Ready for Canva for Education?

All NSW DoE staff now have easy access to Canva for Education! Canva is a handy online tool that makes it easy to create, collaborate, and communicate visually in the classroom and beyond. Set up your classroom space, then invite your students, and manage lessons, activities, or projects, all in one place. You'll get access to premium educational templates for every subject, grade, and ability. And discover worksheets, lesson plans, presentations, posters and reports, all ready to customise - to jumpstart both your students' and your own creating! The T4L Team have prepared a Canva information page with all the information you need to get started with using Canva right away! And why not join us for an introductory webinar?

Getting started with Canva - Thu 29 July - 7:30-8:30am

Getting started with Canva - Mon 2 Aug - 3:30-4:30pm

Canva for Education is now available for all NSW DoE staff and students!

Remote access to school server

A new service for principals, executive and school admin staff is now available, to remotely and securely access school files while working from home. Installing the MS Remote Desktop client on their home or school-loaned PC, will provide access to files stored in U drive, Faculty, and Collaboration shares, as well as MS Office applications, including Outlook. For instructions on setting up remote access for principals, executive and school admin staff, please visit the Azure Virtual Desktop page.

Azure Windows Virtual Desktop

UDM: Custom comments field

A very handy update was made to Universal Desktop Manager (UDM) recently which allows ICT Coordinators and TSOs in NSW public schools to add a 20 character comment to each device listed. This is helpful when browsing through the devices because you can easily see information that is useful to you. For example, you could use the Comments field to show:

The device's serial number

An asset tag to help find full details in your assets register

The name of the person the device is allocated to

Watch the quick video below for full details!

Minecraft webinars this week!

Join Minecraft guru Andrew Balzer from Microsoft as he takes you on a journey to explore how you can maximise the teaching and learning opportunities with Minecraft: Education Edition. There’s also a digital class incursion for students to join – so get in quick and register now! :

Tuesday 27 July 7:30am-8:30am - Inspiring your students to design and create in Minecraft: Education Edition

Tuesday 27 July 3:30pm-4:30pm - Inspiring your students to design and create in Minecraft: Education Edition

Wednesday 28 July 10:30am-11:30am - Designing in Minecraft: Education Edition for students – Digital Incursion

Minecraft Education Edition webinars on this week!

stem.T4L Learning on Demand

The stem.T4L team have just launched the new stem.T4L Learning on Demand videos! We have created more than 50 videos to support your exploration of the stem.T4L kits. The videos are designed to be flexible, so you can watch them in one go, or you can pause, skip back and rewatch these as you need them. The videos include practical tips, technology support, and learning and teaching ideas to inspire. You can access these resources anywhere, at any time. So get started now! Remember to visit the stem.T4L Learning Library for more about the project.

Visit the stem.T4L Learning on Demand website!

Our latest T4L mags!

If you haven't discovered magazine.T4L and T4L Kids yet, you're missing out! Our latest issues focus directly on building and working in cloud classrooms.

magazine.T4L Issue 16 - our latest BUMPER edition is all about Google Classroom, MS Teams and web conferencing!

T4L Kids magazine Issue 5 - Six challenges for students to do online using tech tools including writing, podcasting, coding and more!

And don't forget! You can find more information about teaching and learning from home on the NSW Education Learning from Home hub.

LinkedIn Learning renewed!

We recently announced that the department’s subscription to LinkedIn Learning would be ending on June 30, 2021. Subsequently, feedback was received and the decision reviewed. We are pleased to advise that NSW DoE has now renewed the subscription and LinkedIn Learning will continue to be available to all NSW DoE staff and Stage 6 students until June 30, 2022!

ICT Thought of the day

ICT Thought - This manicure video went viral on YouTube. She had a good thumbnail.

QRGs for Learning from Home

As learning from home continues for many affected schools, there are still some students having difficulties with the process of joining into live online lessons through Teams or Zoom, or accessing their Google Classroom. As a reminder from 2020, here are some handy quick reference guides for students and their parents/carers to help them join into these sessions:

And remember - the Using Technology section at the Learning from Home website contains many great resources to help school staff, students and their parents with their technology questions.

Image - Learning from Home with technology

T4L Learning Pathways

With Learning from home back in full swing for much of NSW, many teachers are still adjusting to a different method of teaching through online tools. To help with providing guidance to teachers wanting to quickly upskill themselves on using and applying our key online learning platforms and cloud services, we've pulled together some great learning pathways. They are designed to help build your skills to teach and learn confidently in the digital space. With professional learning, reading, and listening pursuits, as well as teaching and learning activities to implement, your online classroom will be launching in no time. Check these quick one-page pathways:

Teaching with technology - learning pathways

YouTube is open to all students

Please advise all teachers at your school: With learning from home across many schools, teachers produced lesson plans and content that included the use of linked YouTube videos in their Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams for Education and other remote learning platforms. However, students who attended school, were unable to access those lessons effectively because YouTube was blocked via the department's filter. In line with the 2020 period of learning from home, YouTube has been unblocked for all students at school. This means that students attending school from the start of Term 3, have full access to view videos on YouTube. If you allow your students to access YouTube, please remind them that the Student use of digital devices and online services policy still applies. Their use of YouTube should always be for educational purposes while at school. The availability of YouTube to students when school resumes normally, will be reviewed at that time.

YouTube has been unblocked for student use at school during the learning from home period.

Phishing? Vishing? Smishing?

Cyber attacks are on the rise! Learn the secret tricks of scammers and be able to spot a fake email, phone call or SMS. In these short animated courses, you'll listen to a scam phone call from the fake ‘ATO’ and see how clever scammers are with targeted text messages pretending to be your favourite retailer.

Ensure you follow these good cyber hygiene practices at all times to stay safe online. And check out our new cyber safety intranet pages. Do your part - be cyber smart!

Find out what phishing, vishing and smishing are with these short animated courses

Be a Google Certified Innovator!

The Google Certified Innovator program empowers educators like you to transform education. Google recognises and supports top educators who are excited to grow professionally, advocate for impactful technology, and innovate to improve classrooms. As a participant, you'll identify a meaningful educational project and work with a team of expert Google educators to help you develop the mindset, skillset, knowledge and connections needed to make that project a reality. You'll become part of a global community of passionate educators who drive the impactful use of Google tools. Apply now to be part of VIA21, a special edition of the Google Certified Innovator Academy that is now open in the Asia Pacific region. This year's VIA21 academy takes place entirely online, across 8 weeks, with approximately 3 hours per week of live sessions. This will be followed by 8 months of 1:1 mentorship with an expert Innovator. Applications close on 17 September 2021.

SketchUp Pro 2021 for home use

While NSW DoE offers SketchUp Pro via the eT4L Software Catalogue and UDM, for deployment to school-owned computers, that product is not covered for a work-at-home licence for teachers or students. Furthermore, school-owned computers using the DoE licence will not work outside of school. But many high schools don't know that Trimble, the developers of SketchUp Pro have extended the availability of the full product to both teachers and students for installation on BYO (personal) devices. They have shared new temporary licence keys that will activate the product for use anywhere, for both the new 2021 and 2020 versions of SketchUp Pro. These keys will expire on January 1, 2022 and the software will cease to work at that time. Full details of how students and staff can access this professional software can be found in this announcement on Yammer.

SketchUp Pro 2021 available now for home use