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The Microsoft Education Community is a great, free resource for teachers. It has free web courses on using Microsoft tools and on best practices for using technology in education. There are discussion groups, resources and training tools available. You can earn badges and certifications through the site also. The site is easy to navigate and has some excellent resources. The training goes from the basics of using email, to Office 365 to new products like Sway. It also includes 21st Century Learning, Accessibility and more. Teachers share resources here, as well as providing support and feedback to each other. There are even some great virtual field trips. Check it out! Related: Microsoft Education Resources, including Office 365 .

The Teachers Guild is a really interesting new initiative with the goal to "Bring together teachers, just like you, to collaborate and solve 30 education challenges in three years. Building on each others’ ideas, we will amaze our students, schools and the greater system with a flood of new and better solutions designed by and for teachers." It is an ambitious, worthy goal that has some great potential. Finally, someone sees the fact that teachers are the experts in education and need to be part of any project or reform that has to do with education. David Harrington, from Google, has a great explanation on LinkedIn  (read more at the link): This is about an enabler, and it’s brand new this week. It’s called The Teachers Guild , created by an innovation group that includes the world-famous design firm IDEO and Google . Both Ideo and Google use Design Thinking, a process that was created pre-1970, expanded in the 80's and 90's, and has now moved beyond the narrower ...