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Word mover is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open Word Mover they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct adesigned to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open Word Mover they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems. poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems.

Findery is a community site on which anyone can share a short story about any location on the globe. Findery uses Google Maps as its base so in a way it is really just a public, collaborative Google Map. To make a contribution to Findery just sign-in, pick a location, and start typing your story. Your story can also include pictures and video clips. You can make your stories public or private on Findery.

Panchatantra Tales - Tiger and the Golden Bangle | Moral Stories for Kids in English with Subtitles

Watch this incredible Panchatantra tale in English with subtitles. Learn important life lesson from the actions of the Tortoise

"With budgets tight, many schools are hoping to bring technology into the classroom without having to shell out for a device for each student. A solution for many has been to make classes BYOD (short for "bring your own device"), which allows students to bring laptops, tablets, and smartphones from home and to use them in the classroom and share them with other students. It's a promising idea, especially for schools that don't have big tech budgets, but it has met with some criticism from those who don't think that it's a viable long-term or truly budget-conscious decision. Whether that's the case is yet to be seen, but these stories of schools that have tried out BYOD programs seem to be largely positive, allowing educators and students to embrace technology in learning regardless of the limited resources they may have at hand."

"Google changed the way search works this week. It deeply integrated Google+ into search results. It's ostensibly meant to deliver more personalized results. But it pulls those personalized results largely from Google services-Google+, Picasa, YouTube. Search for a restaurant, and instead of its Yelp page, the top result might be someone you know discussing it on Google Plus. Over at SearchEngineland, Danny Sullivan has compiled a series of damning examples of the ways Google's new interface promotes Plus over relevancy. Long story short: It's a huge step backwards."

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

"Teachers, share with your students one of the greatest stories of all time - how did animal life evolve on planet earth? Download or stream these short videos to help students learn about this dramatic rise of the animal kingdom and how those first animals lead to the astonishing diversity we see on earth today"

via @rmbyrne