources. Please include all the background material another teacher would need for your lesson. “Hand out worksheet from the red file” might make sense to you, but it’s useless to all of us.

We don’t like:

• Single worksheets. It takes no time at all to pull together a worksheet on a particular topic if you already have the ideas, images and structure of a topic. We’d far rather you submitted these along with the lesson plan, presentation or other material you would have used to make up the lesson.
• Wordsearches, crosswords or flash cards. These kind of Word documents can all be generated in a few minutes by freely available software, and are of no real value to other teachers.
• Highly derivative or copied ideas. If you’re not sure whether your idea is useful for other teachers ask yourself two questions: a. ‘Did you have to pull together lots of original material to build up the resource?’ and b. ‘Is there similar material already on Teachable?’. If it’s No and No then your stuff is useful.
• Sloppy presenting. Fine if it’s just a lesson plan or activity guide for the teacher to read, but not if its designed to printed out or presented. Our editors try to correct basic formatting, grammar or spelling mistakes, but they won’t rework the entire submission for you.