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Have you ever wanted to share your digital resources or look at what someone else has produced? Have you ever made a whiteboard lesson from scratch, only because you didn't have a place to go for quality content? Classmate gives you access to hundreds of thousands of teachers from around the world, all sharing and collaborating across multiple formats. 

"Teachers around the world are gearing up for the new school year -- but the experience is going to be vastly different for new teachers. Where an experienced teacher has the knowledge of what worked and what didn't, a new teacher is going to be bombarded with tons of new info and the need to process it! Not to mention, they will be preparing for the most important piece of all: their classroom instruction. In no way, do I want to add to the burden of the already-filled-to-the-brim, new teacher stress bucket. I do however, want to share just 20 tidbits which I hope will help ease new teachers into a fun, successful school year. Some of these will be in the form of social media tools, which I think are awesome, and wish I had had as a newbie. And each little tidbit is linked to a resource which I hope you will find supportive. "

Some tips for beginning teachers from Edutopia

"A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults..... Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?"

Sir Ken Robinson and Joel Klein discuss the future of education in this video from The Economist. The permalink is http://ideas.economist.com/

Arguments go around and come back again about the role technology should play in the classroom. Should it be a subject? Should we have standards? Should it be mandated or optional? Some people argue that technology is simply a tool to be applied where and how it's appropriate. Others say no technology is neutral and we have to be deliberate in our choices to use it. In my view, technology can't be optional and it can't be an add-on.

"Google Alert allows you to create alerts around topics you are interested in and start receiving emails with updates about your search query. For instance as a doctoral student with a research interest in emerging literacies , I have created an alert with the name " emerging literacies" and each time something new published online with those key words in it I get an email with a link to it. This keeps me abreast of the latest releases in my area of research. I also use Google Alert to track down authors and scholars whose works are related to my research areas. I simply create a Google Alert with their names as the alert titles and next time they publish something I get it first. Another way to use Google Alert is to create an alert about yourself by using your full name and anytime somebody mentions you somewhere online you will instantly receive an email with a link to it. Here is how to create a Google Alert"

This infographic from Online Universities takes a look at the pros and cons of social media in education.

".......in an increasingly connected and digital world, the things a student needs to know are indeed changing-fundamental human needs sometimes drastically redressed for an alien modern world. Just as salt allowed for the keeping of meats, the advent of antibiotics made deadly viruses and diseases simply inconvenient, and electricity completely altered when and where we slept and work and played, technology is again changing the kind of "stuff" a student needs to know. Of course, these are just starters. Such a list really could go on forever."

At our Digital Technologies Curriculum Summit in 2013 we announced a partnership with the University of Adelaide to create a free open online course for primary school teachers to help prepare them for the implementation of the new digital technologies curriculum in Australia which will have compulsory computational thinking & coding from K-8.

"Published on 30 Mar 2015 More than 9 in 10 Australian adults are online - Get the facts from the ACMA's 'Australians' Digital Lives' report"

"One of the things I have been writing about and have tried to make clear over the past few months is that work as we know it is dead and that the only way forward is to challenge convention around how we work, how we lead, and how we build our companies. Employees which were once thought of expendable cogs are the most valuable asset that any organization has. However, the employee from a decade ago isn't the same as the employee who we are starting to see today. To help show that I wanted to share an image from my upcoming book which depicts how employees are evolving. It's an easy way to see the past vs the future."