Safer Internet Day takes place this week on the 7th February. The aim of the day is ‘ to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world.’ Here’s a video which gives more information about the day:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some of my favourite resources that you can use to support your work on the day:

1) A ‘Safer Internet Day Kit for Schools‘ is available with resources, lesson plans, competitions and certificates.

2) The ThinkUKnow site has resources that can be used with different ages groups:

3) The BBC have a number of great resources, including an animation featuring Dongle the rabbit, an interactive Tracy Beaker episode and a ‘Caught in the Web’ Newsround special.

4) KidSmart have a wide range of resources and interactive games that can be used in class.

5) Vodafone also have lots of useful information for parents to help them keep their children safe online.

6) Our sister site, Teaching Ideas, has an enormous collection of themed ideas and resources linked to ‘Staying Safe Online‘.

7) There are also lots of e-safety videos on Teaching Videos.

8 ) Know IT All have a fantastic animated video which teaches children about different aspects of Internet Safety.

9) BrainPOP also have a free video about Online Safety.

10) Kent Trust Web have a number of useful resources, documents and links to support schools.

Are you planning to get involved in Safer Internet Day this year? What activities will you be trying?

Happy New Year!

Here are links to some of this week’s education-related news:

Schools:

• The education secretary is being urged to ditch regulations limiting infant class sizes to 30 pupils, in order to save money.
• Education Secretary Michael Gove has accused those who oppose his academies programme of being “happy with failure”.
• The Education Secretary loses the concentration of his young audience shortly after beginning his defence of academies.
• Dozens of teachers facing allegations of incompetence and misconduct will escape official hearings owing to the abolition of the General Teaching Council for England, new figures suggest.
• A third of parents are so unhappy with their child’s school they would advise other families not to send their children there, new figures from Ofsted have revealed.
• Schools are routinely cheating Ofsted inspections by bribing pupils, sending troublemakers home and rehearsing lessons, teachers have warned. Read the response from Ofsted here.
• The school day should be lengthened to prepare pupils for work, says Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg.
• Too many exams are ruining children’s enjoyment of their time at school, a former schools adviser has said.
• How well children perform in the classroom could be linked to how physically active they are, suggests a Dutch review of previous studies.
• Children who grow up without a daily routine of set bedtimes and mealtimes do worse at school, a report suggests.
• The Commission on School Reform has urged Scottish schools to abandon what it called the “bog standard” model of comprehensive education.
• Schools are being encouraged by the UK’s top scientific body to bring cutting edge science into the classroom.

Universities:

• University application numbers could be making a sharp recovery – according to figures from a university.
• A new type of privately-funded science and technology university has been announced by the universities minister.

Other News:

• Children’s access to smartphones and computers should be limited to stop them becoming “addicted” to electronic gadgets, according to a schools’ leader.

Adobe have recently launched a new site for teachers. The Adobe Education Exchange is an online resource where teachers can seek support and advice from colleagues, share resources and gain inspiration from one another around the use of digital tools in the classroom. The site hosts example curriculum resources, lesson plans, tutorials and examples of class projects to inspire teachers to learn new methods of teaching.

The site already has thousands of resources, which you can find by different subjects / age ranges. You can also upload your own resources, allowing others to use them in their classrooms. The Adobe Education UK team are also on Twitter, so you can follow updates there.

Here are links to some of this week’s education-related news:

Schools:

• Tens of thousands of seven-year-olds are struggling to master the three Rs, official figures show. Read the announcement from the Department for Education here.
• The education secretary, Michael Gove, has proposed that every child aged five or over should be learning a foreign language, and promised to “pull every lever”, including encouraging longer school days, to make it happen.
• Work has begun to train 100 former members of the armed forces to become mentors in schools in England.
• A-level pupils should be ranked by the schools they attend as well as the grades they get, an exam board says.
• This report from the BBC discusses schools that are using 3D technology to support learning.

Inspections:

• School inspections in England will give more scrutiny to the quality of teaching, in a back to basics shake-up by the Ofsted education watchdog. Read the official announcement about the changes here.
• Education Secretary Michael Gove has suggested some schools judged to be “outstanding” do not deserve the accolade.
• Parents are to be encouraged to rate their children’s schools on the Ofsted website.

Other News:

• A quarter of teenagers say they have never received any careers advice, according to a poll.
• Nearly a third of children aged ten or under now have their own mobile phone, according to survey of parents.

Next week’s Teaching Events include:

• 7th September to 23rd October - Rugby World Cup 2011
• 17th September to 2nd October - British Food Fortnight
• 1st to 31st October - Walk to School Month
• 1st October - World Vegetarian Day
• 1st October - Older People’s Day
• 1st to 31st October - Black History Month
• 1st to 31st October - The Big Draw
• 3rd to 9th October - Children’s Book Week
• 4th to 10th October - World Space Week
• 4th October - World Animal Day
• 5th October - World Teachers’ Day
• 5th October - Primary Learning and Teaching with Dylan William and Guy Claxton
• 6th October - National Poetry Day
• 7th October - Jeans for Genes Day
• 7th October - World Smile Day

Evernote is a wonderful program which I use every day. At a simple level, it lets you store notes about anything that you choose. These are all synced so that you can access them using the PC  / Mac / iPhone / iPad / Android / Blackberry (and other) versions of the software, as well as via the Evernote website itself. Having the notes available everywhere is a fantastic feature and it means that you should always have access to whatever you have stored within Evernote.

Evernote has a wide range of potential uses for teachers, so I thought that I would share some of the ways that I use it as part of my own work, both in and outside of the classroom:

2) Reducing paper mountains! - I must admit that I’m not great at keeping track of paper… and as a teacher, there is often a lot of paper to deal with. So, I use a Scansnap scanner to quickly scan any important pieces of paper. These are important automatically into Evernote where I can save them for the future and organise them into notebooks, using tags to help me find them again later.

3) Making notes in meetings – During staff meetings, I use Evernote to keep notes on my iPhone or iPad. If I use a piece of paper to make notes, I will often lose it, so storing the information digitally in Evernote means that it can’t get lost! It’s also great because the notes are synced between all of my devices so that I can access them in a range of places whenever I need to.

4) Capturing images – Sometimes at school, there might be a note on our staffroom board which I need to remember or I might be given a post-it note with something that I need to keep track of. Rather than relying on my memory (which appears to get getting steadily worse!), I often take a photo of the note using the Evernote iPhone app. Again, this saves the note across all of my devices, reducing the potential for me to forget about it!

5) Storing documents – You can also add documents to Evernote notes as attachments, so it is possible to use this to sync and store your files in a range of places. However, I am a Dropbox user, so I don’t use Evernote for document storage a great deal.

6) Storing PDFs – Although I don’t use Evernote to store documents much, I do use it to store PDFs so that I can read them on my iPhone / iPad whenever I have the spare time to do so. When Evernote syncs PDFs (and images), it also scans the text, making it easier to search for things later.

7) Bookmarks – I used to use Delicious for storing bookmarks, but Simon Haughton suggested using Evernote instead. By using the Evernote web clipper, you can copy the title, web address and content of web pages into Evernote, so that they are accessible anywhere. By storing the content in Evernote, you also have a permanent record of the web page in case it ever goes offline. I now have over 2,000 bookmarks in Evernote which I can search through quickly using the search box or by using tags.

Keeping track of achievements – I strongly believe that everyone should keep a record of their achievements. As a teacher this might include nice comments and notes from pupils / parents, evidence from lesson observations and much more. In Evernote, I have a notebook which I use to store notes of this kind. Not only is it nice to look through every now and again, it’s great to have information like this available for performance management and professional development reasons.

9) Twitter Favourites - Whenever I ‘Favourite’ a tweet on Twitter, the ifttt service automatically copies these into an Evernote notebook for me. Although Twitter keeps a record of favourites on their site, I find their system really unmanageable and difficult to search through later. Keeping them in Evernote makes it much easier to find them in the future.

10) Gift Ideas – Whenever I think of a possible gift for a colleague / friend / family member (or whenever they mention that they might like something), I add it to my ‘Gift Ideas’ notebook so that I have an instant collection of shopping ideas at Christmas / birthday times!

Privacy Issues – I must mention that anything you add to Evernote gets synced online to their servers (so that it can then be synced back to any other devices that you use). Therefore, it’s important to think carefully before adding certain kinds of information to Evernote (i.e. pupil data and other private school documents) – although it is possible to set up ‘Local Notebooks’ which are not synced and only stay on the machine that you are using at the time.

Evernote is a brilliant free piece of software. It’s my ‘second brain’ and I have signed up for the Premium service (which offers greater upload limits and other features) as I use it so much. Do you have any other great ideas for using Evernote?

Technology Bits, Bytes and Nibbles is a wonderful blog from Cyndi Danner-Kuhn. Cyndi works at Kansas State University and does lots of technology professional development in K-12 schools. Her blog started as a way of sharing resources for her colleagues but it is also extremely popular with other educators around the world.

Cyndi posts regularly and she shares some wonderful technology resources that teachers can use. You can follow her blog via RSS or by email too, so it’s easy to keep updated. Take a look!

The helpful team over at Primary Technology have put together a really easy website which shows school holidays dates. Currently available are the school holiday 2011 and school holiday 2012 dates.

You can easily put the school holiday dates on your website to share them with parents at your school. Some widgets are also in development which you will be able to embed on your site. The service is completely free and schools can edit their INSET days and adjust their holiday dates.

Don’t forget the other fantastic resources from Primary Techology, such as PrimaryPad, PrimaryWall and Primary Games Arena.

Here are links to some of this week’s education-related news:

Teaching:

• Quality feedback from teachers is more effective in raising grades than homework, uniforms and smaller classes, a Durham University study says.
• Poor teachers could be ousted from England’s schools within a term, under government plans to make it easier for heads to get rid of under-performing staff. Read the official report here.
• A rise in the number of support staff in the classroom has had “no impact” on standards, said a report published by the Sutton Trust charity. The study suggests that assistants can “positively affect” pupils’ attitudes towards education but may undermine lessons when used as a substitute for proper teachers.
• A cricket “dream school”, where luminaries of the sport take cricket-related lessons in a range of subjects, is being set up in London for a day.
• It could become “impossible” for young people in England to study music GCSE, if the English Baccalaureate is kept in its current form, a professional body for musicians says.

Admissions:

• Academies and free schools in England could be allowed to give priority to students from the poorest backgrounds when allocating places, under a new admissions code being published. Read the official information on the DFE site.
• A group of principals has called on schools to stop academic selection.
• Schools in Oldham are largely polarised along racial lines, research has found.

Behaviour / Attendance:

• Teenagers’ classroom behaviour is getting better rather than worse, according to a global study that places Japan at the top of the league.
• This report in the Telegraph examines corporal punishment in the US and around the world.
• The autumn-term truancy rate in England’s state schools in 2010 reached a five-year high, although overall absences continued to decrease.

Image - iStockphoto / ThinkStock

Exams:

• A new hi-tech weapon against those who cheat their way to exam success has been unveiled. The new computerised screening device flags up where candidates get the same scores in written answers.
• GCSEs and A-levels are in decline as more teenagers turn to practical courses in subjects such as food safety, sports coaching and health, official figures show.
• Exam boards could be fined for offering second-rate qualifications, the government’s exam standards regulator for England has warned.

Universities:

• Universities are recruiting overseas students in greater numbers – and not just to boost funds, they say, but to ensure a diverse student body.

Technology:

• Open University researchers say they have created an app which can help parents teach their children to read.
• Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants young children to be allowed to use the social networking site.

Other News:

• US First Lady Michelle Obama has been reunited with a group of British schoolgirls she met during a previous visit to the UK.
• Parents looking for a more inclusive education for their child are opting for smaller prep schools.
• A reel of forgotten film has given an insight into life at a school for children with disabilities in North Yorkshire in the 1950s.
• A Devon girl is celebrating after her campaign to raise the age limit for mixed-sex teams from 11 to 13 was accepted by the Football Association.
• Almost one in three internships on a government website for graduate job-hunters this year has been unpaid, a Freedom of Information request shows.
• A quarter of the 1,600 children held in young offenders’ institutions (YOIs) in England and Wales have been in care, a report by prison inspectors has found.

I am currently working on a new version of the Teaching Events site and hope to have this online over the next few weeks.

Andy Green currently holds the current World land speed record of just over 763 mph and was the first person ever to break the sound barrier on land! All Primary, Secondary, Independent schools and Colleges in the UK can now enter a competition to bring Andy Green into their classrooms and interview him!

Give your students an insight into the Bloodhound 1000mph car project, whilst they learn about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics! How to enter…

1. Schools must register with the Leaders Award by clicking here.
2. Students should write a joint letter about why Andy Green should come into their school.
3. A covering letter from the Head teacher/ teacher should also be included.
4. All letters should be sent electronically to editor@leadersaward.com

Andy will review the letters and visit the schools with the most persuasive argument! The closing date for the competition is 30th May 2011. For more information visit the Leaders Award site.

Image – Bloodhound SSC

Although I wasn’t able to attend this year’s BETT show in London, it was still possible to find out about the new products and services being shown, as well as the fantastic presentations being given by teachers and educators, thanks to the Internet! Here is a review of what I discovered from this year’s BETT:

• The New at BETT online publication outlines some of the new products that were featured at the show.
• The Bee-it site has a number of posts about BETT, including a list of the winners of this year’s BETT Awards. They also have daily reports from their time there… see Day One, Day Two, Day Three and Day Four.
• The TES have a list of the workshops that tool place on their site, along with related ideas and resources that you can use.
• Chris Ratcliffe, from Scholastic, has also created set of day by day posts… Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Teacher Blog Posts:

• Ollie Bray’s blog has a number of interesting posts about his favourite parts of BETT 2011.
• Alex Findlay has written his review of the event which he feels was ‘calmer than normal’.
• @misterel has posted the Teachmeet presentation that he gave about using EasyVoter in Moodle as well as a review of his experiences.
• Bev Evans gives a detailed outline of the event, along with her top 10 highlights, in her ‘London Calling’ blog post.

Image – BETT 2011

• Alessio Bernardelli has shared some of his favourite memories from the day that he spent at BETT.
• Ian Addison has also shared his thoughts about some of the things that he saw. Kevin McLaughlin has also written about the benefits of connecting with other teachers and educators at the event.
• The Geeky ICT Teacher has a list of some useful ideas and resources that she came across.
• Tim Rylands’ site has a review of his presentation called ‘ICT to Inspire’ which also involved Simon Widdowson and Kevin McLaughlin.
• Danny Nicholson has two posts (here and here) which mention some exciting new products and interactive whiteboard resources.
• Jason Dilling has produced an account of his visits to the Frog and Fronter stands to view their products.
• Dai Barnes has also written about the Teachmeet event on the Friday night which he watched online. You can watch a recording of the event here.
• Simon Widdowson and Simon Haughton have both written some extremely interesting reports about their visit to the events, with information about the presentations that they gave.

Audio, Photos and Videos:

• Here is a collection of photos from BETT 2011. Which tools, sites and products can you see featured in the images?
• Leon Cych has created a video playlist of his videos from BETT. View them here or subscribe in iTunes.

Browsing through all of this information about BETT, it seems that there were very few big announcements and new products revealed at the event. The main highlight for lots of the teachers seem to be the Teachmeet and Teachmeet Takeover events… this was certainly the case for me when I attended in 2010.

Did you go to BETT 2011? What were your favourite parts of your trip?