Education News

2020 Commonwealth Bank Teaching Awards give a nod to 12 outstanding teachers The diversity of teachers given the 2020 Commonwealth Bank Teaching Award highlights the importance of vision in bringing great education.

Free weeks of homeschooling plus tips for parents Just to be on the safe side many parents are keeping their kids home or getting out of the city altogether, that means keeping up with their learning.

Teachers need to be included in classroom design Billions of dollars are being spent on new-build schools each year, but one vital piece is missing: input from teachers themselves who are very qualified to inform the design of innovative learning spaces.

COVID-19: An opportunity to listen, learn, and lead with our children As the world continues to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the implications for schools and families remain front and center. During this unprecedented time, we are hopeful that parents will remember the critical importance of listening to and learning from their children. 

Australian teacher named in the top 50 shortlist for us $1 million Global Teacher Prize 2020 Maths teacher Ashley Stewart from Newton Moore Senior High School, Bunbury, Western Australia, has been included in the top 50 shortlist for the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize 2020 in partnership with UNESCO. Now in its sixth year, the US$1 million award is the largest prize of its kind and the 2020 winning ceremony will be held in London

NAPLAN cancelled NAPLAN is the latest Covid 19 casualty and will be cancelled this year because of the virus as well as the high absenteeism it is causing.

Corwin offers free resources for transition to online learning Corwin Australia is offering its School Leaders’ Online Toolkit and Online Teaching Toolkit free to schools needing help with transitioning to online learning. To access the toolkits and receive new resources and ongoing updates, school principals and teachers need to register online.

83 per cent of students from Prep to Grade 3 are not accessing eye health services The ‘Glasses for Kids’ program aims to remove vision impairment as a potential barrier to educational engagement and in Term 1, 2020 340 schools from some of the most disadvantaged areas of Victoria are expected to participate.

AEU – My School changes ignore NAPLAN’s real problems Changes to the way NAPLAN data is presented on the My School website to compare the performance of students from like backgrounds do nothing to address  the issues of corrupted data introduced by the shambolic rollout of NAPLAN Online says the AEU’s Corenna Haythorpe.

Connecting to kids safely Designed in Australia to safely connect kids and parents, SPACETALK is a self-contained mobile phone in a GPS-enabled smartwatch that provides no access to social media and no open access to the internet.

Partnership lets students access industry standard creative tools Adobe Creative Cloud has been integrated with Canvas, allowing millions of students and educators to access creative tools like Spark, Photoshop and Illustrator from within the LMS many schools use every day.

Primary schools’ virus response needs to leverage tech Mass closing of schools both primary and secondary in response to the virus’ spread hasn’t happened, yet. And while secondary students will probably be used to working online and self-directing the challenge of teaching primary school children without a teacher being in the room is tougher.