The Brain: A Secret History-1. Mind Control  – available until Jan 27th. This ep will be repeated on bbc4 on Jan 11th. Next ep is on – emotion (jan 13th, then 14th)

How Drugs Work – 1. Cannabis – available until Jan 27th This ep will be repeated on BBC3 on Jan 9th, 10th, 11th, and 13th. Next ep is on – ecstasy (Jan 13th, 14th & 16th)

What Makes Us Clever? A Horizon Guide to Intelligence – available until Jan 19th This ep will be repeated on BBC4 on Jan 12th

EDIT 11.33 (thanks to Hilary Paul on psychexchange):  10 things you need to know about losing weight is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ksh7c/10_Things_You_Need_to_Know_About_Losing_Weight/ and available until Jan 13th (can’t find it’s proper site so not sure if it’s being repeated)

V. frustrating that these things get consigned to the iplayer cliff edge of doom…there are (illegal I assume) ways to download them but given they’re repeated this week it should be possible to record them!

Thanks to THSP for this (as below):

In today’s NYT: an incredible array of articles, interviews, videos and interactive games that are just begging to be squeezed into a unit on cognition or memory, or at the very least as filler for 15 minutes. Among the highlights:

• Tracing the spark of creative problem-solving (features insight, with interactive puzzles)
• An unbelievably speedy champion crossword puzzle solver (and a special crossword to boot)
• A great article on famed memory patient H.M. and how he continued to solve crosswords
• Students at Brown show how crossword constructing is done*

And there is so much more, on topics like jigsaw puzzles, mind-bending puzzles (which came first, the chicken or the egg?), and a great essay on puzzles by the usually mute magician Teller of Penn & Teller. Enjoy solving!

Perhaps something in there for those last lessons of term!  Enjoy!

I try and encourage my students to read about psychology in the media as well as their additional textbook reading. Although there are often newspaper articles relating to psychology, there are also a lot of blogs about psychology out there, of varying qualities & interest to a-level psychology. I discussed using delicious.com to save bookmarks to posts like this in an earlier post.

A few blogs I often link from are:

BPS research digest – on current research, written for non-specialists

Mental Health Update – short posts on mental health research

Mind Hacks – brilliant blog which often throws up interesting psychology, current and historic

Neuro images – not updated so frequently, but a nice selection of brain pictures – artistic, neuroimaging and anatomical

Teaching High school Psychology – American equivalent of this blog I suppose, has nice teaching ideas and occasionally resources

There’s quite a nice category-specific list here:

http://generallythinking.com/blog/the-28-best-psychology-blogs-on-the-internet-organised-by-topic/

Fuller list here (which should also get updated):

http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Psychology_blogs

The researchdigest recently posted a list of psychologists who tweet, which includes me (tweeting on a-level related psychology news). I turned that into a twitter list (so you can see all their tweets in one place).

To follow these links, I use googlereader, there are alternatives but they’re all fairly similar – the video below shows how I use this to:

1) follow blogs I want to read

2) read them & mark them as unread or starred

3) send specific posts to delicious/twitter/email

Sorry this video is a bit long – if I get time/remember I’ll try and create a shorter version.

If you use any other blogs for psychology teaching, do comment.

The movie was made using the opensource CamStudio and (also opensource) Virtual Magnifying Glass with editing in Windows Live Moviemaker.

PsychClips is a great new web site for psychology teachers to share video and audio clips that are hosted on youtube-type sites.

There are already almost 100 video clips on PsychClips and with other psychology teachers help this should grow considerably. Some of the videos are the better-known ones such as the Milgram and Zimbardo clips but there are already some lesser-known ones that psychology teachers may not have seen before embedded on the site.

The site is free although you do have to register. Teachers who have already registered for PsychExchange can use their existing user name and password to access PsychClips.

Possibly the best feature of PsychClips is the book-marking facility. Teachers can add clips to their own profile so that they have instant access to these psychology clips when they log on. This is so useful for teachers who have access to networked interactive white-boards in their classroom – like me.

For a list of youtube-type video sharing sites check out yube.co.uk

If you have, or know of, a web site that will be useful for teachers or learners of psychology please go to www.clickpsych.com and submit a link.

Categories and links are easy to create and are swiftly moderated.