Music-ITE

Teachers TV is funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and operated by a consortium of technical and educational partners including ITV and the University of London’s Institute of Education.

Teachers TV is a free-to-air channel which is available on digital satellite and digital cable television 24 hours a day. There is also a daily, one hour programming slot on Freeview.

This review will focus primarily on the Teachers TV website resource at www.teachers.tv. This offers over 2000 videos online and includes links to other resources including lesson plans, worksheets and further information. All videos contained within the website have been shown on the Teachers TV channel. However, not all videos aired on the TV channel are available through the website. This is normally because of prohibitive licensing or legal agreements.

Videos are normally played within the web page. Double clicking a video, once playing, will expand it to full screen mode.

Once you have found the sub-section of the Teachers TV site that is of interest, you can create an RSS feed which will then alert you to any new additions. As an example, at the time of writing this review there were 34 videos tagged as being about ‘music’.

Creating an RSS feed for this involves a simple click on the appropriate icon on the left of the screen. Of these 34 videos, 14 were also tagged with the ‘secondary’ tag. Again, once the videos had been sorted under ‘music’ and ‘secondary’ it is easy to create an RSS feed to alert oneself to future content that matches both these categories.

So what are all these videos about? For music, there is a range of content. This includes:

• Reviews of teaching resources, websites and pieces of technology;
• Stories about how different music departments have conducted interesting music projects – sometimes with external partners such as professional orchestras or community music groups;
• Interviews and discussions with musicians and educators, including policy makers;
• ‘How to …’ type videos that explore the practical and pedagogical uses of pieces of technology (e.g. musical sequencers) or different types of instruments (e.g. African drums);
• Exploration of various musical initiatives, including those associated with Wider Opportunities;
• Approaches to teaching different musical processes such as composition (e.g. how to develop, sequence and structure musical ideas) or aural perception (e.g. through the use of Dalcroze Eurhythmics).

Firstly, each video has a synopsis that outlines its main features and a date of publication. Following this, there is a section entitled ‘Your comments’. In true web 2.0 style, registered users can rate and comment on individual video resources. The overall rating is shown alongside the video front page at the top of the screen.

Secondly, each video contains links to further resources. These can contain many different things, including subtitles for the video, supporting information provided by the maker of the video, lesson plans, information about concepts or ideas discussed in the video, further web-links, etc.

Thirdly, there is the option to download the particular video resource in either Windows Media or QuickTime formats. Please note that you have to be a registered user of Teachers TV to access this function.

Firstly, there is a helpful section devoted to whole school issues, including topics such as Every Child Matters, personalised learning, inspection, inclusion, and much more besides. This section also includes a selection of videos devoted to educational research, notably a collection of short, 5-minute films under the title ‘Hot Research’!

Secondly, the ‘Learning Journeys’ section of the Teachers TV site is designed to guide users through the video catalogue and support user identified CPD goals or tackle common educational issues. Each learning journey is led by an educational professional and is focused on a particular question, e.g. how can Teachers TV inform secondary school teachers about the main components of personalised learning?

What follows is a written narrative that sequences together key videos from the Teachers TV catalogue that address the particular question. Each step of the sequence contains a commentary on the video by the educational professional. This is written in a lively style, mainly in the first person and with a degree of critical insight mixed with personal opinions. At the end of the journey, there is a summary statement and the opportunity to continue to develop one’s knowledge through watching other, related videos. Users can also suggest a new journey to the Teachers TV team.

Perhaps the most useful beneficial aspects of being a registered user is the ability to download videos from the site. Videos are available to download in Windows Media (.wmv) and QuickTime (.mov) formats. Once downloaded, these can be edited in video editors such as Movie Maker or iMovie (both freely available with PC and Mac computers) and used as a teaching resource. There are some useful notes on how to do this within the ‘Help’ section of the Teachers TV site.

A second benefit of registration relates to the construction of an individual user profile. Individual user profiles provide traces of recent activity on the site, and also allow users to create individual bookmarks for interesting content.

As discussed above, all users of the Teachers TV can customise RSS feeds to be alerted about new videos resources as they are put online.