Having put together the Mediaedu site with the input from inspirational Media teachers and other professionals in the field we are now recruiting a team of inspirational English teachers.
These teachers and writers will be paid to collaboratively build a site which offers, like Mediaedu, a user-friendly tool which makes your lives easier while ensuring that learning is challenging and enabling for all. We are all teachers and know that often we are sent exciting resources that we have to read and think about before we integrate them on the site which is comprehensive for the user. If you have created original resources and think others might benefit from having access to them, please get in touch.

A new area on British Pop Music has been added along with a scheme of work targeted at A Level students.

There is a new section on Understanding Copyright.

Two guides to interviewing have been written by Jeremy Orlebar: Radio Interviews and TV Interviews.

We've upgraded to a new server to cope with increased traffic to the site. This should improve page access times and allow faster navigation from one page to the next.

We've started to develop a pilot for some practical training sessions which should help teachers with activities in class.

We will be adding to our existing collection of audio podcasts this year. We'll be producing a series on Quiz Shows with Pete Wall and HarperCollins to support people preparing for the AQA GCSE Controlled Test.

Keith Langton and Jan Radnedge have both produced Mock Exams for the AQA GCSE Media Studies Controlled Test and shared them with Mediaedu. These will be available in the next fortnight.

Shirley Bierman continues to develop the OCR Nationals area on the site.

Our Cover Zone will soon be online. Keith Langton, an experienced GCSE Media Studies teacher, has kindly agreed to begin developing this new area on Mediaedu. The Cover Zone will contain one-off lessons and activities which can be used by non-specialist Media staff during periods of absence and for students who need independent and educational tasks to get on with if they have been isolated for any reason.

We will add these one-off activities below, when we receive new content. If you have something suitable, feel free to get in touch using our Contact Us page. Just remember that the work we add to the site needs to be original so that we aren't infringing any one else's rights.

Our Comic Strip will launch in November. This is a joint venture between Edusites Ltd (Mediaedu et al) and Largecow.com (Hunt Emerson's cartooning website).

We would like to expand our podcasts to include things that you are currently interested in and/or teaching. You could either create an audio recording yourself using a digital voice recorder and send it in to us or we could come to you.

It's a good idea to work from a script with educational audio recordings, it gives you confidence and ensures your ideas are structured and cohesive. Digital voice recorders are pretty cheap now and widely available. We've used several by Olympus which are easy to use. They're basically a dictaphone but record on to digital memory rather than little tapes.

Likewise, if you're doing something which works well with students, we would love to come to you and video a session.This could be uploaded onto the site and will benefit other teachers seeing your good work and also give you a starting point for subsequent year groups.

We have ready to use permission letters to send to parents for these types of activities to make sure that parents are aware of what they are agreeing to and why.

Don't forget that if you paid a £10 teacher you can now upgrade to the Class Set system by logging in to the Client Panel. This upgrade allows you to create a set of 30 student logins.

If you paid for a £30 teacher sub - the new system - don't forget to log in to the Client Panel and create your students' logins. We can help you with this if it seems a bit confusing.

We've also noticed that there are quite a few folk who are still using their school email addresses as their username. This is no longer necessary. You can now change your username, password and contact details using the Client Panel. We introduced the feature in the hope that it would allow you to log in faster.

Hope you had a relaxing Half Term.

Kind regards,

rgtsignature

Richard Gent - Edusites Ltd
[e] richardgent@mac.com

Updates for October 2008