Useful links

“Educational Postcard: ”…real engagemen” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Ken Whytock

 Creativity and Knowledge | @TeacherToolkit The author considers the question: Can creativity be cultivated in our current school system? He shares his thoughts on “Why real creativity is based on knowledge” by Tim Leunig from TEDxWhitehall.. Some interesting ideas and observations. Concludes with “This therefore concludes, that creativity has its foundations built upon a knowledge base, but with anything delivered in the classroom, it requires the skills of a good teacher to ensure outcomes are met.” And puts up some questions that based on the article.

What should parents know about Steam? From CommonSenseMedia. team is a place to buy, play, discuss, and learn about games on the internet. It works differently from other websites in that it requires you to download the Steam “engine” to run the games. Once you install the engine and create an account, you can play free games, chat with other users, play multiplayer, join forums, learn about new games, play demos, and even create games for others in the site’s Workshop section — all for free. Most popular games require an additional download — and they often cost money.

While sites such as Twitch and YouTube Games are popular places to watch others play games, Steam is mainly about playing your favorite games against others, including friends you know from real life. Kids who have Steam accounts regularly exchange Steam “handles” so they can meet up online.”

Teaching with Technology: Using Microsoft Excel in the Classroom This piece looks at some of the ways teachers could integrate the application Microsoft Excel into the classroom is becoming more and more prevalent in many schools across the world. The guide offer assistance to teachers who want to this tool in classes with students. “Also listed are some unique ideas for ways in which to use spreadsheets in different lesson plans.” There are a range of tutorials and basic guides for both novices and more experienced users.

Creating games using Microsoft Excel: Tic Tac Toe | The Piffle Lab An explanation about creating a simple game using Excel

How To Create A Game In Excel – YouTube YouTube video, published 10/04/2015, that aims to explain how you can create a simple game in Excel. Useful for teachers to use with students

Mapping the online world – Nominet “The international nature of the internet was affirmed in the mid-eighties, when a system was agreed for allocating each country its own space online. Each would get a two-letter code within the Domain Name System, the address book of the internet. In 1985, the first three were delegated: .us for the USA, .uk for the UK, and .il for Israel. The internet’s reach would go on to expand well beyond the confines of the globe, as astronaut TJ Creamer showed in 2010 when he tweeted from the International Space Station.

At Nominet they have been looking for a way to visualise global internet use. The result is our map of the online world, an atlas redrawn according to the number of registrations within each country’s internet domain* — whether .uk for the UK, .de for Germany, .cn for China, and so on.”

Feedback Q & A Infographic | An Ethical Island An Infographic about useful feedback – asking for it and what to give

https://anethicalisland.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/lesson-ideas-3.pdf Some useful ideas for organising lessons. This outline provides a great framework for teachers from any learning area.

elements.wlonk.com Keith Enevoldsen has created an interactive periodic table that illustrates exactly where you may encounter even obscure elements on the chart.

K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum | Common Sense Media Links to their digital citizenship resources

Parents ‘oversharing’ family photos online, but lack basic privacy know-how – Nominet “Mums and dads are sharing nearly 300 photos online on average every year, with the top three destinations for these being Facebook (54%), Instagram (16%) and Twitter (12%). Nominet’s study polled 2,000 parents who have children 0-13 years old, revealing other findings including”

Cyberbullying – A guide for parents | Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner “Cyberbullying support tool from the Children’s eSafety Commissioner. Sometimes cyberbullying feels like a minefield. As a parent it can be hard to know if a situation qualifies as serious cyberbullying. Work your way through our support tool for guidance on how we can help you.”

Report Cyberbullying | Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner “Make a cyberbullying complaint. Select “Make your complaint” to open the form in a new browser window.”

Keep Calm and Carry On (reporting) | Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner One parent’s post about dealing with cyber bullying. It also has links to the Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner where there are several places offering an online complaints system to deal with serious cyberbullying. These can assist individuals with their own decision-making.

Rewrite Your Story | Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner “You can’t undo the past, and you can’t change the actions or words of other people, but you can Rewrite Your Story. With all the information around online and at school about cyberbullying and how to handle it, in real life for some reason it’s different.

The Future of Collaboration Spaces Encompasses Video, Interactive, Mobile — Campus Technology “The future of classrooms, is moving toward models where students are doing more problem-based learning, working together in teams, and sharing what they’re learning with peers and professors. This is the type of teaching and learning our new classrooms must support.” A recent learning space renovation at Indiana University focused on informal learning, collaborative technology and sharing ideas and content across multiple devices and users.

9 digital tools for your classroom toolbelt | Ditch That Textbook “Finding a new digital tool can open up new opportunities for you and your students. This is an annotated list of tools created by one classroom teacher gathered from interactions with other educators.”

Windows 10 deployment (for educational institutions) – Free step by step guide – Microsoft UK Schools blog “A step by step guide together for upgrading to Windows 10 from a previous version of Windows, such as Windows 7. This definitely caters more for the IT pros within an educational institution, but those more tech savvy educators will find this pretty accessible, also.”

Building a Common Understanding of the 4Cs. Season 3: Episode 2 – TLTalkRadio In this podcast, two teachers are talking about the 4Cs. “Our focus this school year is to build a shared understanding of the 4Cs. In this podcast, we introduce the 4Cs – Communication. Collaboration. Critical thinking. Creativity.”

Top Tips for Fast Formative Assessment that Works @coolcatteacher In this podcast Vicki Davis and Steven W. Anderson discuss formative assessment, the ability to know what you students know the moment they know, and how it allows you to adapt your teaching and increase your effectiveness. They also discuss the benefits of and how you go about updating what you’re teaching in real-time.

Entry events for project-based learning – Innovation: Education Some ideas about how to get a class started on PBL. “Take students someplace outside the classroom, either into the community or around the world, and ask them a challenging question. Ask them to consider something that might never have occurred to them, such as, “What would the community do if this resource was not here, or was unusable?”  At a historical site, ask “How could our community engage more with this place?” At a landfill you could ask, “What will happen when this landfill is full?”

Teaching copyright with video mashups – Innovation: Education The meaning of the concepts of copyright and fair use, as applied to creative work, has broadened dramatically in the digital world. Students are some of the biggest consumers and creators of work created on digital platforms, but they don’t often understand: 1. what they may legitimately use. 2. how they may use it. 3. What protection exists for their own creative work. 4.Introducing “fair use” concepts. The authors of the post explain how they took the excellent Rework, Reuse, Remix lesson from Commonsense Media to create the foundational lesson plan for an 8th grade Digital Learning class hat St. Francis Xavier School, in Winooski VT. It introduces the concept of fair use and how to apply it to case studies”

EducationHQ Australia – Five ways to get started with STEM It is easy to be practical with STEM studies. “There are so many benefits and as we get further down the track of understanding that whilst STEM will always be a combination of those four core disciplines, it is just as much about interdisciplinary work and collaboration. As a teacher, we don’t have to provide all the answers for students. We just need to create the problem, the context or the inspiration, and great things can happen” There are 5 ways discussed here to get started with STEM with examples linked back to the Key Learning Areas.