I have recently had a quick look around the Teachit site, I know- mabye a bit slow on the up-take there! http://www.teachit.co.uk/

I would welcome feedback form other A level practitioners - is is worth subscribing? Is there much KS5 and how "sharp" have you found it to be? (I know that's very subjective!)

I work in a college - so we don't do any lower school work, which there seems to be a great deal of

we do GCES with OCR
AS and A2 Lang, Lang-Lit and Lit with AQA B

I know I can save/print the Pdf files without paying anyway, but I rarely want to use anything without makng it "mine" in some way!

I also feel slightly frustrated that the identity of the writer/originator seems to be hidden. I regularly use resources shared on an e-mail list of Eng Lang A level teachers, (you cold join via: http://www.markboardman.com/ )but then I have a sense of whose stuff I am likely to use, and whose stuff doesnt fit my teaching style - does anyone know the reason why the work is anon?


I appreciate that ppl who work for Teachit are likely to be reading this, and I am not trying to be provocative, just genuinely interested

I admit I have not over-used it for KS5, but I have used it and I think I ought to search it more often for KS5 materials. If the ecredits stop, I shall continue to pay the £20 or whatever myself to subscribe because it really has made a big difference being able to word process and alter a document, as you said you prefer to do, Susan.

I find their intercatrive stuff a bit dull though. It seems to under-use the Internet and just offers what are, to my mind, essentially not too attractive moving word documents. (No insult to their makers intended, since I can't even manage to make those!)

My mate, a supply teacher, swears by it and pays the subscription.

I rate it very highly all round and good for A level - especially for teachers just starting out. I guess that it can't hurt to try it for a year at such a reasonable subscription.

Teachit is a cottage industry, and highly virtuous, I think. It's basically Siobhain and Garry (plus children and dog). Alternatively, it's the working out of an idea hatched one evening in a pub... To make a clearing-house or exchange for teachers' resources - and to help with the publication and distribution.

The strength of Teachit is also potentially a weakness - but one that Siobhain is fixing: that is, the bulk of the documents are submitted by teachers, so there's more than you need for X, and not always enough for Y. She's fixing it by employing some teachers to write quality material to reach the parts that otherwise might not be reached.

If you contribute stuff, then you may receive a royalty payment - I know one teacher colleague who was very pleasantly surprised when he received a cheque.

Key stage 5 is one of the areas of Teachit that Siobhain is working to build up.

The reason why the original writer may not be credited is to show that the contributions have gone into a collective enterprise.

Mostly it's predicated on an assumption (currently a correct one, for most English teachers, alas) that the users will not experience the site on the Web in real time, but will save to a local network, or, more probably, print and photocopy.

I would question the value of many interactions on a Web site, anyway. You can do far more by dropping text into a word processor, than with any of the quizzes and wordsearches and so on that people generate with, say, Hot Potatoes.

To make interactions in a teaching resource is a great challenge - since the resource should have some appropriate interpretation or guidance in it, as well as the interactive elements. To make text or images move around in response to given inputs is not too hard. But that on its own does not necessarily make a difference to effective learning.

I have found various ways to animate, or build in interactions, but I'm not at all sure that this is a worthwhile thing to do. For some examples, see:

www.universalteacher.org.uk/grammar/demo.htm

www.universalteacher.org.uk/contents.htm#special

www.universalteacher.org.uk/poetry/patrollingbarnegat.htm

When I taught English for a year (and a little bit) I found the resources on TeachIt invaluable - and hence why I sent as many as I created in. I was delighted to be able to contribute. I think the site is fantastic.

Not quite sure where the comments about 'interactions' came from, but I do believe there is massive potential for such interactive materials, as long as you think a bit further out of the box. If a wordprocessor activity works, then use it! More complicated 'interactivities' have different purposes and uses. Things like this storyboard activity on Hitler I believe has great potential. That's another topic though.

TeachIt.co.uk - brilliant. Best thing was seeing other English teachers in my department downloading worksheets from the site that I'd created - they'd gone on the internet and downloaded them rather than pop into the classroom next door!

LOL And I use emails with colleagues in the same school. My excuse is that my health is awful and I work part-time... but actually I just like using email

I discovered Teachit a few years ago when I was teaching and found it wonderfully useful and especially for those times when you're running out of ideas or want individual stuff while working with others. Their Shakespeare stuff is partricularly great as we don't have as much emphasis on it here for younger students and I found their things terrific for older but less able kids. I have passed it on to many Australian teachers as we have nothing as good here - at least I haven't found it if we have.
Pleased to hear that they are upgrading. I will put that into our union journal IT notes.

It felt strange reading this thread and I wasn't sure whether to respond - but here goes anyway ...

I'm the first to admit that Teachit is not yet perfect and there are many ways we could improve, including * supplementing the materials we have for A/AS, particularly Lang * increasing resources for Media and Drama * working on our interactive materials *adding more PowerPoint and IWB materials. All of this and much more is already underway so do keep an eye on developments.

On the other hand (and when I'm not worrying too much about the length of the to-do list!), I'm incredibly proud of Teachit and the service we offer. As far as I am aware we are unique for the following reasons:

1. We offer around 4500 pages of photocopiable resources completely free of charge and add on average 19 pages of completely new materials each and every week. These go through a rigorous editing system and this has helped us earn a reputation for trust-worthy, user-friendly and accurate materials.

2. We have since 2002 opened our files and now provide the editable raw material at very low cost - at £16 - £30 our annual subscription is about the same as the price of a video and works out at around 1p per resource. This allows members to adapt the materials to suit their own needs.

3. We share our revenues (not just our profits) with our team of contributors and editors each of whom receives a quarterly cheque from us.

4. We were the first English website to become Curriculum Online approved and work closely with NATE.

We also provide other free services such as the staffroom discussion area and pupils' published work areas, as well as hosting the Association of Teacher Websites site.

Many thanks to Andrew and others for your endorsements. I hope we continue to live up to these.

Any further queries feel free to get in touch!

Siobhain Archer
Editor
Teachit

TeachIT looks like a very useful site!

Andrew writes:

Yes, many of the so-called interactive websites that I have seen fall into the category of what I call “point-and-click-let’s-move-on-quick”, and they are not truly interactive, e.g. in the sense of requiring learner input in the form of typed text or spoken language and offering discrete feedback, etc. Hot Potatoes is a useful tool for creating quick-and-dirty exercises, but there are more sophisticated tools around if you wish to create truly interactive materials.

I have been using the word-processor in teaching Modern Foreign Languages and English as a Foreign language since the early 1980s. You might take a look at ICT4LT Module 1.3, Using text tools in the modern foreign languages classroom, where a few examples are presented, as well as links (Section 6.3) to sites offering further ideas. See http://www.ict4lt.org

A couple of questions to Siobhain: There has been a lot of correspondence in the forum about copyright recently. Two questions that relate to issues that have been raised elsewhere:

1. How do you ensure that the materials sent into TeachIT are original works?

2. Anyone who creates an original work is automatically granted copyright in that work. Do your contributors retain copyright in their work or do you ask them to assign copyright to TeachIT?

My own answer to Question 1: As editor of the ICT4LT site, I always ask contributors of materials to the site to endorse the following statement:
“Guarantee of originality: The Author warrants that the Work is an original composition and that it in no way infringes any existing copyright either in whole or in part and that it contains no material which may be considered libellous or defamatory. The Author shall indemnify the Publisher against all actions, proceedings, claims and demands made against the Publisher by reason of anything contained within the Work constituting an infringement of copyright or being libellous or defamatory and against all costs, damages or expenses in respect of such action, proceeding, claim or demand."

Hi Graham

Yes, this is a tricky area and involves lots of legalese (thanks to a fairly expensive expert lawyer!). In brief, we ask all our key contributors to sign a copyright and royalty programme that a) asserts the work is theirs and assigns the full copyright to us. The last thing we would want is to pass off work belonging to others as ours, though I'm sure the collaborative nature of teaching does mean that this happens more often than educational publishers might care to admit!

Hope this is of use.

Siobhain

LOL @ S...unspellable name!

I see we are browsing at the same time ... I meant no offence, and my enquiry was genuine. You are no doubt entitled to a bit of self-promotion on the back of my question.

xx
suze

Siobhain writes:


It sound like you have it sorted!

Just an addendum to my previous message:

Chris Sweeney wrote (Ask an Expert / ICT / Websites and Copyright)


I replied:


In response to numerous questions regarding copyright, especially copyright and the Web, I have produced the following Web page at the ICT4LT site:
http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_copyright.htm

Today, on The Learning Curve (BBC Radio 4) I heard a powerful series of arguments for teachers to take back control from the politicians.

The best thing about Teachit (which would be true even if most of the stuff were less good than it is) is that Siobhain and Gary did it without anyone else's by-your-leave - which is pretty rare, and very heroic. It runs counter to many of the received ideas about publishing, by putting out work from such a wide range of teacher contributors.

It reminds me of the old Co-Op in the best possible way...

Oh, and good to see that Siobhain is posting here.

Andrew writes:


More or less the same process that gave rise to the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org. It was basically my idea (I am a retired teacher). The idea was wrapped up in a funding bid to the European Commission, who obviously liked the idea and gave us half the fundng that we needed to get the project off the ground, with a completely free hand to determine the contents of the website. The original contributors to the site were mainly practising teachers and advisory teachers in three different countries, whom we were able to pay consultancy fees (at the EC's modest rates of around 300-350 euros per day) to write the materials. The outcome is a huge bank of information about using ICT in teaching and learning modern foreign languages at secondary and HE level - we would like to add a section on Early Language Learning sometime. The site and printed accompanying materials were launched in December 2000.

I now spend around 3-4 hours per week (free of charge) updating the English language version of the materials and checking the 1000-plus links that the site contains. Updates and new contributions have been made made by the orginal and new contributors at regular intervals (free of charge). It's a labour of love and, because the site was created with European taxpayers' money, we do not charge for access, although we do make a modest charge for the CD-ROM of the site because there is an unavoidable production cost. The website is hosted (free of charge) by the University of Hull.

Interestingly, government agencies such as BECTA completely ignore the existence of the ICT4LT site (try doing a search at the BECTA site), even though it is probably the largest resource of this type anywhere on the Web and has achieved wide international acclaim and received very positive reviews. The site averages around 600 hits per day.

All the UK government sponsored initiatives in this area have achieved far less than we have achieved. I welcome new contributions, but I am afraid it has to be a labour of love as we run on zero funding now.

I agree. Teachit has been able to develop a model that works. It retains its commitment to producing free materials for teachers but has found a way to bring in an income to pay for the service it provides.

I have done the same thing. My funding comes from a variety of different sources. However, it adds up to enough to enable me to spend several days a week providing free materials.

The forum is another place where teachers provide free teaching materials for schools. Andrew's comments about the "Co-Op" is very perceptive.

Teachit is great but you do need to join as, occasionally, the materials contain significant errors you'll have to edit out yourself. A handout on grammar for KS3 has the sentence, "Britney goes to the shop" and underlines 'shop' as being the object and follows it with a number of sentences with intransitive verbs where, presumably, the adverbials are supposed to be underlined and called objects. Publishers would be unlikely to make those errors so you do have to be extra careful.

Don't count on publishers getting it right either. A colleague of mine has just taken the TES to task for publishing an article (17 Sep) on adverbs in which there were several mistakes, resulting from confusion about the difference between a particle of a phrasal verb and a preposition forming part of an adverbial phrase. As a Germanist, this is the kind of mistake I can spot immediately. (My colleague is also a Germanist).

Following up an earlier exchange on copyright issues, the following publication is probably what we have needed for a long time. It answers most of the questions surrounding copyright in the context of the development of e-learning materials. The publication appears at the Legal Information website of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which is funded by the UK further and higher education funding councils:

Casey J. (2004) Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in networked e-learning: a beginners guide for content developers: http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/publications/johncasey_1.htm

The publication is described as follows at the above website:

"This guide aims to provide a user-friendly introduction to IPR issues for e-learning content developers and managers. It is intended to act as a point of entry to the field of IPR in e-learning that will provide a good foundation for building expertise in the e-learning developer community. It deals with the basic aspects of IPR, especially copyright, in e-learning content development, with an emphasis on reusing third party materials to create new resources. The guide has been written by an e-learning content developer who has had to deal with these issues in practice. The style of the guide is practical and approachable with many useful tips and observations but it also provides a sketch of the wider issues. It also provides flow diagrams, templates, case studies and further sources of information and guidance."

Another interesting note:

"The right of John Casey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended)."

Let's be realistic here. Hard pressed teachers produce worksheets which they submit to teachit.

We classroom teachers at secondary level are increasingly called upon to work inhumane hours - we work full time and have the usual pressures of performance-managed targets to attain put upon us (I have worked a 14 hour day today), as well as contribute to sites such as teachit.

Let us make a few extra pounds for our work without the sour grapes of a few professionals from other subject areas.

For those of us who rely on teachit for extremely useful back-up and base-line resources - more power to their elbow, I say.

It is easy enough to knock, but a great deal less easy to help!

Edited to add that membership per individual for a whole year is less than many colour ink cartridges for our computer printers. And no - I am NOT linked in any way with the site except as a user - and for that small sum I am extremely grateful someone had the courage to start and run such a site. It is an ENGLISH site for ENGLISH teachers and it WORKS (even if we have to occasionally check each other's skills, for G's sake!)

Glad you think so.



How many UK teachers of English do you think would even spot this? It is more comment on our level of expertise than on teachit imo. Most of us don't need to teach this subject at any but a Literary level beyond the limited GCSE (which isn't even about language...)

As I said before in my earlier message, "Teachit looks like a very useful site!" It's a remarkable achievement to be able gather together so many resources and to disseminate them. And it's great that teachers can make a few extra quid for themselves in this way. This is how I got started as an author around 25 years ago, eventually building my income from such activities up to a level where I was able to accept an early retirement package in 1993 - although I continued to work part-time in HE until the end of 2001.

Regarding the issue of understanding English grammar, this has an obvious spin-off into learning modern foreign languages. If the learner knows what an object is, then it is easier for the learner to understand that an object in German and Russian (and many other languages) appears in the accusative case. Obviously, you don't confuse the learner with complex grammatical metalanguage, but if the concept is understood it helps!

The KS3 "Framework for Teaching MFL Years 7, 8 and 9" contains a glossary of grammatical terms based on the National Literacy Strategy "Framework for Teaching". There was much discussion about the precise terms to use, however, and it was clear that English language teachers and MFL teachers do not always use the same terms, compounded by the fact that there were glaring mistakes in the early drafts of the National Literacy Strategy documents. There has been a good deal of convergence in the meantime, and now we appear to be talking the same language!

See:
National Literacy Strategy: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/literacy/
KS3 Framework for Teaching MFL: http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/keystage3...b/mflframework/

But having read the following article in The Guardian (5 Oct), one wonders for how much longer Modern Foreign Languages will continue to be taught to children beyond the age of 14:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/s...1319291,00.html

Graham - this IS the English thread and not the MFL thread.

I am not being bolshy - but it would be better and more productive if you take your MFL concerns to your own thread to discuss. I am not being shitty with you as such because I DO - and I really DO - have a great deal of professional respect for you as you know your onions in certain areas - but honestly, do you really think that us English specialist are not familiar with the National Literacy Strategy and so need a non-specialist to point it out to us?

I hope you would not intentionally insult colleagues so!

As to the rest of us - any English specialist @ this level who remain on this Board.. what do WE think?

I see nothing wrong with Graham's contribution in this thread and would advise Chris to try and communicate in more appropriate language on this forum.

In what way is drawing attention to the cross-fertilisation between two closely-related subject areas insulting?

On a related topic - this outfit posted itself on the A level Lang List this summer


I do not know anything about them, does anyone?

in fact JL Hagger was appealling for resources on certain texts, so you might be able to talk terms?

xx