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For Education Leaders

Know Thy Impact! (Inscription at the temple of Apollo at Delphi)

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Reflections from the on-going Invitational Education and Visible Learning journey at Clarkson CHS. Teachers’ understanding of their students’ academic progress, as well as the influence of teacher comments and actions on the students’ self-concept, lead to the creation of inviting classrooms. Read more

ABC’s award-winning app was designed with kids, for kids

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Kids want things that appeal to them but that doesn’t mean they have to be childish, that was the biggest take away from the process of redesigning the award-winning ABC Kids app.
   It is now Australia’s No. 1 kids’ app with over one million monthly viewers, and content is carefully curated by experts, including early education specialists. The ABC and strategic design studio, Future Friendly, worked on the app together. Read more

Hard facts about soft skills

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Automation is going to change the workplace, but what machinery lacks is the ability to empathise and collaborate, we’re still the best at that by far. So, soft skills, like creativity and people management are going to be at a premium when employers are looking for new hires.
  A study of 1,000 Australian undergraduates and recent graduates found that they view complex problem solving as the most needed soft skill. Read more

Guess what the Children’s Word of the Year is?

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The Oxford Australian 2020 Children’s Word of the Year used children’s language experts to analyse more than 50,000 short stories written by three million Australian children for this year’s Storyathon writing events.
   Students in Years 3-8 voted on shortlisted words which included ‘friends’, ‘virus’, ‘zombies’, ‘lockdown’, ‘fun’, ‘world’, ‘shocked’, ‘school’ and ‘people’, to determine the 2020 CWOTY.
Read more

Escape Rooms to uni

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They talk about the positives of gamified learning but this takes gamification off screens and into the physical world.
   Escape Rooms is an innovative learning and teaching method that have student teams engage in learning games created around Escape Room hypothetical situations. The approach has been especially successful in engaging high-school students from relative socio-educational disadvantage in trials in the top end. Read more

The education system needs a reality check – student voice

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If teenagers are not even allowed to drive alone at eighteen, why should they be allowed to take the wheel for their career path? It just doesn’t make sense. Either we are making a mistake by having teens being able to drive, or kids just are not supposed to be forced to pick a career at a young age.
   Many students, when asked what they want to be, give the same response: “I don’t know yet”. Read more

Graduate employment down

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Higher education graduates across Australia have found it harder to gain employment over the last 12 months and it wasn’t just about COVID.
   There was a drop in the November and February employment rate pointing to a softening of the labour market for graduates prior to the pandemic but there was a big drop during May when COVID hit.
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