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The final report of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG), which was a government-appointed task force asked to look into how to online child safety issues.

A tool for teachers who are not experts on a particular piece of software. It has specific tasks for each application on the site and each video is short sharp and to the point.

An interesting task that introduces students to writing blogs and esp commenting. Includes a list of blogging rules and also another document about ideas for comments

Dial2Do lets you do common tasks by just calling a number and speaking. Use it to send EMAIL or TEXT messages, record REMINDERS to help you remember things, post updates to your TWITTER or JAIKU stream and LISTEN to your favourite internet content. It's easy and handsfree.

These pages contain brief videos that demonstrate how to perform specific tasks on your computer: podcasting, windows movie maker, google earth, GIS using AEJEE, Photo sharing with Flickr, wikis and creating interactive experiences with an iPod

Formative Assessment, assessing student performance routinely as instruction unfolds can transform teaching and learning. Writer actively experimented with giving more feedback to my students, using rubrics, models of student work, and having students assess their own work as well as that of their peers. Problem is Baltimore County school administrators have ordered all teachers to begin using a grading system next month that will require them to judge whether each of their students has mastered more than 100 specific skills. Elementary school teachers have classes of 25 kids while highschool teachers can have more than 100 students. Over the course of a year, many teachers would have to make as many as 10,000 marks indicating whether a child had learned a task.

"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.

Via Adrian Camm, a link to The wikipedia game is played by having you begin with a start Wikipedia article, eg banana and a winning article eg "Britney Spears". The task is to get from the start article to the winning article in as few clicks as possible.

"Keeping your computer in good shape gets to be tedious and annoying when you have to try to fit it in to your busy schedule. Rather than letting things slip through the cracks and watch your computer slow to a crawl, fall victim to a nasty virus, or crash and burn with no backups, we've put together everything you need to tackle to stay on top of all your computer maintenance tasks. Here are the four things we're going to look at (feel free to click to skip to any of the sections):"

A good list of advice for backing up your computer when teachers often conduct a clean up between teaching years.

"Organised by the Melbourne School of Engineering, The Amazing Spaghetti Machine Contest is being launched in 2011 as part of the School's 150th anniversary celebrations. The contest will be an annual competition for schools students in year 10 in which knowledge and skills in maths, science, engineering, and project management are put to the test in the creation of a 'spaghetti machine' - the Italian term for an overly complex machine or device that is used to perform a relatively simple task."

Interesting technology competition in Australia, Students will enjoy building these strange machines.

"Have you ever faced the situation of agreeing on decisions and task assigments in a meeting and it takes days before the minutes are written and sent to everyone-if they ever are? Ever got a quick customer call, whose outcome should be traced and shared? minutes.io just does that. In an elegant and simple manner. You can use it in your browser, but you don't need to be connected to the Internet. You don't need to sign up. And it's free! "

Surely there must be some impact all of this technology is having on our brains and behaviours as even mere males become more competent at multi-tasking their technological devices.

SqoolTools is an online service, brought to you by SqoolTechs, LLC, that provides instructional tools for the purpose of "Supporting Quality Online Opportunities for Learning". Specifically, SqoolTools is a virtual learning environment, built on Moodle open source software, that allows K-12 teachers to create interactive websites to either support classroom instruction or to deliver instruction completely online. SqoolTools provides a wide variety of tools that support most instructional and classroom management tasks.

The English Domain page contains links to: Victorian Essential Learning Standards; English-related learning and teaching support materials such as websites, publications and other online resources; English assessment maps and sample tasks;

Stixy makes it fun and easy for you to collaborate online! Create tasks, appointments, files, photos, notes, and bookmarks on your Stixyboards, organized in whatever way make sense to you. Then share your Stixyboards with friends, family, and colleagues.

This is a great collection of blog posts, references, reports, prognostications, (100 in total) speculating on the future of learning and education. I've read a couple but now have a real task ahead of me to take in the rest, wish me luck.

"Welcome to the Assessment for Learning website. This site has been developed by Curriculum Corporation on behalf of the education departments of the States, Territories and Commonwealth of Australia." "There are 32 assessment tasks, covering the learning areas of English, Science, Studies of Society and Environment and Health and Physical Education, Languages Other Than English, Technology, The Arts and Mathematics - or their State and Territory equivalents.

Useful list to remind us all of different/alternative tasks that can be used to assess learning

How might we shape that culture and how will we understand the many forces at work? Understanding the culture of class or perhaps even a school is an important element of our teaching but realising the complexity of this task must come first.