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A brief article that looks at the how and why of the makerspace activities are moving into schools and education. it also includes 4 links to some useful digital resources for anyone interested in following up.

"Those who do not learn how to utilize social media strategically run a great risk of encountering obstacles when seeking employment or admission. Research has been clear that social media can serve important professional purposes, such as personal branding, self-promotion ad impression management (Chen, 2013; Jackson & Lilleker, 2011; Labrecque et al., 2011; Zhao et al., 2013), and we encourage its intentional positive use. We suggest that all youth (and young adults!) work extra hard to do great things at school and in their community (e.g., making the honor roll, volunteering, extra-curricular activities, etc.) so that when one does search for them, they find evidence of hard work, integrity, and civic-mindedness."

A good article about developing literacy skills. "All Australian children and young people becoming literate I believe it is vital we understand and define the complexity of literacy. Literacy encompasses the knowledge and skills students need to access, understand, analyse and evaluate information, make meaning, express thoughts and emotions, present ideas and opinions, interact with others and participate in activities at school and in their lives beyond school. "

"The best way to activate your classroom is for your students to make something. This might an amazing high-tech invention or it might take the form of costumes for a historical reenactment, homemade math manipulatives, a new curtain for the local auditorium, toys, a pet habitat, a messy science experiment, or a zillion other things. Best of all, you don't need expensive hardware, or to start by mastering a programming language. You can begin with found materials: buttons, bottle caps, string, clay, construction paper, broken toys, popsicle sticks, or tape (hint: Google "tapigami" or "duck tape projects"). What are you having your students "make" to help them learn English?"

Standard 4 of the ISTE Standards for Teachers focuses on the concept of digital citizenship. The past decade has seen an exponential increase in digital tools and opportunities, which carry the need for students to master a new set of life skills for behaving responsibly online. Contrary to popular belief, however, digital natives don't pick up these skills through osmosis. It falls on parents and educators to teach them how. Just as a teacher would talk to students about etiquette and safety before they enter a public place on a school trip, so must they remind students of what's expected of them online. Students are much more likely to understand good digital citizenship - the norms of appropriate, responsible technology use - when teachers model it on a regular basis. The three social studies activities described in the table below are designed for students in grades 5-7. The objective of the lesson is to help students explore another culture and share traditions, events, customs and rituals from their own culture. There are different ways to address these objectives, but not all of them take advantage of the prime opportunity to promote and model digital citizenship.

"Regardless of the ultimate fate of the printed book, reports of the imminent death of the library as a physical entity seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Bookless digital public libraries are already starting to appear, the first in San Antonio, Texas, where lines of bookshelves have been replaced by e-readers, computer workstations, laptops and tablets. The simple truth is that, like Roald Dahl's character Matilda, people like going to libraries. Indeed, going to the library is like getting a pay rise, according to a survey conducted in 2014 by the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The survey, which attempted to quantify how happy different activities make us, showed that while dancing and swimming nearly always cheer us up, so does going to the library. "

Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors' (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia's rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia's history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW."

"The 2015 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, Web-based sites that are user friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. "

"Children are heartily encouraged to read in their early years of school. However, once students have mastered this skill and they move from learning to read, to reading to learn, the role of pleasure in the activity can be forgotten. If reading is just seen as a tool for learning, the will to read may not be fostered in young people. Recreational book reading involves voluntary reading for pleasure, and research suggests that students in Australia and internationally are reading less over time."

ool Australia promises to make learning about our natural world exciting while making the teacher's role easier. We bring sustainability into the heart of the curriculum by incorporating themes such as Energy, Water, Waste and Biodiversity into learning activities and units of work across the entire curriculum. "Cool Australia empowers students to construct their own vision of a positive future. Cool Australia is for all teachers especially those who thought that sustainability was not in their brief or was too big to tackle."

"This guide is the result of a collaboration among a group of individuals who were grantees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Global Libraries initiative. We came together as a voluntary project group to share our research, insights and experiences from Chile, Poland, Ukraine and other countries about the value of making in public libraries. We have compiled this short guide to share our learnings about: the case to support making in libraries; different services libraries can provide to encourage making; lists of equipment, software and other tools you can use to create physical or digital content; tips and ideas on how to implement maker activities; as well as links to other maker spaces, resources, and much more"

Guidelines for "Pets caught reading photography contest" This one was for National Library Week

From the old KWL it has developed into the KWHLAQ chart. It offers one framework to promote Reflection as Part of the Learning Process, Not as an Add-on. In the visual in this post langwitches shares ideas of how to embed the KWHLAQ framework in analog and digital activities.

"Links to a poster from the website Edmodo on the best digital citizenship practices. This visual is available for free download in PDF format. Edmodo succinctly outlined the key tips students need to keep in mind while using the digital space. These tips are valid for any kind of online as well as offline activity. The purpose is to teach kids about proper nettiquette and ensure their safety when using the net."

From ReadWriteThink, the Trading Cards app could give students and alternative way to share what they understand about the characters and places from the books they have been reading. The fields/categories that can be documented include: fictional person, real person, fictional place, real place, object, event and vocabulary word. Each category has specific guiding questions to assist students. Space is limited so students have to be able to demonstrate their ideas succinctly and only include the most important information. The app is easy to use, has good "how-to" information, auto-saves and can be printed or emailed.

A useful annotated list of collaboration tools. "The right strategies will enable instructors to conceive and create interesting, informative learning coursework, activities and exercises that will fuel students' hunger for learning more. Also this will encourage them to open up towards their instructors and other students in their group who can ably support them by offering thoughtful advice and tips. So implementing right strategies and using proper tools for implementing them, is a must for facilitating learning through online group collaboration."

"Managing your digital identity is a skill that everyone needs to learn and educators should be teaching their students about. In a digitally focused world students may not understand the implications of what is shared via social media. Teachers need to be fully aware and proactive and start teaching students about the effects of their on-line activity and how to manage their own digital footprints."

The home page for MediaSmarts. This is a Canadian not-for-profit charitable organization for digital and media literacy. Their vision is that children and youth have the critical thinking skills to engage with media as active and informed digital citizens. "What We Do: MediaSmarts has been developing digital and media literacy programs and resources for Canadian homes, schools and communities since 1996. Through our work we support adults with information and tools so they can help children and teens develop the critical thinking skills they need for interacting with the media they love."

"Depending on your point of view, content on the internet can be a vast collection of treasures or a big pile of gold specks mixed in with an even bigger pile of dirt.  This has given rise to content curation, the process of finding the gold among the dirt, as a very popular online activity. At its most basic, content curation is the process of finding, organizing, and presenting content from the flood of information and media that inundate the web by the second.  Similar to museum curators, content curators sift through a seemingly never-ending amount of digital objects to unearth individual items worthy of being showcased for a specific audience."

This tool gives students options to add both text and images to their covers using various templates. It does not include an option to save the work, so students have to complete and print their covers in one session.