Chris Betcher

Our school has a subscription to a  website called the Study Skills Handbook  which offers study tips to senior students. I'm sure it's a valuable resource; so valuable in fact that it's behind a $1200/year paywall that requires a login password in order to access it. What a bargain. I'm sure those tips wouldn't be found anywhere else on  the Internet for free at all. Anyway, I got an email from someone at school today promoting this resource, and amongst the several study tips it suggested, it listed this one... 3. DISCOVER OTHER RESOURCES: You could also ask your local librarian for any additional direction on where to look for resource material for your assignment. Librarians are often your best source of information. They know how to help people access relevant and appropriate information, in books, the Internet or computer based references. One of the challenging aspects of Internet based searches for school students is the complexity, language and pur...

At my school, PLC Sydney, we just launched a BYO iPad program for our Year 5 and 6 students. This followed on from a fairly successful trial of iPads last year and the subsequent decision that we wanted our upper primary kids to have full time access to this technology. We initially looked at the idea of the school providing and managing the iPads, but in talking to the students it turned out that a very large percentage of them already owned iPads, so it didn't seem to make much sense to spend a whole lot of money providing something that most of them already had. The general feeling from the parents was supportive of the BYO idea and the kids were keen of course. So this week we officially launched the BYO program. We invited all the parents and students to come to an information night where we explained exactly how we wanted things to work, and far more importantly, why we felt this was the right move to be making. The response from parents was very positive, although a few were...