Technology 4 Learning

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2025

Issue 121 - 2025 | Term 2 | Week 6

T4L Tuesdays

Our T4L Tuesday sessions are underway and going strong! These quick, 15-minute meetings are crafted for busy teachers looking to explore effective digital tools that can enhance their classroom.  

Each session offers practical strategies to help simplify your workload, increase student engagement and boost your confidence. You can find the meeting link, past recordings and links to mentioned tools here.


A new tool has been made available for use within all Google Classroom assignments: Read Along.

This tool supports teachers with reading practice and reporting on the progress of students. Teachers can choose from either Levelled Reads or Decodable texts, or they can choose to upload their own content that they create themselves.

Check out the video created by the T4L team, on how to incorporate Read Along in your Google Classroom.  

Google is also announcing a new webinar to support content creation using Google tools. Learn to leverage Google Vids, and Chromebook features like Screencast and the GIF creator, to create content as an educator and a student.  

Click here to register at the event page, so you can watch the recording of this webinar, as well as access the resource slides.

The See Yourself in Cyber Program launched on Monday 12 May, to align with National Careers Week, welcoming 55 enthusiastic Year 9 and 10 students from Blacktown schools to Parramatta.

During the event, students:

  • Completed Introduction to Cyber Security micro-skills through TAFE NSW
  • Explored real-world cyber security scenarios
  • Gained insights into cyber career pathways from industry experts
  • Took part in an interactive Capture the Flag challenge—with prizes up for grabs!

Some strong interest in cyber as a career was seen. We hope to have some budding professionals soon.

You can view the upcoming events for the Program here.

 


Canva has recently announced some new features, which will appear shortly for all users. Updates include the Visual Suite 2.0, bringing Docs, Presentations, Whiteboards, and the new Canva Sheets, into one seamless space. Magic Studio is packed with tools like Magic Write and Magic Charts, helping you to work faster and smarter, and for the first time, you can build interactive learning experiences with Canva Code—without the need for any coding experience! 

The new AI tools, Canva Code and Magic Insights, will be disabled whilst they are being assessed by the NSW Department of Education (DoE) Safe AI team. They will be enabled for staff and/or students based on the outcome of those assessments.

You can watch the keynote on demand or join Canva’s live educator webinar on 6 June, and there are always the great resources at Canva Design School.

Click here to access an overview of some of the changes that have occurred to the Canva Homepage. 


Microsoft Planner has been updated with new features that boost productivity and simplify task management. The refreshed interface offers smoother navigation, while users can now see tasks in grid, board, and timeline views—great for organising assignments, projects, and school events. Premium templates such as Goals & Objectives and Event Planning, help teachers plan lessons and activities with ease. 

With calendar integration, Planner tasks sync to your schedule, helping teachers know when tasks are due. Microsoft Teams integration means you can create and add plans straight into Teams channels, for easy collaboration across classrooms and staffrooms. 

Users can personalise their Planner by adding custom fields and columns, and reorder tasks in Grid view to suit specific needs. Real-time dashboards and visual summaries make it easy to track progress.

Learn more at Planner help & learning - support.microsoft.com


 


EduTECH

The Apple iPad and Mac are full of assistive technologies that support students, teachers and support staff in the classroom and with their learning. Have you checked out how using the Spoken Content tools on your device can support learners to read text from the screen?

This Text to Speech tool can assist you in the classroom, to support literacy, grammar, reading comprehension and confidence, as well as supporting the diverse needs of all students with their learning growth. Keep updated with the new support resources on the Apple section of our T4L Inclusive and Assistive Technology page.


All NSW DoE schools now have the ability to migrate their devices to Intune and Cloud Device Manager (CDM). The previous registration process has now been removed.

If you need support with setting up site profiles, contact your Digital Field Services team via EDConnect.

There have also been some updates within CDM, including Bulk Importer tool, which helps users upload multiple site customisations at a time, bulk modify the Primary User from Company Portal,  as well as the opportunity to create a site profile. There is also the capability to have up to two custom homepages per site profile.

Explore the latest set of activities on the Adobe Express front page, tailored for a range of subjects, and perfect for the classroom. You will also find helpful new in-app tutorials under the Learn button.

The May edition of the Adobe in Education Newsletter is now available.

You also can discover the latest Adobe Express features here

The homepage also has easy links for you or your students to create videos, graphics, website as well as an engaging tool to animate your voice. Visit the T4L website Adobe Express page to access some how to videos.


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?