Useful links Weekly

• Free stock photos · Pexels “The some good free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators.”

• Visual to text coding- Index page | Digital Technologies Hub “This lesson sequence provides a bridge between visual coding (eg. Scratch) and General Purpose Programming languages (eg. Python or JavaScript). Each video builds a simple program in all three ways: Scratch, Python and JavaScript. This resource is most suitable if: you have never done General Purpose Programming, you benefit from slow-paced, step-by-step video tutorials.”

• Developing digital citizenship | Services to Schools Education 2020. With our time spent #remotelearning online, good digital citizenship & literacy skills are more important than ever. This guide includes many tips & resources to help you & your students. Developing digital citizenship with the understanding that Digital citizenship encompasses skills, values, and behaviours that include appropriate and effective ways we interact with people and information through media and technology.

• Dylan Wiliam: The nine things every teacher should know | Tes News A list of the nine things created by an experienced teacher with point he wished he had known when he started teaching. “

• factitious It you are teaching digital literacy skills this is a fun way to reinforce your points. A free game that tests your ability to spot FALSE or MISLEADING News. Offers different levels (6) depending on educational level of students

• Everything You Need to Know About Building a Great Screencast Video | Cult of Pedagogy “One of the most effective ways to move instruction online is to build screencast videos. Screencast videos are unique because they are actual recordings of your computer screen or tablet as opposed to a video of an in-person lecture. They are a powerful way to deliver instruction, but they do require a fair amount of time and planning, which I have learned through a lot of trial and error. Building effective screencasts continues to be the barrier that stops educators from making a smooth transition to distance learning, so I have put together the following tips to help guide you through the process.”

• Andrew Fuller: Remote learning tips and ideas for teachers – The Parents’ Website “Remote learning is a major opportunity for schools to refine their lesson planning and delivery. The efforts of teachers to adapt classes to online platforms has been nothing less than heroic. Now we have the chance to incorporate the ingredients that create effective remote learning, accelerate expertise and enhance the experience of our students. The rapid shift to remote learning has been unprecedented and we are all learning as we go through this. At its worst, remote learning can be disorienting and disconnecting. We all need to be innovative in creating learning that is engaging and involving for our students. The ideas in this paper are derived from the author’s research and work with schools of the air and distance education as well as his work with students who have been unable to attend school due to mental health issues.  “

• Free Online Language Learning Resources for Kids | The New York Public Library A compilation (annotated) of useful resources for students learning

• Join NYPL’s #BookCoverDouble Challenge! | The New York Public Library  New twist on an old idea. Recreate book cover images

• Women’s Prize for Fiction Announcing the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist – Women’s Prize for Fiction This is the 2020 Womens Prize for Fiction shortlist. Information on the six shortlisted authors and their books is available here.

• Support resources to share with parents | Education Endowment Foundation | EEF “The Covid-19 crisis has meant that schools are having to maintain communications with parents and families in very challenges circumstances. Here are some EEF resources to help schools communicate with parents/carers, as well as resources schools can share with families to support home routines and valuable learning opportunities, such as shared reading.”

• Free Online Language Learning Resources for Kids | The New York Public Library  A compilation (annotated) of useful resources for students learning

• National Standards for Quality Online Learning | From Virtual Learning Leadership Alliance (VLLA) and Quality Matters (QM) Although a US site it still has useful information for anyone trying remoteteaching. “Below are links to view or download the most current versions of each of the standards sets. National Standards for Quality Online Courses is currently being revised. Below are links to download the past versions of the standards from iNACOL.”

• Free Technology for Teachers: Quick Tip – Apply Custom Colors to Google Slides “Regular users of Google Slides are probably familiar with the process of adding images to the backgrounds of their slides and changing the background color. There is one little background color option that is easily overlooked. That option is applying a custom color that isn’t listed in the default colour menu in Google Slides.”

• Your local Bookshop An list of Australian bookshops has been compiled here so you can see which Australian bookshops offering home delivery, book drops and drive through pickups.

• How to set personal boundaries with remote learning : Innovative Education in VT “Many teachers are are struggling to make a distinction between home and work. This change in working conditions may feel overwhelming.The shift to remote teaching and learning is fraught with challenges. One of the biggest is how to make this type of work sustainable for teachers. In this situation, many are working for hours without breaks, forgetting about their own needs. This is not healthy or sustainable. This article offers some advice bbout how to set up some boundaries.”

• Women’s Prize for Fiction Announcing the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist – Women’s Prize for Fiction This is the 2020 Womens Prize for Fiction shortlist. Information on the six shortlisted authors and their books is available here.

• Getting Started With Project-Based Learning (Hint: Don’t Go Crazy) | Edutopia A handful of tips to help teachers ease into #PBL without getting overwhelmed.

• Becoming a More Connected Educator #digicon15 – Read Write Respond

• Celebrate Science: Where Should We Shelve Informational Fiction? Blog post discussing this literature “For the most part, the authors fully realized that these books should be classified as fiction, and they liked the term “informational fiction” because it acknowledged all the research they’d done and that the books were mostly faithful to the facts. But the Library of Congress labelled these books “juvenile literature” (the term they use for nonfiction). And in most cases, publishers and reviewers called the books narrative nonfiction.”

• Student Leadership Through a Student-Led Podcast @coolcatteacher

• Research Confirms Value of School Librarians | School Library Journal

• Sensory Products AU | Sensory Toys Australia | Sensory Oasis For Kids “Sensory Products for Special Kids with Special Needs. Australian owned & operated, Sensory Oasis for Kids is a Melbourne-based online & retail store run by a mum of three amazing Autistic boys”

• On The Move Visual Kit | Sensory Oasis For Kids

• 7 Good Lesson Plans Sources for Teachers and Educators | Educational Technology and Mobile Learning Some good sites mentioned here. ReadWriteThink and TedEx have a lot lot of ideas but from the descriptions of some of the others, there are a few other useful places to go for ideas.

• Create Interactive Online Presentations & free Infographic software. HTML5 Animations, download & Publish | Visme.  A digital tool that allows your create interesting visual stories (Infographics, presentations, etc.). You are allowed to create 5 free resources before you need to pay. My students have found very easy to use and creates some nice looking timelines for their assessment task.

• Jen Robinson’s Book Page: The Third Grade Cliff: My Response to a Finding from the @Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report “The 7th edition of the Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report was released last October. Scholastic presents the results of a survey, managed by YouGov, of 2758 adults and children. This biannual report is, I think, one of the best windows into what families are doing and thinking when it comes to kids’ reading. I’m in the process of going through the material and there are certainly causes for optimism overall. However, one of the major  findings hit me hard: The Decline by Nine”. Author discusses some results and how she intends to overcome them.

• 10 Elements Of A Quality Blog Post: Tips For Teaching Students (Poster and Examples) “Students have been learning about the elements of quality blog posts and comments. When high standards are set for publishing online, students tend to yield the greatest results. They can meet academic outcomes while learning how to be a safe and positive digital citizen. This post goes through 10 elements of a quality blog post. You are free to share these tips with students and they might be useful for adult bloggers.”

• Collage Maker | BeFunky: Create Photo Collages Useful to generate interesting images.

• Top 5 Unbiased World News Sources Free From Censorship “Every journalist is aware of the nine principles of journalism. The first says that a journalist’s first obligation is to the truth.
  “This ‘journalistic truth’ is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation.”
  The ability to set aside one’s own prejudices in order to be “neutral” is not a part of those principles. However, “the source of their credibility is still their accuracy, intellectual fairness, and ability to inform.” When journalists let personal biases hinder their objectivity, it puts the entire media organization at risk. Thankfully there are still enough media outlets left that uphold these principles.”

• Stock photos that don’t suck “An ongoing list of the best stock photo sites the author has come across.”

• A Universe of Podcasts: A Summer Listening Guide for Elementary, Middle, and High School Students | School Library Journal  “The 2019 Collaborative Summer Library Program reading theme, A Universe of Stories, offered unlimited opportunities to connect with students and to build community. This summer is also the 50th anniversary of the July 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. As you include related fiction and nonfiction titles on your summer reading lists, consider adding a listening guide that explores the theme and anniversary through podcasts. New research provides compelling reasons to recommend them, and our curated lists will get you, your students, and their families started.” Lots of ideas that could be repurposed.

• School Sends Kids To Meditation Instead Of Detention, With Amazing Results One elementary school has changed the approach to disruptive children. Instead of detention and punishment, the children take part in a “Mindful Moment Program” with some amazing results.

• Three Powerful Google Docs Add-ons for Creating Diagrams and Flowcharts | Educational Technology and Mobile Learning “Google Docs add-ons that enable you to create a wide variety of charts and diagrams. Of course there are numerous other tools you can use for this purpose but these  three are conidered by the authors to be the best. “

• How to Engage Digitally Distracted Students – The Tech Edvocate While it is clear that digital technology is distracting students, the technology is here to stay. For example, while most teachers agree the best way to turn digital distraction is to not allow mobile devices in the classroom, these same teachers agree this is ineffective in the long run. Instead, educators must be proactive and teach proper digital device usage in the classroom. Therefore, teachers must find ways to engage digitally distracted students.”

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Useful links: Week 13/04 – 17/04

• How to Get Kids Ready to Video-Chat for Online Classes | Common Sense Media A list for teachers to share with the parents of their students so they can be ready for their online sessions/lessons.

• Webinars – Listenwise Teacher Support Center “At Listenwise, has been watching how the outbreak of the coronavirus has caused many schools to close temporarily and rely on remote learning. They have their weekly webinars in the month of April as they continue to discuss remote learning. You can also access recordings from previous remote learning webinars. You sign up for free and all webinars will be recorded and available to view afterward.”

• Wakelet – Save, organize and share content

• (2) 10 Tips for Education’s Overcomers – YouTube

• Free strategies for teaching K-12 online | Learning Keeps Going  “Coronavirus is posing unprecedented challenges to educators around the globe.  The COVID-19 Education Coalition is a community of nonprofit organizations who have come together to support the education field as they keep the learning going during extended school closures. Go to the Educator Help Desk to get answers to your online learning questions from experts”

• Remote Learning – Eduro Learning “Real Life Experiences with Long Term School Closures: Conversations with Educators & School Leaders in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Watch or listen to our conversations with educators and school leaders who have been navigating school closures since mid-January.”

• Stuck at Home? These 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take on Your Couch (Video) Some great opportunities to see some of the great artworks of the world without the expense of travelling there.

• Facts and Opinions Explained by Common Craft (VIDEO) Useful presentation.”Understanding the difference between a fact and an opinion isn’t difficult. What matters is being able to apply that knowledge responsibly. When someone presents information in the form of a fact, like “the blue whale is the largest animal on earth.” They are stating something that can be proven with evidence. That’s different from an opinion, like “blue whales are the most beautiful whales.” Here, they are sharing a personal belief that can’t be proven”

• Pedagogy: why child-led learning ‘does not work’ “Once you get to real academic learning, the child discovery approach is just not going to work,” explains David C Geary, Curators’ Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, keeping alight the eternal flame of debate about the best way to teach”

• Responding to Absenteeism During the Coronavirus Pandemic & Beyond – Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo – Education Week Teacher “The new question of the week is:
  What are effective strategies—both school-wide and individually—to handle student absenteeism?
  It’s a little bit ironic to publish a series on absenteeism at the same time that most schools are closed because of the coronavirus. But students not being “present” when teaching takes places was a problem before the pandemic, is an issue now when many of us are doing remote learning, and will be one after this crisis has passed.
  Though the original responses to this question were written prior to school closures, most contributors have made significant modifications to their answers over the past month.”

• Free Technology for Teachers: ytCropper – Share a Section of a YouTube Video “ytCropper lets you share just a portion of a YouTube video by specifying the start time and end time of the video that you want others to see. To do this simply go to the ytCropper site then paste in the URL of the YouTube video that you want to share. Once you have done that you can specify the start and end time of the portion of the video that you want people to watch. ytCropper will generate a link to the cropped version of the video. Share that link to have people watch your specified portion of the video.”

• SafeShare.TV – The safest way to share YouTube and Vimeo videos A tool that allows you to take parts of videos and leave out inappropriate or off-topic (and ads) sections.

• Nik’s Learning Technology Blog: Cropping YouTube Videos to Create Activities Nik Peachey explains how to use SafeShare.TV. It is a tool that allows you to take parts of videos and leave out inappropriate or off-topic sections.

• Start Mixing “Drag On Tape” lets you splice portions of different YouTube videos with an online editor. It allows you to cut portions of one video and then let you put them all together.” It has quite a slick interface that isn’t as simple as some others are, so it might a little tricky for some non-tech savvy people like myself, but many should be able to figure it out.

Useful links

“2012-240 #6WordMission” (CC BY 2.0) by mrsdkrebs

• Reshot: Uniquely Free Photos Useful site for for students to go to for images to put in their projects

• Why feedback is SO time consuming — and how to fix it | Ditch That Textbook We all agree the feedback to students is important but how can we be give useful and timely feedback and be smarter about it so we don’t get totally overwhelmed by it? This offers some useful ideas about how teachers could go about giving feedback to their students and remain “sane”.

• This Is How to Use Google Drawings to Create Educational Visuals ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning “The Google Drawings tool is a very useful one for teachers. The strength of Drawings, besides the different features it provides for free, lies in its integration with Google Drive allowing you to easily integrate anything you create through Drawings into other services (i.e., Docs and Slides)

• 5 Takeaways from News Literacy EdCamp – EasyBib Blog  “The best way to help combat fake news is to teach our students what it is, what it looks like, how to spot it, and how to prevent it. These were identifies as the five biggest takeaways from a day of workshops and discussion from The News Literacy Project & TIME Inc.’s News Literacy EdCamp. Keep these in mind when teaching your students about fake news.”

• Digital Citizenship “In collaboration with Common Sense Media, this lesson helps students learn to think critically about the user information that some websites request or require. Students learn the difference between private information and personal information, distinguishing what is safe and unsafe to share online. Students will also explore what it means to be responsible and respectful to their offline and online communities as a step toward learning how to be good digital citizens”

• Blogging the Digital Technologies Curriculum – Read Write Respond

• Science Printables and Freebies | Elemental Blogging Lots of science printables for free, with no strings attached.

• What Great Scientists Did When They Weren’t Doing Science (infograph) What Great Scientists Did When They Weren’t Doing Science (infograph). Marie Curie was a simply astounding woman. She won the Nobel prize two times. The first time she won it in physics, in 1903, and the second time in chemistry, in 1911. But of course, there was much more to her life than just work. She had a husband and children….& she was also an avid long-distance cyclist. Get to know some of the interesting quirks behind the famous faces in science.

• Seven Advanced Excel Features You Should Be Using [Infographic] | Lifehacker Australia “Microsoft Excel is packed with useful data management features that don’t see a lot of use, like pivot tables, index and match, and conditional formatting. If you’re just using excel to sum and chart columns, this graphic can show you some other tools to help you become the spreadsheet guru you always wanted to be.

• 15 of the best apps to engage students outside the classroom | eSchool News “Learning shouldn’t stop when students leave for summer vacation. Rather, this extended break from the classroom is the perfect time to introduce kids to a variety of mobile apps that can continuously promote creativity and critical thinking. From kindergarten to grade 12, the vast assortment of digital offerings can meet any student’s interests, all while providing valuable lessons that will appropriately challenge each user. Here are a few great options for rainy days, road trips or any time in between.”

• 57 Teaching with Technology: Beyond the Bells and Whistles | ELL Strategies | Empowering ELLs “We have moved beyond an Industrial-Era approach where students are passive consumers of information to a modern one where students are active prosumers of content. Our duty is to prepare ELs for their future, not our past. Tech fosters critical thinking, spurs creativity, and cultivates collaboration – all skills needed for their futures.”

 

Useful links

“Quote – judgments” (CC BY-NC 2.0) by rhondda.p

• Some Handy Google Sheets Tips for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning “After Google Docs poster, here is the one we promised to prepare for Google Sheets. Our purpose behind these visuals is to highlight basic features teachers (and students) need to know to make the best of Google Drive services in their teaching (and learning).  These are especially helpful for novice users. All of the data we include are taken from guidelines provided in Google Drive Help Centre. Today’s post features what we think are the 10 basic Google Sheets tips to help you make better spreadsheets. Again, feel free to download, print, share or distribute the visual the way you want provided you credit our blog as the source and keep it free of charge”
•  Some Very Good STEAM Websites to Use in Your Class ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning “A handy visual we published featuring some of the best   STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering ,Art, and Math)  tools to use in your classroom.  Under each category we featured four representative tools that will help students cultivate the skills involved in that category. The overall aim is to provide teachers with a handy resource to use with their students to help them develop critical thinking skills and  adopt ‘an engineering or design approach towards real-world problems while building on their mathematics and science base’. We have also created a visual for this post which you can download in PDF format from this link”
•  10 Best uses for OneNote in your teaching and learning – Microsoft EDU “OneNote is often described as a digital 3-ring binder, or considered to be the Swiss Army Knife of note-taking. That description covers the basics, but over the years OneNote has gained many new features designed with education in mind. It has developed into a more comprehensive teaching and learning framework that belongs in every learner’s toolbox.”
• 3 Lessons Learned Building Student Digital Portfolios | Getting Smart One teacher’s attempts to build use digital portfolios in the classroom – advances and setbacks and becoming paperless.
•  24 Must-Share Poems for Middle School and High School – WeAreTeachers Classroom Ideas. These poems inspire creativity instead of yawns.
•  Engaging Parents to Engage Learners with Digital Portfolios A succinct article explaining the benefit to student learning when digital portfolios are created and used by them.
•  Is Banning Smartphones the Answer to Children’s Online Safety? 
• 3 Tips to Keep Parents Assured that Student Data Is Protected | EdTech Magazine “Schools and families can work together to make sure information is kept private.” Discussion on topic.
•  Census 2016: This is Australia as 100 people – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Interesting visual representation.
• Caren Cooper – Home Advocate for citizen science.
•  ISTE RELEASES NEW STANDARDS FOR EDUCATORS TO MAXIMIZE LEARNING FOR ALL STUDENTS USING TECHNOLOGY | Tech Learning “ISTE last released standards aimed at teachers almost a decade ago, when technology in classrooms looked very different. The updated ISTE Standards for Educators support educators by providing a framework for learning, teaching, and leading that is amplified by technology.
• High School Flexible Seating Done Right | Edutopia
• Learning to Learn: You, Too, Can Rewire Your Brain – The New York Times Discussion about the topic topic and 4 techniques explained that could easily be tried by the readers.
•  What are Pixels and how do they work? – YouTube A basic introduction to what a pixel is, and how it is used to display images, video & content on our screens.
•  3 Lessons Learned Building Student Digital Portfolios | Getting Smart One teacher’s journey with gains and setback in trying to go paperless with students.
•  3 Fast, Free Lesson Plans to Fight Fake News @coolcatteacher The fake news epidemic is becoming more disturbing. How can we, as educators, fight it? One idea is to take a hint from how the medical community fights the flu or any other virus. We inoculate ourselves. In this post, Vicki Davis explains how she teaches students about fake news. Just as the flu shot exposes a person to enough of the dead “harmless” virus to cause immunity, we can also expose students to things that have already been verified or shown to be fake. By exposing our students to things that look very real, we can help them notice and understand that many things that look real, are lies. We can also help them understand why shady companies and organizations actually benefit from fake news (like a movie coming out this month in one of these examples.)
•  How Savvy are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills – EasyBib Blog Although not new, the sites here are worth looking art if you want to test your students’ capabilities at figuring out if a website is real or not? Use these fake websites to help, but be careful! Looks may deceive you! Some of these sites are tougher to catch than others.
•  Fact vs Fake: Resources to Help Librarians Navigate Digital Literacy – ALSC Blog The role of librarians when it comes to helping their patrons negotiate and assess the information that comes from those sources varies greatly depending upon the community it supports.  The role, to provide media and digital literacy in a constantly changing world, demands more than ever that we share what we learn and our own expertise. Towards that end, ALSC’s Intellectual Freedom Committee partnered with AASL to host a joint Community Forum on Digital Literacy/Digital Citizenship. If you missed the forum you can access the transcript (Link given) or focus on the media literacy section of the ALSC Post-Election Resource. There are a few of the great resources listed as well.
•  Lesson 5 – Hoax or No Hoax – Multimedia Presentations A practical lesson plan that sets out the following objectives: Students will be able to: a. Evaluate the quality of informational websites. b. Rate informational websites by applying criteria. c. Compare their results and learn that all sites are not of equal quality.Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Useful links.

“Metacognition” (CC BY 2.0) by mrsdkrebs

• Note Taking With Technology | Edutopia “Today’s students require strategies that support their acquisition of knowledge, allow them to save their notes across devices, permit them to search through vast quantities of information, and share their learning with the rest of their community. Before blaming a device—either the pen or the laptop—we need to identify what is best for individual students by considering what I call the four S’s of note taking. Does the system students are using: 1. adequately support the students’ learning needs? 2. allow students to save their notes to multiple locations? 3. let students search for salient points? 4. permit students to share with peers and teachers?”

• Sketchnoting: I Just Don’t Know How To Start • Heck Awesome If you like the idea but don’t know where to start here are “some ideas to keep in mind,  tips for thinking about it and ideas for how to start using it in your teaching and student’s learning”

• ISTE | 9 ways real students use social media for good “Students around the globe are tapping into social media to get involved with world-changing projects and share their passions. The 9 approaches here explain some of the ways they are using these tools for good.”

• A Reading List for Differentiated Instruction | Edutopia  Annotated list of resources on the topic.

• How to Teach Students to OWN that Speech | Teacher Off Duty “A lesson plan that offers practical advice and can also be adapted to plan for any sort of performance-based activity: speeches, poetry slams, presentations, or interviews. “

• Slam Poem Videos Appropriate for Middle School (and others) – Teacher Powers One teacher’s thoughts about SLAM poems and ides for how to use them. You are also given his introduction to slam poetry lesson plan. The lesson could be appropriate for all ages.

• A Great Hands-on Approach to Programming – STEM Activities for Kids  One teacher’s explanation about the Let’s Start Coding kit? The basic kit comes with some useful pieces and component and coding cards. “There are projects included on the website, as well as educator guides you can download. The projects have the kids modify both the hardware and software components. By changing various components, the board and program will respond in different ways.” One way to approach learning coding.

• A Beginner’s Guide to Bringing Coding Into the Classroom | EdSurge News  There are many free resources, lesson plans, tutorials and events that can bring the power of coding into the K-12 classroom. This post discusses nine of the authors favorite options for anyone of any age to learn computer science skills. There is allso a link to a much fuller list of coding resources as well.

• The Edvocate’s List of 88 Amazing Edtech Tools, Apps, and Websites – The Edvocate “A list of 88 amazing edtech tools, apps, and websites that has been created to assist educators to understand what is available to them.”

• 10 Questions to Ask Before Installing a New Educational App | EdTech Magazine “This checklist has been compiled to assist teachers to select apps that can not only improve learning outcomes but also align with school and district technology goals.

• News for Padlet fans and newbies — @joycevalenza NeverEndingSearch  Joyce Valenza has written a post to explain about some useful new features added to Padlet that make it an even better space for classes for learning and sharing.

• Canva Font Combinations: How to Create Pinterest Friendly Graphics Discussion about designing graphics using canva fonts.

• Type Connection This is a typographic dating game site called typeconnection. It can be fun and helpful as you learn different strategies for combining and matching fonts.

• Fontspring Matcherator :: Find Fonts From An Image This is a tools that takes an image with type and finds the fonts that match. One user talked about using different maps and wanted to find a font that would be perfect for the writing on them, Font Matcherator was helpful.

• Font Pair – Helps designers pair Google Fonts together. Beautiful Google Font combinations and pairs. This is a tool that assists designers pair Google Fonts together

• Why Digital Learning is Reshaping Education – The Edvocate “Technology has changed just about every field, including education. Digital learning is reshaping education in unprecedented ways. The ways in which students learn are changing rapidly thanks to technology, and both students and teachers will benefit from it.
  There are several specific changes that we can expect to see as digital learning takes over education. For one, the way teachers present information and how students work with that information has changed. Students are asked to be more hands-on and collaborative than ever before. There are also new skills that students must learn, such as digital literacy.”

• 9 Tips for Teaching Coding in the Classroom – The Edvocate There are some very good suggestions discussed here. They are logical and really show commonsense and offer practical ideas.

• Choose The Best Search For Your Information Need – Laptop Study Useful list. Nicely organised with brief annotations.

• The Complete List of 200 Most Useful Websites for College Students – Laptop Study A useful annotated list, with like tools grouped together under appropriate headings.

• 15 Games To Teach Kids About Social Issues – EasyBib Blog An annotated list of social impact games that can be used with students to educate students about different social issues.

• John Grisham’s Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Popular Fiction – The New York Times

• How to Teach Students about Internet Privacy – SafeSmartSocial Nothing new but some simple and logical commonsense points that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of. “3 experts to share their best tactics, tips, and talking points parents can use to help teach students about social media and internet privacy.”