""Reduce teacher workload!" can be heard up and down the country, in staffrooms and online. The truth is it's one of the simplest things that schools can do to help retain staff and maintain their wellbeing. That being said, however, some schools aren't doing all they can to remove unnecessary burdens. Those who have done so, enjoy rave reviews on Twitter and elsewhere, which of course doesn't do them any harm when it comes to recruiting and retaining excellent staff. The best staff know their worth and will inevitably leave the school earlier than they would've done if they feel that another school would trust them and let them just get on with the real job of teaching. Even the Department for Education has begun to take note of the issue, identifying some key areas where schools can reduce teacher workload."

"As a headteacher, I had become quite used to doing things in my own way. Over a number of years I had developed my own style, grown comfortable and confident about my personal convictions and educational philosophy and had found, I thought, an effective way to deliver my kind of leadership and make my school my kind of school."

"Anyone who's actively been trying to collect feedback on something knows what a struggle it is. You put down the work, figure out questions, deciding appropriate scales, thinking through how to phrase the questions, rephrase them 3 times more, and then, finally, input everything into your favourite survey tool and press send."

"Of course, I have always held the opinion that we are all still scientists in our own unique manner.  In light of that, I have chosen to write about how I think on this blog post.  There are two main types of blog posts on this site to 'demystify the life of a scientist'.  The first deals with large numbers or various statistics reported in the popular news with no real context provided."

"Hosted by @digicoled, in this episode we explore the Phonics teaching and learning strategy in England with an in-depth, fascinating interview with Debbie Hepplewhite MBE."

"He opened his laptop and started playing around, again. I hadn't quite noticed until I'd gotten the rest of this Year 7 class to get their books open and start completing the questions that were on the whiteboard."

"A superb platform for creating online books. Add pictures from the bank of images or from your computer. Browse the extensive library of books created by the community."

"A new qualitative study, published in the journal Gender and Education and carried out by researchers at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Hildesheim, found that teacher gender has no effect on how male and female teachers employ discipline strategies used in primary school classrooms."

"Browse and download 16,000 sound effects from the BBC, licensed for educational use."

"A new study co-authored by researchers at Michigan State University and Case Western Reserve University found that "growth mindset interventions," or programmes that teach students they can improve their intelligence with effort - and therefore improve grades and test scores - don't work for students in most circumstances."

"Teachers are notorious for ignoring health concerns and just carrying on. From teaching with a high fever, and soldiering on with 4 hours of sleep, teachers often put their health at risk. But done this make teachers more productive, or less?"

"A great map making site from National Geographic with a bank of ready made layers with data about wildlife, the environment, and human development."

"How many times do you hear a pupil fishing for the answer to the question you have just asked? How many hands go up to say, "Sir, I am Stuck!" and "Sir I can't do this!", or similar."

"A fab platform for creating your own ebooks. You can even embed images and videos. There is also a huge range of published work from the community. Invite others to comment and even collaborate on your stories."

"There are many components that make teaching stressful, such as teaching for tests and hoping the pupils will perform well, marking and giving meaningful feedback quickly. Also, there are 'Pinch points' in the year where lots seem to come at once! Even when confronted with a group of students, when you get one of those classes where none of them cares or see the point no matter how hard you try to convince them otherwise. Ultimately, teaching is a massively important role in society, so there's a lot riding on the profession which equates to a lot of pressure/stress. It's just fortunate that most of the time the wins outweigh the rest."

"There are lots of stressful careers, but teaching combines the elevated baseline of chonic stress of the day to day, coupled with bouts of intensely stressful events. Inspections, staff meetings, work scrutiny, piles of unmarked books in the boot of your car, all can cause stress and anxiety. Plus the current culture of the profession, where boasts about the long hours individuals work are wore like medals rather than alarm bells, make us feel inadequate unless we are working ourselves to the verge of medical exhaustion."

"Hosted by @digicoled, this episode we are honoured to interview one of the founding fathers of Pixar Animation, Loren Carpenter, who charts his time as a computer scientist at Boeing, and then with Lucas Films. Listen via Soundcloud below, via the Apple Podcasts icon, or subscribe to 'UKEdChat' via your favourite podcast smartphone app."

"Surveys fill a multitude of purposes within education and give students, teachers, and parents a chance to share their opinions in a familiar way that have been around since the 1920s. The collected information is, among other things, meant to form a framework from which teachers improvement is built upon. Improvements are then implemented and the cycle begins again. In theory, this sounds like a good and reasonable way of working. In reality: Not so much."