3.1 TES Connect – selecting a resource

My name is Martyn Robinson-Slater. I now work at the International School of Bremen. I have been in the teaching profession for over 36 ... this is my 36^th year of teaching.

Using TES Connect I would say it improves the quality of teaching. It allows for a different style of teaching to take place and delivery within the classroom, and it really allows the young people to see quality presentations. I love the ones where people are uploading and you’ve got a whole package.

If I can explain one that really set me off on this sort of journey of sharing it was the one I did around the rock cycle. I had a low ability year 7 class that I had to teach and wanted to get this concept across of the change of structure of rocks, so I thought why don’t I do it using cheese toasties? I brought in all of my equipment; slices of the bread, grated cheese and that sort of thing. And we got the kids to go through the process of erosion, that’s the grating of the cheese. We had 2 colour cheeses; we had a red and white cheese, and then they would put the 2 slices together, put it into the cheese toasty maker and that then would replicate heat and pressure. The great thing, of course was that they ate them at the end. But that’s what started me off with sharing resources because I uploaded that with a total package of a poem, what the rock cycle was about, and it took off, but that was fun and to share that with other people. I actually got a feature at the back of the TES magazine because of that as well.

I’m proud of what I’ve actually done so I’m uploading it for others to use. I’ve got uploads on behaviour management. I’ve got communication because I was in a business and enterprise school so there’s a wide and varied spread of things that I’ve uploaded and my expectation is that I’ve put them there to assist people. My belief is that sharing is the way forward and so when that resource goes up I’m fully aware of the surrender of the intellectual property. It’s something that you are saying: here it’s yours to use as you wish.

My subject area is geography and I tend to try and get topicality into my teachings. If there is an earthquake, sort of extreme weather conditions, flooding, I’ll be using that sort of footage. And then, of course, there’s good old YouTube, which you can use some extensive video clips there to enhance and to reinforce your teaching.

Recently I have been doing work around flooding so I’ve chosen to go on to the TES Connect site and picked up on an absolutely excellent action aid resource there that has taken me through what happens within Pakistan and then you can develop and modify worksheets that are also available on the site for a comparative study say of Bangladesh, which I’ve done.

The way I would find a resource would be to actually go into the site and there’s a good search procedure within that. Using the topic so you can put the topic in to the search engine at the top there, you can then modify the search on the side there to the specific, particular area of the curriculum you are looking at and then, judging the quality of it, I would probably be looking at the reviews that are written up about that particular resource as well as looking at the ones that don’t have reviews because, of course, if someone uploaded as I say on to that site it’s been specific for their needs, so invariably what you have to do is to modify to what your requirements are within the classroom and the particular part of the curriculum you are actually going to be working on. So if I’m looking at the effects of earthquakes, I would be going there to look for what sorts of effects they have on people, what they sort of people have effect on the land but if there’s a specific reference to a textbook that has been used that I won’t have in this facility in this particular school I’m going to have to build that around some of the resources that I have got available within my classroom.

I view it we are a big community, a big learning community as I say, and we want the best for the young people that were working with, so why should we be care about sharing common resources?