E-potential is a Victorian Government website aimed at encouraging and supporting teachers to use technology as part of their everyday teaching. It has surveys you can take to find out how much of an expert you are and very useful links. It also has good resources.

Intel’s teacher website is a fantastic way of using technology to engage students and to allow them to think more creatively and deeply. The resources are easy to create and lend themselves to a very large variety of subjects. Highly recommended.

This one -Create Surveys -  is a useful survey tool.

Assign-a-day is useful for keeping track of upcoming work and assignments. Teachers can upload all of the work due and give students a link to it all so that they can access it whenever.

This one – smile – is good for creating online quizzes and activities for students to complete.

On a similar topic to the one above Hot Potatoes is free software that teachers can download to create quizzes, cloze activities and crosswords for students. The finished file is saved as a webpage and can be stored on any computer. This is an excellent resource.

Smartboard software for any school that has smartboards is an excellent interactive classroom resource. As well as creating great lesson activities you can record the activity on the Smartboard and save and print files for students and teachers.

Kathy Schrock and Discovery School have created literally hundreds of resources for educators. Worth checking in no matter what you’re teaching.

Teachit is the definitive English teacher’s website. So many resources here. It used to be free and now sadly is not, however it is still very worthwhile viewing.

As I said, these are only a very small amount of the useful websites for teachers available. Feel free to add more readers.

Well, in the end we got kids started with their blogs, and of course we all know with any lesson involving technology you never know where it can go, but this was a practice SAC and the stakes were reasonably high at this point. It highlights the need to try things out well in advance, which in this case the teacher was unable to do because of limited access and time. I still believe that we have to try to work around these things and I hope that the teachers that I’m asking to do this as well don’t curse me for this!

It is vital that we encourage our kids to use technology for learning. The world that they inherit will need them to have some familiarity with this, it also encourages ( which is more to the point) problem solving skills, interpersonal skills, design skills, written communication skills, and I might add patience (!)

Thanks so much to all of you teachers who are doing this, you know who you are. I really appreciate your passion and enthusiasm and (the watchword of the day) patience. The kids will thank you for it even if you do get grey hair!

this is a network for English teachers who are teaching the new Context. It is for sharing ideas and asking questions about the new Context. Unfortunately the widget won’t work here, it comes up transparent, wish I knew how to use HTML.

Here is another newbie, I found this ning online which has been set up by Jo McLeay of VATE. It’s a great way of working with other English teachers from other schools. It’s focus is the Context ‘Encountering Conflict’ however setting up a ning is easy and you could use of for anything where you need to discuss things with teachers from other schools.