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"The Teaching and Learning School Improvement Framework brings together findings from research into the practices of highly effective school leaders. The focus of the Framework is not on everything that effective leaders do, but on those leadership practices that appear to be most directly related to school-wide improvements in teaching and learning."

"The much awaited review of the National Curriculum has finally been released with the reviewers calling for more of a focus on Western literature, and recognition of Australia's "Judeo-Christian" heritage."

"This "Teacher's Guide to Flipped Classrooms", offers one place for a teacher to go to if they want to try changing their classroom focus. You get a good grounding in the principles and mentalities that a flipped classroom requires. "The following 10 amazing (and free!) resources will further ensure the flipped classroom is as successful as can possibly be"

"The flipped classroom allows the class to dig a little deeper into active learning. It's a big misconception that the flipped classroom is about making videos and placing them online, sure that's one part of it. It's an important part of the puzzle as its forces you to focus on the explicit content you would like students to know. Making a 5 - 8 minute lesson isn't easy, but it certainly makes you consider what your learning objectives are . The real power of the flipped classroom is what happens the next day in class. The flipped classroom opens up opportunities. My main goal is to go deeper and have students participate in a richer active learning experience where I become more of a coach to guide their learning. The classes become much more collaborative in nature where students are solving complex problems with an emphasis on higher order and critical thinking skills."

The mychild.gov.au site is an initiative of the Australian Government. This site is about children, with the main focus being on early childhood learning and child care. You will also find helpful links to other information for families in this site

We need interventions that focus on building empathy, identifying escalation, and techniques for stopping the cycles of abuse.

Many members of JISC Emerge community are active in exploiting the potential of various Web 2.0 technologies and approaches. But what if the Web 2.0 sceptics are right? What if Web 2.0 services aren't sustainable? What if the social aspect of social networking tools are too intrusive? How should we go about developing a sustainable approach to use of Web 2.0?

Various explanations and solutions have been proposed over the last ten years in relation to the ongoing problem of student lack of engagement with the middle years' curriculum in Australia. Identified contributors to this problem include an irrelevant or trivial curricular focus and ineffectual teaching and learning strategies.

Lovely Charts is an online diagramming application that allows you to create professional looking diagrams such as flowcharts, taxonomies, sitemaps, organisation charts and many more. With Lovely Charts's extremely simple and intuitive drag'n drop drawing mechanism, you'll be able to focus on what really matters. You won't have to draw boxes and arrows, you won't have to worry about what symbol to use.

Educators and students around the world spoke, and Wetpaint listened! Advertising will now be removed from qualified education sites to keep the focus on collaboration and learning.

via Andrew Sartori (Sartz). I didn't realise that wetpaint wikis were also free for educators!

LEGO MINDSTORMS site from New Zealand. Seems to have worth while links that focus on the NXT robots.

UNSW offers training for staff in various aspects of NXT Lego robots. Seems to have workshops each year.

UNSW Computing has developed specialised robotic workshops for school students. They focus on the use of the new Lego NXT technology combined with the popular RoboCup Junior competition for schools. This results in some serious fun for students.

An online Victorian collaborative project to gather, display and share robotic projects from classrooms around the world. Seems to have a primary school focus.

This slideshare from upsidelearning.com is a really challenging introduction to the world of mobile learning. Though the focus is on higher ed and training the sentiments are applicable to all levels of education and is well worth a look.

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

If we want to develop an understanding of the pedagogy of the subject we teach, we have to start somewhere and making sense of what seems central and often difficult to grasp by most learners, is a good place to begin our inquiry. A tendency among academic teachers is to stuff their curriculum with content, burdening themselves with the task of transmitting vast amounts of knowledge bulk and their students of absorbing and reproducing this bulk. In contrast, a focus on threshold concepts enables teachers to make refined decisions about what is fundamental to a grasp of the subject they are teaching. It is a 'less is more' approach to curriculum design.

Students are using a dual-boot machine with UbuntuLinux and Windows XP. I love this account of how he got the change going at a Technology magnet school...note the focus is on bringing innovative experiences to students rather than making it easier for District Technology Department staff to do their job, which unfortunately, is what keeps GNU/Linux out of many school districts: The Rudd laptop scheme damaged the use of linux in schools in Aus. Maybe this will help.

"Calendars can be a great classroom resource and inspiration for research. The Australian Schools Calendar on edna and this one from New Zealand both alert teachers and students to special days that can be "observed" in the classroom. Student activities can be as simple as working out how old the person whose birthday is marked on the calendar "is", or looking for websites that are celebrating the day, the month or the year. Many of those sites have an educational focus and special activities for students."

Raises some interesting and strategies about how to use Google Calendar in the classroom with students.