From the Teacher Support Network, www.teachersupport.info.

TEACHERS SAVE TIME PREPARING THEIR LESSONS BY USING FREE TEACHING RESOURCES
Free plans, activities, worksheets and other resources for teachers

Many teachers have said that they struggle to find the time to create the large number of new plans, activities and worksheets required for their lessons in an average working week.

TES Resources identified that it would benefit all teachers if the free teaching materials, normally shared in staffrooms, could be hosted all in the one place. Therefore making it simpler for teachers to know one website where they could find ready-made materials to download, print and use straight away.

Our editor's picks highlight topical resources and give teachers a hand at find the best materials:

• Seaside collection
• Synthetic phonics collection
• Minibeasts collection
• Child Safety Week
• World Cup 2010

Visit www.tes.co.uk/resources to view the events calendar for more topical collections.

TES Resources now hosts one of the world's largest free resources' websites. It contains thousands of lesson plans, interactive resources and teaching materials, for all subjects and key stages, for teachers to download for free. Now used by more than 230,000 teachers every week, it clearly fills a gap for many teachers looking for ways to speed up their preparation time.

Did you know that many teachers create an average of one hundred new documents every year to prepare for teaching their classes? This means there is a staggering amount of new, and almost certainly duplicate, materials are being created every week. TES Resources aims to support teachers by decreasing the amount of duplicated resources and hosting ready-made teaching resources, for everyone to access for free.

For those teachers who are creating their own bank of resources for their subject specialities, TES Resources gives individuals an opportunity to share materials, best practice and give back to the teaching community. Anyone can set up a profile and start sharing their own lessons plans, worksheets and ideas with other teachers so to find out more please contact resources@tes.co.uk

By sharing their own resources, for comments, ratings and feedback, teachers are improving the quality of the resources they create. Now hugely popular; some of the shared files on TES Resources have been downloaded more than one hundred thousand times.

Over time, TES Resources hopes that if all teachers who are producing resources of an excellent standard shared their materials online then it will raise standards across all aspects within the educational community. But its not only teachers who are seeing the benefits to sharing materials on TES Resources; many educational groups, organisations and charities now have very active profiles on TES Resources.

Through these profiles our partners are now sharing their free teaching materials with the large number of teachers who visit the site every week. Organisations like; Teachers TV, Channel 4 Education, NRICH Maths, TTRB, Nuffield Foundation, National Archives, South West Grid for Learning and many, many more organisations are sharing their popular free resources to gain wider exposure within the TES Resources community.

To browse what's available today, please visit TES Resources at www.tes.co.uk/resources