I spend a lot of time online. Here are some great links to random things that might be related to education…

General learning related

We all assume that students learn at different speeds. I feel like that is a fairly natural assumption. Not necessarily true according to this fascinating study:

PROOF POINTS: The myth of the quick learner

Greg Ashman, DP of Ballarat Clarendon College, Victoria’s most successful school based on NAPLAN and VCE results, has a blog that I would highly recommend. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, but it is not easy to argue with his reasoning. Many of his posts are free and you should also check him out on Twitter, but for $5 a month you get all his subscriber-only posts and they’ve been invaluable in my learning about learning journey:

https://fillingthepail.substack.com/

This amazing free course “Learning how to Learn” from coursera. Seriously this should be compulsory viewing for all teachers:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

This is totally random but if you are interested in seeing every school in Australia ranked by ICSEA (a rough measure of how wealthy the parents are that send kids to a certain school), here it be (this specific link is for Victoria but click on the page links to see another state):

http://house.speakingsame.com/topschool.php?sta=vic&type=3&filter=&year=0

This is awesome. What Works Clearinghouse is a massive resource where you type in what you’re dealing with as a teacher and it gives you evidence-based suggestions:

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/FWW

On a similar note, this site, you just click on a behaviour a learner might be showing and it suggests ways to deal with it:

www.pbisworld.com/

Boston’s Harvard University have done the world a solid with their Visible Thinking project. 1000% would recommend:

https://pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking

A.I.

This AI platform will help generate sources of information for a literature review or just to find decent peer-reviewed information about a topic:

https://elicit.com/

Visual stuff…

Cannot recommend this enough… it’s Australia’s very own Canva! Very easy to use and had sooooo many templates so you can make something that looks pretty professional in a short space of time. The pro version where you get way more templates you can use and more free graphics is $20 a month (which you can claim on tax so more like $14 a month if you are paying typical full time teacher tax).

https://www.canva.com/

Background remover… This is now common to get these on smartphone apps but this is a great very simple image background remover for desktop:

https://www.remove.bg/

A similarish kind of site is one that removes watermarks. Now I would never ever ever ever suggest anyone use anything copyrighted but if you had to just for ‘research purposes’ this site is quick, simple and great:

https://www.watermarkremover.io/

Speaking of copyright images, this search engine will find you copyright free images (or indeed anything):

https://search.creativecommons.org/

I love these two for creating unique text graphics:

http://typeslab.com/

https://typo.polona.pl/en/

And even animated text:

https://cooltext.com/

This place is where I get all my gifs for hilarious presentations etc:

https://giphy.com/

My favourite fantasy map art creation thing… it is sooo awesome. I was paying the paltry monthly sum for a while and it is definitely worth the money:

https://inkarnate.com/

If generating fantasy city maps is your thing (and it should be), this is rad:

https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

And if generating a fantasy city is not enough, why not this rad engine that creates entire worlds? And it is super customisable:

https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

Game related

Don’t go past ACMI’s game lessons site. I’ve submitted a few for this. It is a place where teachers have written lesson plans so that you can use video games in your classroom:

https://www.acmi.net.au/education/school-program-and-resources/game-lessons/

A rad share trading game from Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-stock-chart-trading-game/

Oh and look, there’s an Australian share trading game made by the ASX itself, not one but two!

https://www.asx.com.au/investors/investment-tools-and-resources/sharemarket-game

A massive list of games that have a social issues bent:

www.gamesforchange.org/games/

I have not spent a lot of time on this but it looks epic. build a civilisation where you can see the effects of human activity on an ecosystem, and free:

https://play.eco/

If you need to be convinced, check out its awesome trailer:

A load of cool civics and citizenship games be here:

https://www.icivics.org/games

This looks primo as a country simulator:

https://www.nationstates.net/

Google are involved in the educational games situation also:

https://artsandculture.google.com/play

This amazing school an hour outside of Melbourne truly embrace game-based learning and I applaud them for it:

https://www.instagram.com/sjsebastopol/

The person who made this site is a straight up genius. Really intriguing mini-games that can model anything really… Hard to explain everything Nicky does but definitely check it out:

https://ncase.me/

Assessment

Dylan Wiliam is a total BOSS! when it comes to thinking about assessment. But almost anything education related that he talks about is so incisive. I challenge you not to be challenged and amazed by this guy! This provocative video is titled “Why teaching will never be research based” (!!!). But I think that ends up not necessarily being the end of the world. Anyways, legend person, legend video:

And on the subject of assessment, but closer to home, my former colleague that I used to work with at the Assessment and Evaluation Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, Margaret Wu (who incidentally I think is the most intelligent person I have ever met), demolishes the inappropriate use of NAPLAN data (NAPLAN being a literacy/numeracy standardised test in Australia). This is probably my most shared video link to teachers in Australia. This is the person who, on the cover of the text for her quantitative methods subject had “If you have a watch you know what the time is… If you have two watches, you are never quite sure…” (loving an assessment person pointing out the limits of assessment):

This has massive potential, it is an Australian-based initiative to develop numeracy and literacy progressions where teachers can assess their students against it, and even better, it could one day be able to spit out suggested teaching strategies for learners based on their current ability. Mind you it is a federal government project so don’t hold your breath:

https://www.ofai.edu.au/

Awesome Stories

History

The History Teachers’ Association of Victoria (HTAV) have made a series of paid courses to improve your history teaching. I wrote the assessment one and co-authored the technology one. They are good times and good value:

ecourses.historyed.net.au/

Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland | British History Online

Create timelines, share them on the web | Timetoast timelines

EyeWitness to History – history through the eyes of those who lived it

Free Online Course Materials | History | MIT OpenCourseWare

HistoriCool

Homepage – National Archives of Australia

Internet History Sourcebooks

Learning at the British Library

Making History: Museum Victoria

Medieval Fight Club – Historical weapons armour and collectables

mrgrayhistory – home

National Center for History in the Schools

National Centre for History Education – Commonwealth History Project :: Home

Nerdfighteria Wiki – Crash Course: U.S. History

Nerdfighteria Wiki – Crash Course: World History

Order | Zbeach True Comics

Photos from the end of WW1

Primary Sources — WWII – History: Military – Subject and Class Guides at University of Washington Libraries

The Kokoda Track | Australians in World War II | The Pacific War | The Australian Veterans’ Accounts | Kokoda Veterans’ Video Interviews

Time Line Generator

TimeRime.com – Homepage

Topics | Portal to the Past

TrueWorldHistory.info – A Historic look at the world of yesterday, today and tomorrow

WWII Primary Documents

Geography

This is a mind-blowing graphic representation of world geography:

http://globe.cid.harvard.edu/

Everybody loves Wordle, how about doing it with flags?

https://www.flagle.io/

Or trade!

https://games.oec.world/en/tradle/

15 Before And After Pictures Of Iconic Cities Around The World To Show You How Much They Changed

https://www.scoop.it/topic/geography-skills-and-ict

40 Maps They Didn’t Teach You In School | Bored Panda

ABS Spotlight : Spotlight

Games | Murray-Darling Basin Authority

Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. – Gapminder.org

Geog Activities from ABS

GEOGRAPHY – EnchantedLearning.com

geography lesson plans and resources

Geography Quiz

Google Maps Area Calculator Tool

Mapwing – Build and Share Virtual Tours for Free

Timelapse – Google Earth Engine

Two Centuries of US Immigration Visualized

Global learning

Designing curriculum for a global perspective | Scoop.it

Global Education Professional Learning Module

Resources gallery | Global Education

sim*sweatshop

ICT

Atomic Learning Education Australia: Online ICT training and professional learning resources for schools – Atomic Learning

Common Craft – YouTube

Power Searching with Google is back – Inside Search

WebQuest.Org: Home

Zunal WebQuest Maker

Literacy

Not much is more important than literacy. It is the enabling skill for most academic achievement…

This site has 15 rad vocabulary improvement strategies:

http://learningtasks.weebly.com/vocabulary-strategies.html

Something half decent that the Victorian Education Deparment developed, their ‘literacy learning progressions’. Now myself and my esteemed fellow literacy researcher Bianca Wood have massively improved upon it, but it’s something…

https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/curriculum/foundation-10/crosscurriculumresources/Pages/Literacy.aspx

Loads of high school learners can’t handwrite very well. Why not replace their normal homework with getting them to practice that? I do it with students who have a deficiency in the area. This site will make you handwriting practice text based on your input:

https://www.worksheetworks.com/english/writing/handwriting/print-practice.html

Homepage – ReadWriteThink

InstaGrok.com

Kids.Net.Au – Dictionary

MrNussbaum.com – Cloze Reading

MyRead – Home

Storybird – Artful storytelling

Vocabulary activities | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

Vocabulary Strategies – Learning Tasks

Wordle – Beautiful Word Clouds