E-safety charity Childnet have launched Trust Me, a new, free resource designed to support Primary and Secondary school teachers in exploring critical thinking online. Developed in partnership with the London Grid for Learning (LGfL) Safeguarding Board to address the emerging area of online extremism and propaganda, the practical resource aims to provoke discussion among students so as to challenge young people to think critically about what they see online.

You’ve just been gifted 120 iPads by a very kind benefactor. Which department would you give them to? For me, the answer is a real no brainer: the Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) department. Some would say I’m biased, and maybe that’s true, but I have put my impartial hat on to answer that question and although Humanities came a very close second I still maintain that MFL naturally lends itself to technology use.

Staff and pupils from Ysgol Cae Top, Bangor, have teamed up with local IT company Semantise Ltd to help parents keep up to date with the school's activities. Innovative iPhone and Android app eeZeeTrip enables parents to quickly see details of the school events and trips children are going on. eeZeeTrip was the brainchild of Llew Davis, headteacher at Cae Top, who wanted to solve the problem of the large number of letters going to and from home.

Edu-software experts busythings have been bringing multiplication to life in Primary schools throughout the UK with the latest addition to their cross-curricular online resource: Miner Birds Multiplication. With the recent emphasis on times tables, this original revision game is raising the bar in helping teachers to improve engagement and attainment levels in multiplication by delighting and inspiring children with fun gameplay, high-quality graphics, animation and sound effects.

School Spider's newest addition to their ICT-oriented product set provides parents with a free-to-use push notification and messaging app. The resource allows schools to send messages to all parents, with the School Spider app available at zero cost.

At this month’s Bett Show, assistive-technology experts Conversor will be launching their new Notetalker app, which will allow students and teachers to record audio, bookmarks and images in the classroom. With this resource, everything from the lesson’s discussion to guided reading and Science experiments can be easily captured in detail. Bett 2016 will be taking place from 20th - 23rd January at ExCeL London, and the Conversor team will be hosting Stand G83.

Explain Everything: Without a doubt my signature app, I have used Explain Everything in a number of ways. It is ideal for editing and improving pupils’ written work. By simply taking a photo of the child’s work, I record myself reading it out, using the cursor tool to encourage children to read along with me, and the pen and shape tool to annotate positive features of their work.

Schools in half a dozen countries around the world are now using ParentPaperwork, an online forms platform designed for both staff and parents. Most schools still rely on a paper-based forms to capture parent permissions for activities like excursions and sports activities. With this internet-based alternative, schools have an easy-to-use replacement for all paper forms.

Getting students enthused about Computing can often be a bit of a battle. I wanted them to really benefit from understanding the purpose of the subject and how it can be applied to the real world. Being an all-boys school, our students are often very competitive with one another, which made me think about incorporating an element of competition in order to motivate them and bring some excitement to the subject.

In this post I will discuss Google’s latest educational tool, Google Classroom, and outline five key features that I feel make it a great addition to the Google Apps for Education family. Google Classroom is not yet a full-featured Learning Management System (LMS), but it does possess a number of attributes that make it very attractive for both learners and teachers. It is available to any school that has Google Apps for Education.