Having taught in primary and secondary schools for around 35 years, Kathryn Bullen has experienced for herself the impact of increasing workload and pressure on classroom teachers.
Teacher shortages, the result of many leaving the profession and established difficulties in retaining graduate teachers for more than five years, have compounded the situation forcing many of those left to the point of burnout.
Over the decades the curriculum has become far more crowded with less preparation time ... but despite the challenges there remains a classroom of young minds who are there to learn.
Much of Ms Bullen's classroom time over the years has been spent teaching music, English as another language, and literacy.
Ms Bullen said the resources and teaching props that engage students have changed over time as children themselves have changed, and finding a hook to catch and hold their interest was vital.
One of her favourite topics, which particularly resonated with her students learning English as another language, was a unit called Blue on ocean conservation.
She used resources from cool.org to build lessons and inspire her young charges.
"There was a well-created fantastic video that came out, a documentary about what is happening to marine life and all these interviews with experts around Australia about what is happening to the ocean.
"They were really interesting interviews and not too long so when teaching a class it held their attention."
Ms Bullen said the cool.org resources included teaching activities, reflections and age-appropriate actions that children could take.
"I did this with English as another language students and part of it was looking at ocean guardians, explaining what it meant, and asking how we were going to look after the oceans and how they were going to take responsibility for doing that.
"These children, for whom English is not their first language, wrote reflections about how they could be ocean guardians which were really astounding and I kept those reflections for a long time.
"They were able to put this into writing, how they felt and they were deeply and really moved by it. You could tell they were really affected."
Son of the Just Jeans family Jason Kimberley founded cool.org to support under-pressure teachers. Since 2008 it has provided more than 175,000 educators with free teaching resources and activities for kids from kindergarten to year 10.
Research has shown that 45 per cent of teachers are forced to work outside their field of expertise, 76 per cent of teachers find their workload unmanageable, and 90 per cent of teachers don't have enough time to effectively prepare lessons.
Cool.org topics are varied ranging from health and wellbeing to economics, technology, conservation, environment, biology, relationships, current events and more.
Ms Bullen said she had used the cool.org resources in various contexts over the years after stumbling across the website.
"One of the great things is it's aligned with the Australian curriculum, set out beautifully and states all the curriculum standard points that teachers have to address when teaching ... which is a great bonus for teachers.
"We are so busy, teaching is such a demanding profession and it makes life a lot easier when you've got all that sorted out and you don't have to go and find out how it align with the curriculum."
It also acts as a "springboard for ideas" when teachers are deciding what activities to use when teaching different subjects.
Ms Bullen said she also valued the breadth of different subjects areas that each topic can cover.
"They might be doing a topic on conservation and climate change but it can be used across different subject areas - humanities, English, history - which works really well especially in primary school where teachers teach all subjects."
Providing fact-checked context to current national and international issues was also a benefit for children and adolescents learning about what's happening in their world.
