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Many teachers are already taking advantage of new technology to enhance learning in the classroom. Now everyone can benefit from these new teaching techniques through the Innovative Teachers Programme.

Through Microsoft's Innovative Teachers Programme, you have the opportunity to learn from teachers all over the United Kingdom who are using technology to improve their teaching practice and motivate and challenge their students.

We invited a group of Innovative Teachers to a "Summer Camp" at Microsoft's headquarters in Reading, England to see exactly what they would do with simple technology that they already have in their classrooms, or can easily access for free. What they came up with truly amazed us.

Many teachers are unaware of the great features and resources available to them. We've asked our Innovative Teachers to help colleagues make the most of these resources by creating a series of short videos in which they explain to you how they create lessons using each of these features mentioned above, and many more. These videos are available for free on Microsoft's Innovative Teachers Network.

To make this even easier for you, Microsoft is giving away some of our most cutting-edge software for free for use in education. Microsoft Songsmith and AutoCollage are now available for free on the Innovative Teachers Network. Songsmith is a great tool for students to use to create songs for use in revision materials, presentations, movies, slide shows or other classroom work. AutoCollage uses digital tapestry and facial recognition technology to stitch together photos into a collage. It's a great way for students to take a number of photos for a presentation or project and stitch present them as one digital photo file.

The sixth Microsoft UK Innovative Teachers Forum will take place on 1 December 2009 in Birmingham. This one-day conference is free for all educators who wish to attend and will look to address the theme of 'Connecting Learners, Connecting Teachers.' Keynote speakers and practical workshops will explore this theme, along with 'real-life' examples of some of the most innovative uses of technology to enhance teaching and learning.

We want these 'real-life' examples from you, teachers and educators. Do you have learning projects that use technology and have made a difference in the classroom? Have you been able to influence colleagues through your teaching practice? Could your work be award winning?

Then why not enter the UK Innovative Teachers Forum Awards? You could be one of the top educators in the UK invited share your work with the delegates at this conference. The creators of the top 15 projects will be invited to the conference for an awards dinner, with travel and hotel costs paid for by the organisers. At the event, we will award four teachers with an invitation to present their project at the next European Innovative Teachers Forum to be held in Berlin in March 2010.

Useful links

For more information about the Forum, visit www.uk.innovativeteachers.com or the UK Teachers Blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/teachers

Cutting-edge classrooms

We know there are many Scottish teachers who are already using technology in creative and unique ways in classrooms all over the country.

The Innovative Teachers Programme allows teachers, educators and education partners from the entire United Kingdom to share and develop ideas about best practice in the use of technology to support teaching and learning. One of the most successful ways of doing this has been through the Innovative Teachers Forums.

These events take place annually, not just in the UK, but also in more than 60 countries across the world. In this year's European Innovative Teachers Forum in Vienna, Scottish teacher Ollie Bray won one of the coveted prizes and is joining Microsoft at our worldwide event in Brazil in November.

Innovations

Some simple innovations you can use:

• Use 3-D surface charts in Microsoft Excel to teach geography lessons
• Pre-select the sources from which you want your students to conduct research and use Microsoft Word's Research Pane so they can search without leaving Word
• Use Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope to have students create a guided tour through the space using imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope
• Create modern foreign language tutorials in Microsoft PowerPoint by recording your voice into PowerPoint slides and having your students record themselves speaking back
• Have students sing into their computers using Microsoft Songsmith, which applies rhythm and a background track to the song and creates an MP3 file
• Use the maths add-in for Word to solve complex equations and create graphs of the equations that students can rotate or navigate through.

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