The story of TeachingLive began shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown in mid March 2020. With schools closing, children, families and schools across the country, and indeed across the globe, were thrown into a completely different world. As part of a group of five teachers, Pie Corbett, John Sutton and Deputy Mitchell co-founded RadioBlogging.Net (a children’s interactive internet radio show). The show broadcast daily until mid June with great success. With over 150,000 listeners and 60,000 submissions of writing by children, we saw incredible progress with the children we were working with over the period the show was broadcast. With the end of the lockdown came the conclusion of RadioBlogging. We are incredibly proud of the project and it showed the potential and the power of blogging and carefully selected Internet tools in relation to impact on children’s writing. We believe we have pulled together the right people with the right expertise in the teaching of writing, the pedagogy behind the effective use of technology to enhance teaching and learning and the technical expertise to create a unique product.

TeachingLive builds on the legacy of Radioblogging by offering schools a focused creative writing programme that will enhance your school’s catch up offering for English. Designed to work with 1:1 groups, small groups or whole classes, TeachingLive focuses on the teaching of writing using carefully selected and simple technology that requires no logins, no complex sets of instructions or mega fast broadband.

TeachingLive uses weekly Zoom sessions alongside a fully interactive and safe blogging platform to deliver 10 week blocks of teaching. During these 10 sessions, we will do the teaching from the front of your classrooms via Zoom. Using a device of your choice, your pupils will follow our instructions, use our resources and interact with the teaching LIVE through this blog. Once the children have completed each session, they are challenged to create a blog post using what they have learned in that session. These blog posts will be checked by a member of the TeachingLive team then approved. That’s not the end, children will be taught how to leave effective peer feedback through comments; asked to submit illustrations to the gallery and even perform their writing. In short, TeachingLive is an immersive and interactive writing program that can bring your class a weekly dose of the best teachers of creative  writing and educational technology at an incredibly low cost.