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2019 (26) 5 August


ET News Digest
Your Weekly Education Newsletter
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Comforting the anxious can make it worse
The natural desire to comfort someone who is feeling anxious can actually make the problem worse.
   “The classical conditioning model tells us that you actually may be reinforcing the behaviour by comforting someone. So if I’m anxious and stressed and I come to you and you give me lots of love, that feeling gets connected to love, so we have to be really careful that we’re not encouraging the anxiety,” says Dr Mandi Shean. Read more

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We are here to stay: Catholic education
High profile closures of Catholic schools have raised questions about their wider viability but Catholic Education says it isn’t going anywhere.
   The Catholic sector admits to being saddened by the Presentation Sisters decision to close Presentation College Windsor, but that this did not reflect the broader situation in Catholic schools across Melbourne.
   Catholic Education Melbourne Acting Executive Director, Jim Miles calls it "Ill-informed conjecture" Read more

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Kids Helpline sees leap in sexting concerns
Kids Helpline’s site is fielding huge numbers of hits around sexting. For the first six months of this year, Kids Helpline’s teens and young adults tip sheets on sexting received over 40,000 page views, making it the third most popular topic overall on the site. Over half of all traffic to the page resulted from web searches on the issue.
   “We welcome the debate around sexting and the impacts on young people,” yourtown/Kids Helpline CEO Tracy Adams said. Read more

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Right lighting can boost student concentration, wellbeing
The right lighting solution and good lighting design is essential to create a quality learning environment which increases attention spans, improves student mood, regulates alertness, wellbeing, performance and health.
   enLighten’s Skyline panel is engineered to give a uniform, low glare and flicker free light to ensure the highest level of lighting comfort. Using superior optical design, with greater than 90% light uniformity, it has an ultra-long life span of >120,000 hours. Read more

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Higher education trumps social inequity, but it takes time
A degree evens the playing field but it does take time for the paths of the disadvantaged and the better off to converge, about eight years.
   Tertiary institutions and other organisations could do more to give university graduates an equal start in the job market, according to a new report led by Dr Wojtek Tomaszewski from The University of Queensland..
 Read more

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Adina Watches’ bespoke service for schools
The gift of a watch is a great way to mark a graduation and Queensland based Adina Watches have launched a bespoke service for Australian schools creating limited edition timepieces.
   St Aidan's Anglican Girls' School in Brisbane was one of the first to commission the Woolloongabba company late last year to create a watch that celebrated the students’ graduation and the school’s 90th anniversary. Read more

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Game Changer Challenge pits students against nation’s leading technology thinkers
Department of Education Secretary Mark Scott will host some of the nation’s leading thinkers and futurists for a panel discussion that will answer tricky questions from public school students across NSW on Tuesday 6 August.
   More than 150 students and teachers from as far west as Broken Hill and north to Nimbin will converge on the Australian headquarters of Google for day one of the Game Changer Challenge, a flagship event of Education Week 2019. Read more