"National data released this week confirms an ongoing trend that now sees nearly half of Australian secondary school students failing to meet minimum digital literacy standards. Current data underpinning decision-making and the new digital technologies curriculum isn't working for ICT in schools for these four reasons:"

"Storyboard Maker is a free Android app.It lets you to set out your story. In the app you can outline story scenes by sketching frames then writing text to outline action and dialogue in each scene. "

Looking back through the new 2015capabilities in Docs, Sheets, Drive, Calendar, Gmail, and Google Apps for Education, it is amazing to see how innovation has happened over the last 11 months. From automated chart creation to cross-domain collaboration in Google Classroom, it was easy to miss one of the additions if you so much as blinked. List here are many of these updates.

"YouTube video editor is a powerful video editing platform to use in instruction to create and edit videos. It provides almost all the pro features you normally find in a premium video software and for free."

"Three great tools to help you with creating, grading and distributing class assignments. While Chalkup is directly integrated with Drive, Flubaroo and Super Quiz are add-ons that you need to install on Google Sheets."

"A collection of popular Android apps to help students with their writing. Using these apps students will be able to: access a wide variety of creative writing prompts, generate plots and outlines for writing projects, focus more on the writing task under hand using distraction-free editors and many more."

"Designed for schools wishing to teach students basic coding and computational thinking. Enjoyable learning website with links to apps available for iOS and Android. The site focuses on students actively creating technology, rather than being passive users of it. Teachers are also catered for with background information, lesson plans and tracking tools."

"Preparation for webinar series focusing on using GAFE to teach writing. A curated list of detailed features (that are easy to use and access) within Google Docs." Educators may want to know how to use these features to jazz up writing assignments and make a more creative, personalized document."

Make the technology work for you.

"When it comes to taking notes, students are no longer limited to pen and paper or even a keyboard and screen. With the OneNote Office 365 app, students can take their note taking to new heights. But OneNote is more than what you might expect from a typical notes app and can create new opportunities for students. Here's how OneNote lends itself to a variety of learning and note taking styles."

"In order to make it on this list, games had to: * be accessible to English Language Learners. * provide exceptionally engaging content, * not provide access to other non-educational games on their site, though there is one on this list that doesn't quite meet this particular criteria. * be seen by me during the second part of 2015. So they might have been around prior to this time, but I'm still counting them in this year's list."

"Minecraft is much more than just a game. Used carefully it can also be a powerful educational tool. It allows young people to create and explore places that are completely inaccessible by other means. Within the blocky world, they can roam around historical sites, delve into the geology beneath their feet or fly through the chambers of a heart, and much more besides. The rich resources of these virtual worlds, coupled with the educational version of the game, allow teachers to immerse young people in a comfortable but exciting learning environment. "

"JISC page that provides ideas and resources to help colleges and universities enhance the entire assessment and feedback lifecycle." There are many transferable ideas for secondary school teachers.

"A research study was carried out at PROCAT to investigate students' expectations and experiences when using technology at college. You can read the research report here. The E-Zine below is a further resource, which follows on from the research report. It provides 20 key messages for Instructors, which summarises feedback direct from PROCAT Students on how to engage learners. The magazine provides a useful checklist for teaching staff and is a resource they can keep referring to for ideas and to check they are on track. You will need flash to be installed to view the e-zine."

A quick guide to a very good and comprehensive report on Improving the student digital experience

I use TweetDeck. It is a useful tool for following along during a Twitter chat as it allows you to build columns that help to keep track of the many different feeds, notifications, mentions, etc. It can be difficult to check out the resources shared and keep up with it all. There are many methods for 'saving' the resources shared. Kelly Fitzgerald @LISDTechie uses the collections feature in TweetDeck to gather those resources to review at a later time. Here she offers advice about how to add a collection and start saving those wonderful resources people are sharing.

Vicki Davis (@coolcatteacher) put forward the following resources that you can use to teach programming with every student and every age

Ten great apps are listed and their use demonstrated with 3 Minute Tutorials for each. These videos show you how to get started and the rest is up to you