Beyond the Pier

Last year I came across an extremely valuable teaching resource website called Teachers.tv.  The UK-based site is regularly updated with content and is nicely laid out.  The site has 3 main areas focusing on videos, classroom resources and community respectively.  Resources are also broken down into in subject and age group Early Years, Primary and Secondary.

There is an active community on Teachers.tv and it is a great point of contact for teachers to share resources, ideas and tips.  There is a lot of good material on Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), especially in relation to ICT.  In time, and over the course of my PGCE, I hope to get to try some of these out in the classroom and report back on the Beyond the Pier.  Here is an example video titled Resource Review – ICT Special: Secondary MFL that typifies the quality of the content on Teachers.tv.

Being a UK site with many programs screened on TV channels, there are copyright issues with some resources and a lot of videos are unfortunately for “Personal non-commercial educational use in the United Kingdom only“. I spoke to a member of their support staff who said they were currently working on distributing internationally – watch their site for updates on this apparently.  (I do not condone the use of proxies to view content from abroad, but I do know Google will happily reveal how to tutorials to you…)

In their own words:

“Through engaging videos, practical resources and an active online community, Teachers TV supports the professional development of anyone working in school, enabling them to widen their skills, develop their practice, and connect with others in the field.

In addition to the website, Teachers TV programmes are available on the TV Channel on Sky 880, Virgin Media 240, Freesat 650 and Freeview 88 (4-6pm) and, most recently, through iTunes U.”