Looking for a way to boost writing progress amongst your pupils this year? Searching for that elusive hook to inspire reluctant writers, or a way to showcase pupils’ work to a global audience? Step forward LitFilmFest - the Primary school festival, sponsored by YouTube Kids, that offers Key Stage 2 teachers free, fully-planned and resourced literacy units on a whole range of writing genres.

As technology advances and information comes in so many new forms each year, the challenge to obtain engagement and interest, as well as ensuring suitable absorption of facts, becomes much greater.

By the time children finish at Primary school they will have written stories, poems, factual accounts, autobiographies essays and plays. But their own song? Hmm, possibly not. It just seems too difficult, too personal and, for many years, way beyond my comfort zone! And yet I’m aware children know hundreds and hundreds of songs. Their whole lives are wrapped in sound, from early nursery rhymes to the latest chart hits. Access to YouTube means that they don’t have to step outside to access songs and music from the whole world over.

On Friday 7th July, Shireland Collegiate Academy in the West Midlands hosted their very own Innovate My School LIVE event. This was the first stop on a school budget-centric roadshow showing school leaders how to do more with less.

It’s been a hard few weeks. Every day when I wake up and turn on the TV, there seems to be more and more terrible things happening in the world. Sometimes this makes it hard to get out of bed, get to work and put on your ‘teacher’ face. Difficult questions from pupils and answers that seem hollow.

The BAMEed Network is a movement for all, and its aim is to ensure visible diversity in the education sector. It is a network for support, challenge and advice. The Network held their first conference on the topic of Unconscious Bias in Birmingham earlier this month.

I tweet and blog a lot about my network and how being an outward-facing leader who is connected to a wider educational community fuels me. It the last few years through Twitter, StaffRm, #WomenEd and now #BAMEed, through #TeachMeets, #leadmeets and #researched I have met a plethora of fantastic educational contacts who have inspired me, empowered me and connected me. Through these connections I have ended up meeting brilliant educators and collaborating on some fantastic projects. These collaborations have reignited my passion for my profession.

The British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) have launched the Resource Our Schools campaign, an initiative working to ensure that every school across the UK has access to the resources they require for first-rate teaching and learning. The campaign has already attracted support from the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) and numerous subject associations. Innovate My School are also supporting the initiative, fitting in with our mission to aid teachers by sharing much-needed school resources.

I wasn’t always going to be a teacher. In 1988, I was at Jesus College, Oxford researching the iconography of landscape in British film. In the late eighties, it was a topic right on the edge of Geography. My thesis supervisor was the razor sharp Professor David Harvey; probably the most famous geographer in the world at that time. But a postcard note in my college pigeonhole changed the direction of my life. A colleague in the School of Geography had obtained a lectureship and asked me to take over his part time teaching job at St Edward's School in Summertown, an Independent School just north of Oxford. I accepted the job. I thought it would be an interesting change from the Upper Reading Rooms and the cramped viewing booths of the British Film Institute, plus a much needed boost to my scholarship stipend.

James and Louise play a game of pool. Louise strikes the ball at a 45-degree angle and watches with great fascination to see how many times the ball bounces against the cushion. She wonders if the number of bounces would change if she had a bigger or a smaller pool table. She drags James around countless pool halls, keeping a record in a hand-drawn tally chart attached to her clipboard, until she believes that she has collected enough data to find a pattern. After several hours of puzzling, Louise finds a rule and is able to use this rule to find out how many bounces there will be on any pool table in the world!