Issue 91 - Term 4 Week 6

The Treasurer’s Financial Literacy Challenge is live! Good financial literacy results in positive wellbeing outcomes. The Treasurer’s Financial Literacy challenge uses fun and interactive activities and resources to give students practical knowledge to help them develop lifelong skills about managing finances in real life. Watch 'What is financial literacy?' - it’s designed for K-10 students and features scenario-based activities including identifying Australian money, budgeting, understanding the real costs of owning a dog or car and keeping track of spending. All students, teachers and families are able to participate, even with learning from home. Content aligns with our syllabuses and includes teacher notes. Upon successful completion, teachers can download a participation certificate from the challenge website, to pass on to their students.

With most eligible schools now having received their T4L Rollout order, the T4L team have consolidated all of the step-by-step set up guides and videos. The Device Management Resources section of the T4L website supports schools with preparing their new devices for use. The guides include:

• Microsoft Windows desktops, notebooks and tablets (F12 builds)
• Google Chromebooks (enrolling)
• Apple iPads (via Jamf Pro)
• Main Learning Displays

In addition, the section contains links to various resources to assist you to get started with effectively using your new devices and making the most of them in the classroom.

YouTube is an amazing free service that the whole world can access, but lately users have complained that there are more and more ads cropping into the videos - before during and after. That, together with the often-annoying comments section below and recommended videos on the right, the video you really want to watch is not given the focus that you want - especially if you're a teacher wanting to show a video in class. But with this simplest of options, you can ensure that the video you want to watch or share with your students is the only thing shown. Watch this quick video below to find out all about it. Soon you'll be sharing YouTube links with your students and others that they'll simply love!

Regional Industry Education Partnerships (RIEP), together with John Holland, invite Sydney-based high school teachers to attend two face-to-face workshops in weeks 8 and 9 this term. The workshops are aimed at teachers that use, or are interested in using Minecraft Education Edition for a real-world activity with students in 2023.  The aim is to design lesson plans with professionals from the construction industry and link industry to the curriculum. The lesson plans will be built in a Minecraft world based around Randwick Children’s Hospital. This world will be made available to all teachers across NSW in Term 2, 2023. The RIEP program are looking for all levels of Minecraft expertise with support provided for novice users. Find out more!

T4L Kids magazine is a wildly popular publication for students in Stages 3 and 4. But with the latest edition, T4L Kids Issue 11, we decided to add a bonus supporting feature! Following feedback from teachers, we ran a half hour webinar to help teachers understand how they can use the latest T4L Kids in the classroom. T4L Kids Unpacked looked at all the elements of the magazine and demonstrated how to incorporate them into lessons with students. It also helped teachers to explore some of the key technology tools, to give them the confidence to start using these in class. If you missed our first-ever T4L Kids Unpacked show, why not jump in and watch the recording on-demand? And keep an eye out for future episodes that will support future editions of T4L Kids magazine!

Extending the school's ethernet network and/or adding special devices to it, can cause more problems than it solves - if not installed and configured correctly. If your school is getting new solar panels or a demountable, or considering upgrading or installing new security cameras, IP phones, wireless access points, switches or cabling - please get advice first! Log an EDConnect call as early as possible, with as much details about your needs, devices and timeframes. Incorrectly installed and configured devices can flood your school's network or cause other frustrations for staff and students. Non-standard installations often cannot be remediated without additional costs. Your local Digital Field Services team can help make your local network project a success.

How often do you check your server room for dust? The school's fileservers and data cabinets run 24/7 with their large fans on the back keeping the server cool by sucking in air and pushing it out through front vents. Clean, dust-free server rooms mean the servers stay clean. But dusty rooms just end up clogging the internals of the server. As humidity rises over Summer, dust can get moist, causing shorts in computer circuitry. School cleaners are typically told to stay out of server rooms, but that doesn't mean the school should never clean their server room. How dusty are your school's servers? If you do see dust, it's safe to carefully vacuum all around the servers using a brush head, as well as the room to help keep your servers working optimally and avoid local outages.

DART Learning is an initiative of the New South Wales Department of Education, facilitated through the Distance And Rural Technologies team (DART). They deliver and co-ordinate interactive video excursions for all NSW public schools. DART Learning's interactive video excursions bring students and teachers, face to face with experts across the globe. Your class is just a few clicks away from booking incredible interactive learning experiences from some of the best museums, galleries, research institutes, scientists, writers, artists, musicians and zoos in the world. If you're looking for inspiring educational activities for your class leading up to the end of the year, remember to take a look at what DART Learning has to offer in both LIVE and on-demand events.

Our colleagues at Deakin University are keen to gather insights from teachers on the increasing integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into K-12 education contexts. Deakin's researchers are interested in hearing about your experiences – or lack of experience, with AI or AI-mediated technologies in Australian schools. Sharing your experience and/or views will help better understand how new education graduates can learn to work in future AI-mediated environments. Deakin University will greatly appreciate it if you can spare 15-20 minutes to complete this research survey and share it with other interested teachers at your school.

The T4L team has run many live online professional learning sessions over the past two years, covering all kinds of technology used in the classroom. But did you know that we recorded most of them? If you missed any of the T4L Webinars or virtual sessions, you can always join in at your own pace and in your own time. Just visit our T4L Learning On Demand webpage that lists our past professional learning events. All of our recordings are organised by subject and easy to access. Remember to also share these with other staff at your school, and check in regularly for new additions.

Information Technology Directorate publishes three issues of news.T4L each term. Remember - share each issue with your staff! And if you aren't receiving an email notification as soon as a new issue of news.T4L drops, then you're missing out! So why not subscribe?