Professional+learning+sites+and+tools

There are a plethora of online resources for teachers who want to improve their knowledge of teaching, connect to other teachers, view videos to help them learn new concepts etc.

Edutopia is a site set up by the George Lucas Foundation (May the Force be with you!) it has amazing tools for teachers and lots of very useful and user-friendly information on how to use web tools. It regularly runs online PD which you can join and sends a weekly newsletter to your inbox. This site is an invaluable one for teachers. Highly recommended.

TED is an amazing site where you can view talks by experts around the world on a variety of subjects, including education, but not limited to that. The beauty of it is that you can join and save your favourite talks for later viewing, you can see a transcript of the talk along the side as it is running and you can join the discussion after you have viewed it. Many people upload their ideas and there are some really interesting and challenging discussions about the videos.

Qwiki is a site that uses the best ideas of wikipedia but leaves out the heavy textual detail. It gives you the information by video using images and maps. It has a variety of topics and aims to educate you about them in short bursts.

TES is a great site for teachers who want to find resources created by other teachers and even to share their own resources with others. It is run by the Times Educational Supplement and while English in focus, it does have many international visitors who share resources. It is also a very useful networking site for teachers.

Learning Without Frontiers is a site where educators share videos on how to teach radically using technology. It advertises itself as disruptive, but has good ideas.

iPads for Education is a site created by the DEECD to support the use of iPads in the classroom, and to follow the progress of the iPad trial in Vic Govt schools. The Educational Apps pages is brilliant!

Scoop It and Paperli are ways of collecting articles and information from the web and sharing them with your team. You simply install bookmarklets in each case and every time you visit a website that you want to share you click it. Easy.My Scoop it is here, please feel free to follow.