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Track student behaviour in class with this online points award system. You can email a report to parents at the end of the week. Can also track absences on this system. Awesome and free!!!

Corrie Barclay reflects on his 1st term

Some useful ideas that can be adapted by most teachers.

This offers some great practical video tutorials on different Google services including: Gmail, G Calendar, GDrive, GDocs, GForms, GSpreadsheets, GPresentations,GDrawings, GSites. These tutorials are 30 minute screencasts of webinars.

Donna Baum (@AuntyTech) put an interview conducted by Dean Shareski (@shareski). He spoke to Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) about curation & his best list of tools. Put onto Theme.

"http://youtu.be/Smt8lsPU_Mo"

"SAMR has been an incredibly useful framework for conversations around, and implementation of, educational technology in schools and districts. I mean, goodness, just look at a Google image search on the term. But there's something about it, or rather, the way it is often promoted, that has always given me that feeling like a piece of food is stuck in the back of my teeth."

"Welcome to the The Granny Cloud! "Grannies" Skyping with children in India and Colombia! Not only "grannies" of course, but grandpas too! And mums and dads and aunties and uncles and… While we do have many grannies it's the attitude that matters - encouraging, nurturing, praising and offering guidance rather than directing, instructing and examining. In this blog you'll find reports from grannies about how their Skype sessions went - grannies sharing and learning from each other."

"...a pedagogical alternate reality game we developed over the course of two years under the aegis of The University of Texas at Austin's Digital Writing & Research Lab. Battle Lines offers a compelling game experience that allows student-players to develop rhetorical, community-building, and digital literacies, crossing boundaries between academic and ludic practices."

"Would any of my students turn down a 1:1 MacBook Pro? Of course not. Still, I believe there is great value in the limitations of resources. When we engage in Device Wars on twitter and the blogosphere, we all seem to exercise significant bias in equating the best classroom tool with the one that we find most productive in our personal or professional lives (I touched upon that in disagreeing with folks who contend that the iPad is not a creation tool). Do I have a vision of what technology I'd like in my class in the perfect scenario? Sure I do. Do my students and I really need that state of shiny utopia, especially when it is (in my view) impossible to achieve in an equitable fashion? I don't think so."

FTF is an independent, non-profit research organization with a 45-year track record of helping all kinds of organizations make the futures they want. Our core research staff and creative design studio work together to provide practical foresight for a world undergoing rapid change.

"Found this fantastic infographic touting the success of infographics. Reading it ( or more correctly, viewing it) immediately focused my thoughts on the use of visual texts in classrooms today. Click on the screenshot above to view the animated, interactive info graphic that presents  13 reasons why we should use infographics ( or visual texts in general). Unlike other infographics I link to on Mr G Online, I'm not going to discuss the specific points presented - that would be contradictory to the message of the infographic. I'll let you get your own meaning from it. However, I am going to reflect on how it made me consider the use of visual texts in education."

"The role of technology in learning isn't entirely clear-or rather, is subjective. While it clearly is able to provide access to peers, audiences, resources, and data, it also can be awkward, problematic, distracting, performing more strongly as a barrier to understand than anything else. Why this happens also isn't clear, but there are some common patterns and missteps to look for while designing or evaluating a learning process."

A key component of the Plan is to create more and better opportunities for workers through skills development.

"The internet is awash with exciting and innovative tools, and your students have grown up immersed in this world - get in on the act. The digital revolution has given us instant communication and easy global connectedness, with mobile technology in particular growing at warp speed: in 2013, there are almost as many mobile phone contracts as there are people in the world. This digital transformation has produced some extraordinary online tools for flexible education, which enhance students' learning and promise innovative pedagogy for teachers. However, they can also be daunting and challenging for educators. It is clear that teachers cannot ignore these tools, which go far beyond just Facebook and Twitter. Educators are now dealing with Generation Z - students born after 1995 who have hardly known a world without social media and have always lived a life measured in bits and bytes. Most have access to iPads and smartphones as well as textbooks and, therefore, the massive resource of the internet."