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We are a happy and stable staff, and my colleagues are a fabulous group of people who look after each other and genuinely care about one another. We have an experienced leadership team, and always aim to take account of how people are feeling and the pressure they are under when trying  new approaches and changes to practice. Even so, it has become more and more clear that workload is becoming untenable and wellbeing is suffering a result. I feel that we have felt obligated at times to put policies in place that seem to be there to collect evidence for Ofsted rather than solely to improve the learning of the children in our care. We want to change this.

"A member of staff said to me at INSET last Friday that all they wanted from INSET was to take away at least one idea to make their teaching better or their lessons more exciting. I agree and this was my favourite idea: a pop-up museum."

"With a major focus on wellbeing and mental-health among many communities around the UK, staff and pupils at Bradford Grammar School are taking things one step further, with a 'Spotlight on Happiness' focusing on actions that can improve the mental resilience of all. In tandem with the England government's pledge of £1.25 billion to improve children and young people's mental health services, the Department of Health and NHS England published 'Future in mind', with a proposal to encourage schools to continue to develop 'whole school approaches' to promoting emotional well-being and mental health."

Present a live, interactive webinar or presentation quickly and easily with this superb online tool. Setup is simple and you just share the url with your audience. The video is recorded so it can be watched again. Get your class presenting to other children/parents. You may even be able to persuade you head teacher to conduct a staff meeting virtually! http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

We often hear about tech-savvy educators and administrators who have an array of best practices and whose love for technology is evident. But as anyone who's ever been part of a school or district knows, not all teachers and administrators are as comfortable or familiar with technology.

Are your meetings disorganised and always over run? This is a good little site for creating agendas and minutes that will keep everything in one place for your staff to work on together. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Send and receive files from anyone into your dropbox. Annual staffs can use this to have people share photos with them or other teachers can have their students turn in files. Great augmentation to dropbox.

This section is full of great ideas to help YOU become a better facilitator. The articles here are written and shared by the staff at Training Wheels. Some of the articles are written by Michelle Cummings, the Big Wheel and Founder of Training Wheels, and some are written by Linda Williams, the Spare Tire and Lead Facilitator at Training Wheels.

On your own for professional development? Earn a certificate of completion by taking the Library'of Congress's self-paced interactive modules. Each multimedia-rich program delivers approximately one hour of staff development.

Excellent post by Eric Sheninger about what parents should do when starting back to school. You should share it with your staff.

If you want plants to grow add rain, sunshine and warmth. The same works with children. A warm, caring environment where students and teachers have positive relationships, where they feel safe and have supports to help them succeed improves test scores. This is no surprise to good teachers. Those who put inordinate stress on teachers in ways that causes stress and harshness are likely hurting test scores and having the opposite effect, if one is to interpret this. Take a read and take action - on my blog I and many commenters have been discussing getting along with colleagues and having warm relationships with students. It isn't fluff but rather, is the stuff that test scores are made of. "It's the million-dollar question or, given the size of the California education budget, the $50-billion-dollar question: What makes extraordinarily successful schools different from other schools? The answer: school climate, according to a new study from WestEd, a San Francisco-based research agency. In recent years, the concept of school climate has gained increasing currency in education reform circles and the California Department of Education has received federal grants to evaluate school climate in 170 schools, as well as Safe and Supportive Schools grants to fund programs that enhance school climate. As defined by the WestEd study, a positive school climate includes caring relationships between teachers and students, physical and emotional safety, and academic and emotional supports that help students succeed. The goal of a positive school climate is "a sense of belonging, competence and autonomy" for both students and staff, the report said."

So, if you want to peek inside Finland, there are 3 videos on this BBC Wales site that will give you what you want. This Diary of a math teacher in Finland gives you a peek. There's also two other great videos "Let teachers teach, say Finns" and "Finland Classroom Success Secrets." You can embed these that I can find, so you'll need to share the links and watch them on the site. These short videos are just under 4 minutes and would be great to share in a staff meeting.

7,000 photos of school lunches are being passed around the Internet. Be aware that your school might be next as this is a hot topic (and has been for years.) Before you know it, you might find that your school has a pic. My school is blessed with amazing lunchroom staff who work hard to serve up great meals. In fact, for their Thanksgiving meal, there are people in town who come to the school to eat it is so good. It is hard with the money they have to make the meals, but we can do better. Delicious lunches are one way to make everyone's day brighter and school to be a place people want to go.

This chart is a great way to help people understand the language of Twitter. Share this one with your staff and others.

This Educause white paper is a useful write up that you can circulate among your staff. Every school should have a makerspace. Classrooms can each have them. Some are even designating parts of the library as a Makerspace. Great resource to share.

This site contains guidance material aimed primarily at students, teachers or doctors who wish to use a patient recording or patient data for learning and teaching. It will also be of interest and use to other clinical and healthcare workers as well as to university staff where patient recordings are made available for learning and teaching.

If you need "proof" of the merit of journalism programs, look no further than the "enemy" that has been the excuse for killing many journalism programs -- test scores. Read this NCTE position paper about journalism in the curriculum which states: "It is important to note that a body of research provides data showing that students who participate in journalism programs do better on testing and college language arts courses. In Journalism Kids Do Better (Dvorak, Lain, Dickson), research shows students who take journalistic writing courses score higher on the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam than students who take only AP or honors English courses. They also score higher on college entrance exams such as the ACT. "We've done a number of research studies that show that high school journalism is equal to or exceeds standard English [courses], Dvorak said. "Journalism students' writing skills, their sensitivity to audience, their use of grammar, punctuation, spelling, their concern with accuracy, their use of sources -- all of these things tended to be significantly higher in their performances."" I would also argue that many students who are not reached by AP or honors courses can be highly engaged in journalistic pursuits. If you want a strong writing program, make sure you have a school newspaper. Share this with your newspaper and annual staff advisors to help reinforce the merit of journalism programs with your board of education and administrators.

How one elementary school trains and supports its staff to blaze a new digital trail.

June 1, 2010 marked the end of a tradition at our school - a tradition that awarded top students not for their efforts and learning but for their grades and achievements. The staff at Kent School decided to abolish the "awards" part of the year end ceremony.

The PACE fine arts staff uses silent film to demo how to live happily ever after with technology