Another week in a row, we have a special guest teaching us something new. One of our software developers, Scott Windsor, brought in his wife, Jane-Anne Egerton, to teach us how to make beer bread. Doesn’t that just have a good ring to it? Beer bread — the best of both worlds. Along with teaching us how to make bread, she’s also taking some photography classes at Photographic Center Northwest. If you want to take a look at her current work, check out her site at Venomous Swan.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups white flour
• 3 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 warm 12oz bottle of warm (room temperature) beer
• 4+ tablespoons butter

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients
2. Pour in the bottle of beer
3. Mix the ingredients together until the batter is wet
4. Pour the mixture into a greased pan
5. Pour melted button on top of bread
6. Bake for 30-45 minutes at 375 degrees

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Do you want to teach us something? We’d love to invite you on one of our Fridays to help us learn something new! E-mail me at joseph@teachstreet.com.

Getting ready for Halloween? We were lucky enough to have a guest teacher come in today to get us in the mood for Halloween. Elizabeth Romatz, a Psychology graduate student at Seattle University, taught us how to make entertaining brain shots for your upcoming Halloween costume party. It was great to learn bartending skills at the office, even only for just one shot. Here’s how to make this tasty concoction below:

Ingrediants:

• 1 1/4 oz. Peach schnapps
• 3/4 oz. Irish Cream
• Splash of grenadine

Instructions:

1. Chill all of your liquors before making this shot
2. Pour in your peach schnapps into a shot glass
3. Slightly tilt the shot glass and pour the Irish Cream so it hits the glass before touching the schnapps
4. Splash the grenadine on top and watch the braininess ensue

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Do you want to teach us something? We’d love to invite you on one of our Fridays to help us learn something new! E-mail me at joseph@teachstreet.com.

Are you looking to take tennis lessons from a real tennis coach? If you are, Stephen is definitely not your guy. But if you’re looking to have some crazy fun on a tennis courth which involves pelting your opponents with tennis balls — he’s your go-to-guy. Stephen Travieso is the creator of a game called Xtreme Tennis, widely famous in the Baltimore area and wanting to slowly grow here in the Northwest. Here are the rules for Xtreme Tennis on TeachStreet.

If you walk by a tennis court and see someone running across while a person is trying to pelt them with a serve, you know what’s going down — XTREME TENNIS!

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Do you want to teach us something? We’d love to invite you on one of our Fridays to help us learn something new! E-mail me at joseph@teachstreet.com.

Our CTO, Daryn Nakhuda, takes time away from his computer screens to teach us how to draw — his way. I’m not sure how many art classes he’s taken before, but judging from the video — I think it may have been a couple years…or more. Although, his story telling is always funny. Maybe he should provide public speaking training or even a comedy class to pass down his quirkiness. I know I’d be in line for that one.

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Do you want to teach us something? We’d love to invite you on one of our Fridays to help us learn something new! E-mail me at joseph@teachstreet.com.

To top off this nice summer we’ve had here at TeachStreet, Jenn taught us how to make some tasty chocolate covered strawberries. You have to love cooking classes that don’t need a stove or oven, especially since we don’t have those in our office. If you need reason to impress a special someone or just want to prepare a “nice summer time treat” — you have to try this out. It’s super easy and simple.

Chocolate Covered Strawberries:

Ingrediants:

• Strawberries
• Chocolate (semi-sweet or dark)
• Milk
• Wax paper

Instructions:

1. Heat your chocolate either under a double broiler, or TeachStreet style (in the microwave)
2. Mix in a tiny bit of milk after the chocolate has melted
3. Wash your strawberries and dip them into the melted chocolate
4. Make sure you swirl the strawberry to get it all covered in chocolate
5. Place on a sheet pan/plate lined with wax paper
6. Put the chocolate covered strawberries in the fridge until chocolate has hardened

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Do you want to teach us something? We’d love to invite you on one of our Fridays to help us learn something new! E-mail me at joseph@teachstreet.com.

Photo by ndm007

We’ve been getting a good amount of our community looking for test prep courses in order to prepare themselves for the upcoming school year. For a lot of high school juniors and seniors specifically, they’re aiming to ace their SATs for college applications to get into college next year. If you haven’t registered for the test, go check out College Board for the most recent SAT test dates.

There’s a lot of ways to improve your SAT score, and it deals a lot with preparation and surrounding yourself with a good support team. There’s a good amount of great SAT tutors and SAT Prep organizations you can connect with. We’re actually working with some great partners nationwide to provide our community with a greater selection of test prep courses to choose from like Kaplan Test Prep, among others.

If you want to learn more about how you can improve your SAT test scores, here are some great articles to get some great tips:

• Some SAT Basics: Thinking About the SAT Strategically
• College Bound: Boosting Your SAT Vocabulary
• What You Did Not Know About the SAT Exam
• 8 Questions to Ask a Potential SAT Tutor
• Five Tips for the SAT: How to Pass Through the Gateway to College

If you weren’t able to make it yesterday for our “Introduction to TeachStreet Team” event, we had a great talk with Sara Selepouchin and Marlo Miyashiro about their experiences starting and leading Teams of their own. First, I wanted to thanks them both for taking the time and sharing their knowledge with us and I know it’ll be a benefit to the whole community. The real takeaways I got out of it were the following:

• Teams is a great way to connect with more teachers in your area and subject
• Learn from and help your team members
• Having local teams with a diversity of teachers may be a good start
• Competition in Teams is always good
• The success of your team is what you make of it
• Start simple

If you missed the event, check out the video and transcript below:

Webcast: Introduction to TeachStreet Teams (Video):

Webcast: Introduction to TeachStreet Teams (Chat Transcript):
http://rec1.dimdim.com/chat/dimdim/f2ee29c2-dd7d-102c-8e71-003048642bd7

We’ll be doing regular webcasts highlighting different topics our community is seeking to learn. If you have a topic of interest or questions about TeachStreet Teams, please send me an e-mail to joseph@teachstreet.com.

Our pilot program, TeachStreet Teams, is finally here and I wanted to let the community know. We have a total of 30 teams ranging from local teams in Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver to subject-based teams like Holistic Healers and the Marketing and Design Team. We’re eager to get everyone’s feedback. Check out TeachStreet Teams below:

TeachStreet Teams: http://teachstreet.com/teams

• Network with teachers/schools/orgs in your community or within the subject you teach
• Team Guides to help your get started
• Become a leader for Team and help TeachStreet grow the community
• Ability to add events your Teams are having for the community
• Forums for each Team to stay connected with other members
• Unique URLs for each Team to help spread the word

We’re having an event next week, “Introduction to TeachStreet Teams“, that will provide you a good time to chat with us and with two special guests who have a wealth of experience creating, maintaining, and supporting teams.

Sara Selepouchin
Former Etsy Teams Coordinator and Philly Etsy Street Team Leader
Sara has run here own crafts teams in the Philadelphia area, and actually worked with Etsy.com to help get their Teams program successfully off the ground to over 20,000+ members worldwide while she was there. I’m happy to say she’ll be helping us get started here at TeachStreet.

Marlo Miyashiro
EtsyRain Team Leader and Local Crafts Teacher
Marlo, is both a crafts teacher on TeachStreet and active participant in the crafts community here in Seattle. She currently runs EtsyRain (Seattle-based crafts team) which she has helped grow to over 600 members. They also organized the EtsyRain Spring Crafts Show which showcased their members.

I encourage all of you to sign up for this event, August 18th – 1:00-2:00pm PST. If you’re interested in how Teams can help your business grow, this will be the event to find out.

Introduction to TeachStreet Teams
August 18, 2009 – 1:00-2:00pm PST

We have such great community, especially in the arts and crafts space. From knitting teachers and crochet teachers to glass art teachers and pottery teachers — they all came out and participated in our Arts and Crafts Contest 2009 which ended last week. In order to qualify, teachers needed to list a class and add the Etsy Mini widget to their profiles, easy as that.

The spirit of the contest was to help teachers and sellers alike know there are other means of income that compliment each other, especially during these economic times. So if you can teach and sell the products you make — it’s a win-win situation as Marlo Miyashiro mentions when talking about her experience with both TeachStreet and Etsy. Thanks again for everyone who participated and here are the winners.

And the winner of the Apple iPhone 3GS ($200 Apple Giftcard) is:

Lisa Whiting – Private Knitting Lessons

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Each of the following prize winners will receive a $25 Visa Giftcard:

Bea Sharp – Fused Glass Plates and Bowls

Barbara Dunshee Pottery – Pottery / Ceramic Classes

Elizabeth Lafferty – Crochet Lessons

hodge podge farm – intermediate sewing: knit top or dress

We’re excited to announce our new pilot program, TeachStreet Teams. This initiative was born out of the feedback we got from you, the community; telling us that you wanted to connect with other teachers, schools, and organizations within your geographic or subject area. If you want to learn more about TeachStreet Teams through our Team Guides and join or lead your own team, please check out the links below.

• Learn more about TeachStreet Teams: We’ve created TeachStreet Team Guides to explore the things you can do with Teams.
  » Visit Team Guides
• Join a TeachStreet Team: If you’d like to network with fellow teachers in your geographic or subject area, feel free to join an existing TeachStreet Team
  » Join a Team!
• Create and lead your own Team: If you love networking, enjoy helping others learn new things, and just love to connect with other folks — we’re looking for you.
  » Lead a Team!

With the excitement of this new initiative, we’ve actually have gotten some great leaders who’ve already created their teams, which we have a lot in store for in the future — so stay tuned. But I’d like to take the time to introduce to you the leaders and the teams today.

Qigong & Tai Chi Team

Develop a shared Qigong class and workshop newsletter for local classes to give even greater visibility to classes and to give Qigong teachers from different lineages a chance to meet and get to know each other, as well as a chance to get to know the different styles or outlooks that each person or lineage has.

Leader: Susan Snyder (contact)

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Holistic Healers

The purpose of Holistic Healers is to provide an online network of practitioners from any area of alternative or integrative health. This community offers a platform of support across the country, and serves to enrich our individual practices in order to improve the health and lifestyle of the general public.

Leader: Johnna Dietz (contact)

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Handmade Philly

Handmade Philly seeks to provide artists, crafters and designers access to and engagement with Philadelphia’s arts culture.

Leader: Ruth Schanbacher (contact)

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Seattle Dance Coop

A cooperative group of dance teachers and others who love dance, dedicated to collaborating and supporting one another and the community in pursuit of our love of dance.

Leader: Linda Townsend of Dance Eclectic (contact)