I am in my first year at university studying a bachelor of education, focusing at this time on becoming an early childhood teacher.

At university we have been set an assignment which involves signing up to e-mail lists, unfortunately as yet I am still looking for a list which I can use to complete my assignment.

A collection of email lists for teachers can be found here:

http://teachers.net/mailrings/

As you are based in Australia you might find this one useful:

http://www.schools.ash.org.au/paa1/join.htm

Are you allowed to include blogs (web logs)?

Here's a site in the USA which collects educational blogs:

http://educational.blogs.com/edbloggerpraxis/

It is one thing signing up to email lists, it is another altogether making good use of them. You really need to be selective, and carefully choose list(s) that are pertinent to what you want to get out of them. Someone once said that the problem with teaching was there is not enough information; now, with the internet, the problem is often there is too much! It is easy to get inundated with emails and information that distracts you from what you are trying to do!

It is great to be able to share problems (challenges!) - and experiences - with like minded colleagues, and that is one of the beauties of online forums and email lists; you can share things, or ask questions that you might not want to ask your supervisor, etc for fear of feeling stupid. And of course if you cannot find a list that focuses on what you want, then start your own.

This is very good advice. Personally I am reluctant to join email lists. I much prefer to ask and answer questions via forums. Maybe your tutor should have set you to task of joining a forum?

I would also recommend usenet
uk.education.teachers
uk.education.teachers.trainee
or
aus.education


On Mozilla under mail and newsgroups
On Outlook Express
or you can download forte free agent.

You subscribe (it is free) to any newsgroup of your choice. Any tech problems then email me.

I've set similar tasks for my teacher trainees, but it should certainly include forums since you are much more likely to find useful information there. If the info you require isn't there, you can just start a topic and watch as the replies flood in (as you've probably realised here!). This is the best forum, but there's also the TES staffroom which is UK biased but still very good.
In the UK, there are also some pretty good newsgroups around. I use uk.education.teachers and uk.education.misc but I find newsgroups are being used by spammers more and more so am reluctant to use them these days which is a big pity.

I agree but taking a longer perspective I find they are being used by spammers less now than at some stages in the past. This is partly because of some follow-up work by members of usenet closing down accounts and blocking persistent spammers.

I cannot tell if this is partly a perception caused by my own killfiles which exclude spammers as well as people who are just boring.

Thanks for all your postings, it has been a big help. I have been able to find some good e-mail lists to join. One that i really want to join though has so far proved unsuccessfull, I think that I may be doing something incorrectly. I have been trying to join the teachers.net.mailrailings.

Thank you all again !!!

• thanks

Apart from being a member of the Education Forum, I belong to two email lists, both of which are concerned with MFL teaching and learning:

EUROCALL: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html

Linguanet: http://www.mailbase.org.uk/lists/linguanet-forum

You can find information about joining the lists on the above pages. You might also look at the extensive section on email of the ICT4LT site, Module 1.5, Section 14:

http://www.ict4lt.org

Although the ICT4LT site is aimed at language teachers you will find a good deal of general information here, including a few caveats on using chat rooms on the Web, netiquette, etc. Section 12 of Module 1.5 refers to discussion lists.

Can I also suggest that as someone about to enter the profession you might like to subscribe (free of course) to New2Computers. This is run by BECTa (and I have to confess a vested interest here as I am one of the consultants!!) and can be subscribed to at the following URL http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/new2computers/index.php

I hope that you may find this useful.