EdTech

What every parent needs to know about video games: a crash course Children of all ages are spending hours every day playing videos games, yet many parents struggle to understand why. Here's our essential guide

If you believe everything you hear about kids online, you might think pedophiles and cyberbullies are around every cyber-corner. Yes, there is bad stuff out there. But the truth is, there's a lot of good, and some experts are arguing against a "techno-panic mindset" that worries parents unnecessarily.

Parents: Wii U is the best choice for family gaming!

"Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational thinking and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. The cloud hosted system is now available to teachers, schools and districts."

"1-to-1 Essentials offers the guidance you need in order to proactively, rather than reactively, address issues that schools commonly face when going 1-to-1. We encourage you to explore, customize, and choose the resources that will best support your school community."

A series of screen shots that show what we use, and in what categories. Parents find these useful when wanting to make better use of iPads at home. Also a lot easier than trying to build and maintain a detailed list that no one uses anyway!

Add Google Drive Folder to Google Sites This is a feature we've all been wanting and it has been described on the Google Sites Help forum many times - a link between Google Drive and Google Sites. Google Sites, while it has those file cabinet pages, isn't the best document management system available, especially next to the incredible set of features in Google Drive.

"How can P2P networks go legit?'' My answer is, ``they already are.'' The world-wide-web is used to download illegally copied software, copyrighted music and movies as well as child pornography, yet we're not asking how the web can go legit. No one here would dispute that filesharing networks are used by those who would violate copyright. But this is not solely the domain of P2P; copyrighted software has been traded on electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) since their inception and has permeated every public communication protocol on the Internet. Filesharing is a social phenomenon, not a technological one - demonizing P2P based on one use of the technology is a mistake in my opinion. P2P already has positive mainstream benefits in certain communities and new uses are being found all the time."

If the metric you used to judge whether or not a new technology is a "pirate technology" is what percentage of its use was "unauthorized," you get a very skewed picture. Early on, all sorts of new and innovative technologies are mostly used for unauthorized copies... until the industry catches up. However, people don't often deal with trends very well, and they assume, quite incorrectly, that if a technology is initially used in an unauthorized manner, it must be a "piracy tool" and no amount of discussing how trends and adaptation works will convince them otherwise. 

The power of a reflective teacher is unstoppable. Hand in hand with reflective practice is coachability.  Coachability speaks to the teachers capacity to: hear feedback; analyze and understand the feedback; implement the feedback into their teaching.

A magnificent way to engage with a 'gamify digital citizenship in Junior School.