Australia is a long way from gender equality in tech and other STEM fields

The Australian federal government has been collating data to report girls’ and women’s uptake in studies and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The yearly STEM Equity Monitor has shown very slow advancement and plenty of areas to improve before Australia can achieve gender equality in STEM careers.

<https://www.computerworld.com/article/3618572/australia-is-a-long-way-from-gender-equality-in-tech-and-other-stem-fields.html>

The online learning needs of students across different grades during the COVID-19 pandemic

A new study published in the British Journal of Educational Technology has identified the different needs of students across primary, middle, and high school related to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the study, investigators surveyed 1,170,769 Chinese students from the Guangdong Province of China.

<https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/w-tol050321.php>

Has Covid-19 sparked a new dawn for distance learning?

An estimated 1.5 billion students across 160 countries worldwide have been forced to study at home during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, participation in digital distance learning (DDL) has increased exponentially in many forms, including virtual classrooms, learning platforms, social media, online repositories, online assessment, webinars, and recorded video lessons.

<http://www.bbc.com/storyworks/the-learning-power-up/distance-learning>

Why Some Families Still Prefer Remote School

Jobs, language barriers and hard-won coronavirus pandemic routines are just some of the reasons that children aren’t going back to classrooms in districts that have reopened.

<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/us/remote-school-covid.html>

60% of School Apps Are Sharing Your Kids' Data With Third Parties

Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less care than they should. 

<https://gizmodo.com/60-of-school-apps-are-sharing-your-kids-data-with-thir-1846819024>

Collaboration is the Key: An EdTech Journey

It is crazy to think, that just over a year ago, many schools had never used remote learning platforms such as Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams, whilst others had only dabbled in using them to provide home learning for their students. Our school was one of those who had not yet taken the leap into the quite scary domain of online learning platforms when the COVID-19 pandemic struck last year. This meant that, as a senior leadership team, we needed to be agile to equip our school and staff with the right tools to support our children and meet the new government requirements for remote learning.

<https://www.bettshow.com/bett-articles/collaboration-is-the-key-an-edtech-journey>