Useful Links

Government Education Portal – Australia
http://www.education.gov.au/goved/go/pld/15
The Government Education Portal provides information for educators & professionals; international students; parents & carers; policy makers; students & apprentices about education and training in Australia. The site also offers specific information on various education sectors, including: adult/community education; early childhood; international school education; university/higher education and  vocational education training.

The government education portal contains links to key education and training websites and government resources at the national, state and territory level. The database contains over 4500 resources, which focus on Australian government policies, programmes, and publications. The site also links to news and events from all education sectors (such as edna newsletters), as well as providing an email news headline service and RSS feeds.

Edna
www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/ece
Edna is a network of and for the Australian education and training community. It provides information about and for government and non-government schooling systems/ personal, early childhood education/ educators, vocational and technical education/ educators, adult and community education/ educators and higher education/ educators. 
 
Edna supports educators, teaching and learning and ICT innovations. It supports educators: through workshops, online groups, email discussion lists and newsletters. Teaching and learning resources such as shared resources from Australian and international collections, extensive listings of national and international events are also provided on the site. Demonstration of the latest tools and technologies, for example RSS feeds, wikis, blogs, podcasts and other utilities are .examples of the ICT innovations discussed on the website. 

The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development – Victoria Australia
www.education.vic.gov.au/
The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) is a comprehensive online resource that assists with educational needs and decisions relating to pre-school and school, through to university and technical or further education. The DEECD provides the Victorian Government with policy and planning advice for all stages of education and childhood development, and this information is included in the website. This website also provides insight into how the department supports and advises the Minister for Education, Bronwyn Pike, and the Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, Maxine Morand, and helps with the management and administration of their portfolios.

The Department of Education Training in Western Australian
www.det.wa.edu.au/education/ece
The Department of Education Training in Western Australian offers insights into kindergarten and pre-primary schooling. The website features information about; shaping our schools; achievements and events in our schools; kindergarten and pre-primary schooling; primary schooling; secondary schooling; and students with disabilities and learning needs. It also supplies information and resources for the parents of school children, answering questions such as; At what age can I enrol my child in school?; When can I enrol my child in kindergarten or pre-primary?; Who can enrol?; How to enrol?; and What fees and charges are involved? A link to issues of the Early Childhood Education journal can also be found on this site. Related links including; Our policies; Schools & You parent magazine; and Raising a reader also feature on this site. 

The Ministry of Education – New Zealand
www.ecd.govt.nz/
The Ministry of Education early childhood, New Zealand, website is divided into five sections they are; parenting; early childhood education for your child, about parents as first teacher; strategic plan for early childhood education; running a quality early childhood centre; and early childhood education publications and articles. The early childhood education for your child, about parents as first teacher section describes the Parents as First Teachers (PAFT) programme in New Zealand. This is a parent education and support programme that helps parents understand how their infant develops and learns, and how best they can help their child reach their full potential. The Strategic Plan for early childhood education draws a picture of that vision and provides a 10-year plan of action for improvement. The Ministry of Education presents information about running a quality early childhood centre. This information is designed to help people develop and improve early childhood services, manage training opportunities and access other New Zealand early childhood information. The publications and articles sections includes; book reviews; bibliographies; articles and research papers; publications; and keynote papers. The site also contains an extensive list of links to New Zealand government sights and international education sites and resources.

National Association for the Education of Young Children
www.naeyc.org/
The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) was founded in 1926 and is the world's largest organization working on behalf of young children. It has nearly 100,000 members, a national network of over 300 local, state, and regional Affiliates, and a growing global alliance of like-minded organizations. Membership is open to all individuals who share a desire to serve and act on behalf of the needs and rights of all young children. NAEYC is dedicated to improving the well-being of all young children. It has a particular focus on the quality of educational and developmental services for all children from birth through age 8. NAEYC provides resources and support for teachers and administrators in early childhood programs. NAEYC strives to provide tools and information about early childhood development—tools that you can use in classrooms and programs to help all young children get a great start on learning.

National institute on early childhood development and education http://www.ed.gov/offices/OERI/ECI/index.html
The National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education (ECI) was established to offer a comprehensive program of research, development, and dissemination to improve early childhood development and learning. The site features, ‘hot’ research topics; research and development; funding opportunities; related links; and publications.  The ‘hot’ research topics include areas such as: The U.S. Department of Education Early Childhood Research Projects ( A brief summary of Early Childhood Research Projects in the U.S. Department of Education); Ear Infections & Language Development (A new publication that explains how ear infections may affect a child's language development and what you can do to help); and Ready-to-Learn Television (Research shows that Dragon Tales has a positive impact on children's growth and development)  The publications include: Early Childhood Update; Early Childhood Digest; Early Childhood Directory; Read With Me: A Guide for Student Volunteers Starting Early Childhood Literacy Programs; and Including Your Child.

Box of Tricks
www.boxoftricks.net/
The box of tricks website provides tips, ideas and resources for using ICT in education. The site is designed and maintained by José Picardo, a Modern Languages teacher at Nottingham High School.  The site is designed to be accessible to all teachers and, as such avoids the use of a very academic or extremely technical approach. The site aims to provide a place where teachers using the standard tools of the trade these days, such as interactive whiteboards and computers, can go and get some practical ideas to use in their classrooms. This page is constantly updated by José, and every time he come across a new piece of software or an exciting website, he list it on the site. 

Innovate
www.innovateonline.info
Innovate is published bimonthly as  a public service by the Fischler School of education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University and is sponsored, in part, by Microsoft. Innovate-Live webcasts, produced as a public service by their partner, ULiveandLearn, allow you to synchronously interact with authors on the topic of their articles. You may register for the April/May webcasts at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/. Webcasts will be archived and available in the webcast section of the article and in the Innovate-Live portal archive shortly after the webcast.  

Building  Blocks
www.gse.buffalo.edu/org/buildingblocks/
Building Blocks is one of a small number of projects (nationwide) that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded to create mathematics curriculum materials for young children. The Building Blocks project created exemplary mathematics materials designed to enable all young children to meet the new prep to grade two standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (principal investigator Doug Clements was on the writing team for NCTM's Principles and Standards for School Mathematics). These materials are a complete mathematics curriculum at Pre-K, and supplement and enrich existing curricula at prep to grade two (with extensions to grade 6). They use print, manipulatives, and computers extensively.

Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice
http://mcgraw-hill.co.uk/openup/chapters/0335206042.pdf
This book offers a view of literacies, learning and teaching as completely interconnected social processes. It addresses the bi-directional impact of research and practice from the perspectives of both beginning and experienced classroom teachers. It aims to provide teachers with a coherent and practical framework for classroom work, which consolidates fundamental aspects of traditional literacy pedagogy and also encompasses the multiliteracies competencies that children will need to negotiate in the new millennium. This book extends the trajectory of the 1993 edited work, Literacy Learning and Teaching: Language as Social Practice in the PrimarySchool (Unsworth 1993d), to attempt such an enterprise, focusing on primary and junior secondary schooling.There are three broad stages in the structure of this book: sociocultural, semiotic and pedagogic perspectives, on key issues in literacy learning and teaching and emerging dimensions of change. The theoretical and practical bases of contemporary literacy pedagogy are addressed and both consolidation and transformation in the development of a pedagogy of multiliteracies are explored.

Multiliteracies Blog by Louann Reid
http://louann-multiliteracies.blogspot.com/
Louann Reid is currently the editor of English Journal and a professor of English education at Colorado State University. He is fascinated by new literacies and especially interested in exploring the relationships of visual texts and ideas about textuality. This site offers various discussions under the headings of: class bolgs; blog achieves; teacher blogs; favorite sites; about graphic novels; and about video games.

Multiliteracies in early childhood
http://www.plsa.plain.net.au/PLSA_2005/2005_presentations/Susan%20Hill.pdf
In this article Susan Hill discusses the role of multimedia in the lives of contempoarary young children. She draws attention to the need to rethink forms of literacy in terms of a pedagogy of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and describes how the concept of multilitercies has expanded our view of reading, writing, speaking and listening to include the various multimedia symbol forms. She claims that to explore multiliteracies one  needs an understanding of semiotic theory and to know how symbols, in the form of letters and words, drawings, icons of various types, photographs, colours and animation movement can communicate meanings (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). She also describes the work of various researchers whose research focuses on the integration of technology and literacy pedagogy.

IBM – Promoting Learning
http://www-07.ibm.com/ibm/au/community/et_kidsmart_program.html
This website documents features of the IBM KidSmart Eary Learning Program. This program, which has been in existence since 2001, is designed to provide technology and training to promote and extend learning in disadvantaged pre-schools and child care centres in Australian and New Zealand. The website also contains a link to an online global resource for parents and teachers, which has been designed to complement the KidSmart program. The related site provides strategies that introduce young children to technology and can be implemented to enhance the learning of young children.

Queensland Government – IBM KidSmart Early Learning Program
http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/strategy/tsdev_kidsmart.html
This website provides insight into the KidSmart Early Learning Program developed IBM. It includes and overview of the project and covers the project’s main objectives as well as the achievements of those objectives. A time line is also provided as well as contact details of the project officer. In addition, the specific schools that participated in the 2007 initiative are listed on a linked page.

Australian National Schools Network - KidSmart Early Learning Program
http://www.ansn.edu.au/projects/kidsmart_early_learning_program
A variety of information about the KidSmart Early Learning Program is contained within this website. You can find a set of 11 printed brochures that document how various early childhood teacher implemented technology with a play-based curriculum, through the KidSmart program. An in depth case study is also provided as well as information about how the KidSmart Early Learning program was implemented in Moorditj Noongar Community College, WA, a school that caters for a large number of Indigenous students. The use of the KidSmart Early Learning program in Gracemere State School, a remote school 10 km  west of Rockhampton is also discussed. This school has a high proportion of lower income, single parents and Indigenous students.

A link to access a paper titled:  The introduction of new technologies: New possibilities for early childhood pedagogy is supplied.  A ‘day of sharing’ presented by Rockhampton and Townsville KidSmart clusters is documented on this site as well as a report from a KidSmart Cluster Day. A Kidsmart Early Learning Project CD-Rom is available for purchase via this site.