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IN Australia, primary school teachers receive, on average, 17 hours of mandatory music education in their teacher education courses. In South Australia it is even less. In Finland it is 270 hours. What is 17 hours of music education supposed to achieve? One has to ask: Why bother?

It seems that every school is considering purchasing iPads these days, and Apple has reported that iPad sales to schools are currently outselling MacBook sales by a very large margin. However, the rush to purchase iPads often precedes the careful planning and preparation that's so crucial to their success as educational tools. Technology alone is never the answer. Instead, iPad use needs to be integrated within a holistic approach to 21st-century education that encompasses a thorough and ongoing review of the skills and competencies required in our rapidly changing society and the educational processes that best help students acquire them.

Can a decent education turn young criminals around? Tony Wilson goes inside Victoria's toughest youth prison to see a remarkable new school in action. The first minute of the first day at Parkville College began with a teacher, Jess Appeldorff, shaking the hands of eight teenage boys and thanking them for coming to class. The school's other four teachers were there, as was their principal, 40-year-old Brendan Murray. The school was Murray's brainchild and it was an auspicious moment: Victoria's highest security youth justice centre - comprising a cluster of buildings collectively known as The Precinct - was about to undertake a bold educational experiment, and these boys from the college's North Remand had just received what Murray called "the three-quarter-time speech of my life".

A fantastic list of apps for iPads in edu. On this page, we are showcasing Apple Apps which can help educators with teaching and learning activities, as recommended by various educators within the #UKEdchat forum. You can easily sort the columns by clicking the arrows by each heading. Are we missing an iPad app which you use a lot in school? Please let us know in the comments box at the foot of the page, or via @UKEdchat on twitter, facebook, or Google+.

Google Drive is Google's cloud storage  with15 GB free of charge. This is probably one of the best productivity suites that  has a huge potential for us in education.  Besides being able to store our files and access them anywhere with internet connection, Google Drive also enables us to view, share and collaborate in real time while creating a document, spreadsheet or making a drawing. For those of you who are still struggling to come to grips with Google Drive functionalities, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has a special page packed full of interesting guides and tutorials on how teachers can use Google Drive. Check it out to learn more

WHEN Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he's "a translator between two hostile tribes" - the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner's argument in his book "Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World" is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently "adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace."

YouTube has a firm place in the current classroom. From Khan Academy's videos to YouTube EDU and beyond, there's a reason all these videos are finding a home in schools. In an effort to help keep the ball rolling, Google just launched a set of 10 interactive lessons designed to support teachers in educating students on digital citizenship. A topic obviously quite close to Google's heart. Google (which owns YouTube) built the lessons to educate students about YouTube's policies, how to flag content, how to be a safer online citizen, and protect their identities. Below is a list of lessons, and the recommended flow for delivery. Lessons are designed to fit within 50 minute classes, but can be adapted to fit your schedule:

Welcome. Project Zero is an educational research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education composed of multiple, independently-sponsored research projects. Since 1967, Project Zero has examined the development of learning processes in children, adults, and organizations. Today, Project Zero's work includes investigations into the nature of intelligence, understanding, thinking, creativity, ethics, and other essential aspects of human learning. Our mission is to understand and enhance high-level thinking and learning across disciplines and cultures and in a range of contexts, including schools, businesses, museums, and digital environments.

With an increasing focus on programming and coding finding the way onto the curriculum in many different countries across the globe, developers are creating materials which can help educators skill themselves, and also to support pupils in this area.

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.

"n the Australian Curriculum, students develop ICT capability as they learn to use ICT effectively and appropriately to access, create and communicate information and ideas, solve problems and work collaboratively in all learning areas at school, and in their lives beyond school. The capability involves students in learning to make the most of the digital technologies available to them, adapting to new ways of doing things as technologies evolve and limiting the risks to themselves and others in a digital environment. The Melbourne Declaration on the Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA 2008) recognises that in a digital age, and with rapid and continuing changes in the ways that people share, use, develop and communicate with ICT, young people need to be highly skilled in its use. To participate in a knowledge-based economy and to be empowered within a technologically sophisticated society now and into the future, students need the knowledge, skills and confidence to make ICT work for them at school, at home, at work and in their communities. Information and communication technologies are fast and automated, interactive and multimodal, and they support the rapid communication and representation of knowledge to many audiences and its adaptation in different contexts. They transform the ways that students think and learn and give them greater control over how, where and when they learn."

The Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model offers a method of seeing how computer technology might impact teaching and learning.  It also shows a progression that adopters of educational technology often follow as they progress through teaching and learning with technology.   While one might argue over whether an activity can be defined as one level or another, the important concept to grasp here is the level of student engagement. One might well measure progression along these levels by looking at who is asking the important questions.  As one moves along the continuum, computer technology becomes more important in the classroom but at the same time becomes more invisibly woven into the demands of good teaching and learning.

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

This website is from one of the Google+ communities titled 'Google Apps in Education'. On this PD training space you will find a wealth of information to navigate yourself around Google Chrome. Hope it helps.

"Whether you're the parent of a child with a reading disability or an educator that works with learning disabled students on a daily basis, you're undoubtedly always looking for new tools to help these bright young kids meet their potential and work through their disability. While there are numerous technologies out there that can help, perhaps one of the richest is the iPad, which offers dozens of applications designed to meet the needs of learning disabled kids and beginning readers alike. Here, we highlight just a few of the amazing apps out there that can help students with a reading disability improve their skills not only in reading, writing, and spelling, but also get a boost in confidence and learn to see school as a fun, engaging activity, not a struggle."

An interesting look at samr as applied to a range of apps for education

Although most homes have video games there's been a lot of resistance to them entering the classroom, but that's changing as teachers recognise their educational benefits.

Kids don't hate math. Not even fractions. Ask them to divide a bag of candy among themselves and watch them tackle the problem. What they hate is repeat computation, void of context. Add a timer and they really hate it.

We're putting together some research for some upcoming BYOT policy content, and in the course of doing so found many existing policies enlightening. For starters, it is clear that some districts were more open-minded entering their BYOT programs than others. Many "policies" (not included below) were really more of a set of rules and consequences for breaking the rules than they were a supporting framework for teachers and students. In the end, every situation is different. There is no single "right way" to implement a BYOT program, so we've included 11 widely varying policy styles below, with each authoring school or district named inline.

Really, there are so many apps available it can be hard to know where to begin and once you find something that looks useful, it's difficult to assess it properly until you've download and installed it on your iPad. iPad music apps that are free can take away the risk of choosing a dud and they can be useful when book-listing apps for students on a tight budget.