I’ve been busy making a few changes to Teaching Ideas recently. For those who don’t know it, the site is a collection of thousands of lesson ideas, activities and resources that teachers are welcome to use in their classrooms. The site was originally set up (back in 1998) as a place for primary teachers to find educational content and it now contains many resources for secondary teachers too.

Here is an outline of some of the changes:

• The site used to be split into ‘Teaching Ideas’ (containing ideas for each curriculum subject) and ‘More Teaching Ideas’ (with ideas for assemblies, classroom management and more). I have now changed the navigation system so that all of these sections are accessible from the same set of tabs at the top.
• The team at PurpleMash have also allowed me to add lots of their wonderful app-tivities to the resources on Teaching Ideas. If you click on a link with the new PurpleMash icon (), you will be able to access a free interactive activity which your children can use as part of their lessons, or as additional work at home.
• I’ve recently redesigned some of the pages on Teaching Ideas, to give everything a more consistent look. There is also a new ‘About This Idea’ box on each idea which gives you more information about the ideas and also allows you to share the content using delicious, Twitter and Facebook.
• I have decided to close the Teaching Forum. The forum wasn’t particularly busy and it took a considerable amount of time for me to manage… I would prefer to be spending this time making resources and adding new content to Teaching Ideas. If you’re looking for an alternative forum, I highly recommend that you join the Primary Teacher Resource Centre forum instead.

I am also developing a new section on Teaching Ideas, called…

www.teachingthemes.co.uk

In this section, all of the ideas and resources will be based around particular themes and topics. For each theme, there will be:

• Cross-curricular activity ideas,
• Free downloadable resources,
• Printables for your class displays,
• Examples of educational videos related to the theme,
• Links to other relevant sites.

At this stage, I’m planning the following topics:

• May 2010 – World Cup
• June 2010 – Myst

If you are able to contribute any ideas, resources or links for these themes, please email me.

Thank you,

Mark

I’ve recently added some wonderful pictures to our gallery of Teaching Photos. Thank you to Kimberley and Danielle for sharing their photographs.

If you have any photos of displays that you are able to share with others, please email them to mark@teachingideas.com and I’ll put them online as soon as I can. Thank you!