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Google's "20% Time", inspired by Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's Montessori School experience, is a philosophy and policy that every Google employee spend 20% of their time (the equivalent of a full work day each week) working on ideas and projects that interest that employee. They are encouraged to explore anything other than their normal day-to-day job. As a result 50% of all Google's products by 2009 originated from the 20% free time, including Gmail. Real break-through happens when we are free from others' expectations and driven by individual passion.

How to teach text structures for better reading comprehension and improved retention. Teachers of history, science, and other subjects are now expected to weave literacy instruction into their teaching of content. But how should they do that? What are the most effective ways to help students learn to read challenging content-area texts? This article breaks down the research behind explicit teaching of text structures and includes a video that shows how to do it (Great for content-area literacy)

"Super Quiz is an excellent Google Sheets add-on that allows teachers to add some amazing functionalities to the quizzes they create through Google Forms. One example: when you create a quiz, you only need to complete it once with an answer key and all future submissions will be automatically graded according to the answers you provided. Another important feature of Super Quiz is that it enables you to get a break down of class understanding and a list of incorrect students' answers  for each question in case you want to stage an intervention."

For teachers in Australia, the long Term Three is drawing rapidly to a close. Indeed as I write this just ten days remain before a two-week break. This is the perfect time to consider a holiday reading list. Just enough time to raid the school library or place an order with your favourite book store. Here is what's currently occupying space on my nightstand. 

With summer in the southern hemisphere, long days combined with school holidays for school teachers create the perfect opportunity to relax with a good book. Here are five great reads that might spark some curiosity and keep the brain working over the break.

It is soon the start of a new school year for students in Australia. In other parts of the world, the year continues after a short break for Christmas while New Year festivities are just around the corner for those observing the lunar new year. The start of the year is considered an excellent time to reflect on key ideas that matter to our learning and potential for success. But does this equate with goal-setting?

As schools prepare for the upcoming Christmas break here is a list of books that are bound to get you thinking.

Officials have launched a manhunt for the absconders, with police glance all roads in the Arcadins coastal zone near Arcahaie prison.

Good video with Margot Bloomenstein, brand and content strategist, being interviewed and explaining, in very simple terms what "is" and what "it is not". This is a good introduction to what content curation is, and how it is done as it would be explained to someone who knows nothing or very little about it.

Purpose: This lecture, reflecting on future roles, posits the potential dawning of a "great age of librarians," if librarians make the conceptual shift of focusing on their own skills and activities rather than on their libraries.

"Get your hashtags ready: Twitter is a far more effective source of CPD than more traditional approaches, research has found. Indeed, teachers believe they derive more from the 140 characters of a tweet than they do from several hours of seminars or lectures. Academics from two US universities surveyed 755 members of school staff about Twitter. They found that the most popular use of the social media website was for CPD, with many praising Twitter's advantages over more traditional methods. Twitter, many teachers told researchers, allowed them to create a virtual staffroom, filled entirely with their own choice of colleagues. Indeed, a middle school English teacher explained: "I have learned so much from other teachers. It has transformed my teaching. And this is my 18th year [in the profession].""

"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring, others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the business world or involves digital technology. Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity, and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless officials to raise test scores at any cost). With a good dose of critical thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin to take back our schools."

The takeaway here for me is that as fantastic as web services are, many of them are controlled by one party and are thus a single point of failure. If they go down or the particular site makes a change to the web service call, it can potentially ripple th

Lots of lesson ideas based on current news items intended for esl but useful for everyone

flash game where users create their own music sfter collecting sounds from the street.

Doubt has been cast on the federal government's proposed internet censorship regime after a blacklist of banned websites was leaked online. Note: this article incorrectly suggests that Wikileaks has been removed. The Wikileaks site says the org's servers were overwhelmed by popular demand.

New analysis also shows the cultural profile of schools often at odds with that of the suburbs in which they're located. New research showing a pattern of 'cultural polarisation in schools across the board' has been released, bringing the 'white flight' phenomenon back into the spotlight. Analysis of My School 2.0 and census data by Chistina Ho of the University of Technology Sydney claims Anglo-Australians may have abandoned public schools in many areas.