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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. "

All of the Macmillan publishers teacher notes and black line masters for the Springboard range of guided reading texts.

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".

Every single teacher is concerned about his/ her teaching practices and the skills involved in this process. How many times have you wondered about a better way to teach the same lesson you have delivered to an eariler class? How often have you used technology to engage your students and improve their learning 

Some great ideas here for integrating ICT to facilitate better writing and formative assessment. Any experienced English teacher knows the drill: on the dreaded due date, students bring printed copies of their essays to class, where we collect them, take them home, jot inscrutable comments in the margins, bring them back to class, return them, and then watch students promptly toss them in the recycling bin on the way out of the room. The whole cycle borders on farce. Students pretend to spend many hours writing their papers, teachers pretend to spend many hours grading them, and we all pretend like repeating this process over and over again leads to something we in education like to call "student growth."

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?

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.

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.

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:

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

The Digital Citizenship page I started here almost a year ago is now growing bigger and bigger and contains all kinds of resources teachers would need to effectively instruct their students on this concept.

During my meetings with teachers, I asked them to reflect on how deep involvement in an inquiry project was influencing their thinking about the way they work with inquiry in the classroom. Their reflections were honest and insightful. In this post, I am sharing some of these reflections- and the potential implications for how we engaging students in quality inquiry. I am so grateful to the great staff of Macquarie for allowing me to share in their journey and their permission to include their thoughts in this post.

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.

"Teachers have known forever that happy, engaged students are better learners - especially when it comes to tough material. And learning how to spell is so hard for many kids."

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.

We received such a response from last week's article entitled Vision & Literacy Resources for Down Syndrome that this week, we wanted to continue to offer assistance and support for teachers as well as families by providing them with some helpful apps for children and teens with Down Syndrome.

"Shaun Tan's picture books have won numerous awards and been adapted to theater and animated film. His stunning wordless graphic novel The Arrival depicts the immigrant experience with unforgettable emotional impact. Get to know this illustrator from Perth, Australia by watching our November 2007 video interview. Learn how he got his start as a children's book illustrator, how he developed his ideas for The Arrival, and what inspired his vision for the book. Tan also describes the meaning behind a few key drawings in The Arrival, and offers advice for young artists."

For some students the hardest part of starting a creative writing assignment is generating an idea to write about. Here are seven good sources of writing prompts that you can share with your students.