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"Much of the best commentary on education is written by engaged teachers and available free online. Jenny Luca highlights her must-read blogs, to help kick start you into the new school year. "

My first year teaching a literacy coach came to observe my classroom. After the students left, she commented on how I asked the whole class a question, would wait just a few seconds, and then answer it myself. "It's cute," she added. Um, I don't think she thought it was so cute. I think she was treading lightly on the ever-so shaky ego of a brand-new teacher while still giving me some very necessary feedback.

21st century classroom is a classroom that is multimodally structured in such a way that students, teachers and parents are engaged in synchronous and asynchronous communicational pathways throughout the school year and beyond. Such a classroom is not restricted by geographical and temporal bounds

Great post re developing your personal learning network through twitter. A great list of educators to follow if I do say so myself ;-)

Productivity and simplicity, these are two things the modern knowledge worker craves. Google Reader is my "secret weapon" of productivity and I'd like to show you how I get the most out of this program.

At school our big focus on CBL and Inquiry Based Learning has led to conversations around how to scaffold and teach students skills relating to researching on the web. It's my opinion that Primary School students should not be left to do open searches Google - there is simply too much information to sort through. (This doesn't mean we don't teach them how and give them opportunities to practise, it just means we don't set them Challenges and let them 'go for it' on the open web) Instead, teachers need to find relevant websites for students to search for information from, and post them on their class Site or Blog. This limits the amount of information students need to search through, and guides their searches to appropriate websites for their reading level etc.

   1 Kathleen Morris, January 2013,http://primarytech.global2.vic.edu.au   Getting Started with Global2 This guide will help you begin a blog using Global2 (http://global2.vic.edu.au).Further instructions can be found at http://help.edublogs.org

The free version of Voki.com lets you create colorful characters who can replay your voice recordings or convert text to speech in a variety accents. These characters are easy to place on blogs and websites, and they each have their own unique URL. It's possible to save the characters you create as HTML code in a text editor like Notepad or Word, but it's easier and more convenient to save them directly on Voki.com using a free account. This could be a great shared literacy exercise.

Now that so many schools are using Google Apps for Education, teachers need to be familiar with many different aspects of Google that they might not otherwise use. The slideshow below has 4 illustrated steps to adding an Event to the Google Calendars that we have on our school intranet.

A great site created by the Oz Gov that discusses cyber safety. Should be included on any class blog. 

Last month we posted a free digital citizenship poster for our educator community to download. The response we received after posting it was incredible - more than 20,000 downloads in the first week! After publishing the post, many international educators requested a version of the poster in their native language and today we're please to announce that it's now available in Dutch, French, German, Greek and Spanish. In addition to these new languages, we also created a black and white version for those looking for a more "printer-friendly" version.