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he job of teaching * Join in the discussion reddit this Comments (1) Wendy Berliner Guardian Professional, Monday 3 October 2011 18.30 BST Article history Teacher Daniel Hartley from Chulmleigh Community College, Devon. Photograph: Apex Back in the summer we decided here at GTN HQ that, with our membership rocketing, it was the right time to mark our first six months in operation with a survey to find out what members thought about teaching today. There were questions across a wide spectrum of topics and, at the end, we left a free text box for teachers to add any comments they wanted to share. It was the dying days of the summer holiday - August 25 - when it went out just after lunch. We knew the survey would take ten or 15 minutes to complete so we weren't quite expecting what happened next, but within those first few hours after its release, we realised you had started something big. By 10.30pm that night we'd had several hundred questionnaires back, which in itself was impressive with many teachers perhaps still away on holiday or back but busy preparing for the new term. The most impressive thing of all was the content of those text boxes. There was just so much of it. Some people wrote several hundred words at a time, speaking clearly from the heart and arguing cogently against the things they felt were going wrong in education. A love of teaching and vocational pleasure felt working with children and young people emerged but it was emerging from a fog caused by far less pleasant aspects of the job - disrespect from society and governments, bullying by senior management, other teachers, parents and students, despair at the parenting skills of some homes and despair with government targets and league tables that were funnelling education into an ever thinner tube feeding stuff that improved Sats and exam results rather than nourishing a lifelong love of learning. One former solicitor questioning the sense of the switch into teaching said: " M

The Year in Rap 2011

We got so many additions and updates to our 2011 list we thought it was time to bring you the most up-to-date list for 2012. So, without further ado, here's the 2012 A-Z list of educational Twitter hashtags. We went through all the comments on the 2011 version, wrote down all the Twitter and Facebook updates, and compiled this list over the course of several months. What follows is our best effort to bring you the biggest and baddest list of hashtags.

Derek Wenmouth produced this slideshare "Introducing some of the challenges, changes and trends facing schools and teachers in NZ in 2011"

Home page for 2011 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) from Jan 17 to April 11, 2011.

This is Google's contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. It runs from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. We invite students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

"In Denmark, the government has taken the bold step of allowing pupils full access to the internet during their final school year exams. A total of 14 colleges in Denmark are piloting the new system of exams and all schools in the country have been invited to join the scheme by 2011."

Tom March makes reference to this article in his keynote "It's Broke - So Let's Fix it!"  http://ozline.com/entry/2011/09/recorded-keynote/

Texas Computer Educators Conference. Use the schedule to find presentations with handouts. Free stuff and links. Look at slide shows. Select by key terms, topic, grade level, etc.

On March 16th, 2011 Sir Ken Robinson presented a talk to the Learning Without Frontiers community followed by an audience discussion where he was joined by Mick Waters, Curriculum Foundation and Keri Facer, Professor of Education, MMU. Here are the edited highlights of that talk:

Moodle Moot online conference April 30 to May 3rd. Register for $65 AUD

Speaker handouts from March 2011 Learning Solutions conference sponsored by Elearning Guild. Must register for free Associate Membership first.

"Have you been gamified yet? Perhaps not a painful as it sounds, gamification is on its way to becoming THE buzzword of 2011. Social media engagement tools such as badges, points, levels, leaderboards, etc are making their way out of hipster apps to every online engagement you can think of. Yes, it all sounds oddly familiar (green stamps, reward cards, etc.) but of course, it's all NEW NEW NEW, with gurus and pundits claiming that gamification will change the way we live and of course, spend money."

Streaming Video from the conference over 3 days in Austin, TX, Oct 4 - 6, 2011. Follow Twitter tag #sxswECO

Joyce Valenza shares how she and other TL's keep up with their network

"When Google Plus was announced in 2011, many people were skeptical that the social network would be able to gain ground against the likes of LinkedIn and Twitter, let alone the industry-leading giant Facebook. After all, looking at the Palo Alto-based Google previous cracks at a similar experiment, it would appear that social media was one area that Google struggled with."

"Take your professional learning community to the next level by using Google Docs to collaborate with colleagues. Google Docs is an online office suite that allows you to create, edit, share, and publish documents, including spreadsheets and presentations. Because everything is stored and even modified on the web, Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues - and even to edit the same document from multiple computers simultaneously. This session will focus on the use of Google Docs to promote and support collaboration within a PLC, including strategies for creating common assessments, sharing best practices, and capturing the conversation - even between meetings. Google Docs can even be used for data collection and analysis. This one tool can revolutionize the way your PLC collaborates. And it's free. (This is a hands-on DOUBLE session: 2.5 hours.)"

In February this year, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon announced the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) would conduct an inquiry into copyright law to make sure it was keeping pace with the digital age. The inquiry was initially flagged by former Attorney-General Robert McLelland in 2011. "Fifteen years ago no one used Google as an internet search engine, viewed YouTube videos on iPads or listened to music on their mobile phones," McLelland told the 15th Biennial Copyright Symposium on 14 October in Sydney.

"The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is a project that will publish one podcast per day, for all 365 days of 2009, 2010, 2011 -- and now 2012. The podcast episodes are written, recorded and produced by people around the world."