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"Have you ever considered letting your students listen to hardcore punk while they take their mid-term exam? Decided to do away with Power Point presentations during your lectures? Urged your students to memorize more in order to remember more? If the answer is no, you may want to rethink your notions of psychology and its place in the learning environment. Here are 35 critical thinking strategies, straight from the mind of Sigmund Freud."

What purposes does education serve? What needs of humanity does education serve? What might the product of our labours be like and how might our efforts contribute to the greater good? These are questions we have long struggled with but with but it seems that in the current times we might need to rethink how we answer these questions.

"Bright, learning device, technology leverager, iApps savvy. Think I'm describing the new iPad? Rethink-and meet Steve Dembo, Discovery Education's Director of Social Media and Online Community, Mr. iPad Mavin and today's (1 - 2:30 PM Terrace Ballroom B) Featured Distinguished Presenter. Steve began his presentation with a confession: his initial bias against the iPad."

" A common tie between all these apps is Readability. The company provides a method to show content of Web site posts on the iPad without all of the extra distractions you have to sort through when viewing via a Web Browser. Now, Readability has released a Universal app for your iPad and iPhone. With the free app on our iPads, we need to examine how our time is best spent."

"Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck's best-selling book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, started a revolution in most of the schools that I work in this year, and for good reason: her findings are inspiring teachers and students and parents alike to rethink what it means to be a successful learner and what dispositions we must cultivate in order to make that vision a reality. This a complex study, and reflecting as we read brings interesting considerations to the surface. For instance, how can we stop perseverating on performance in order to cultivate a growth mindset?"

"Education-bashing has become something of a national sport in the United States. From hurling criticism about slipping test scores, socio-economic disparity, dropout rates, to raising concerns about poor teaching standards and school resources, the popular narrative is that U.S. schools are failing children. There's good reason for the pile-on: in many cases, the problems are real. While most of the conversation around education reform centers on how to address these existing issues, another point of view has been gaining momentum over the last several years. It's a point of view that is less focused on fine-tuning the current system for high performance-since the system was built in 1893 with the goal of churning out "good workers"-and more about rethinking education entirely and how it meets the world's rapidly changing economy in the information age. This topic is explored in depth in the feature-length documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance and will appear at the Tribeca Film Festival April 24. In the film, director, writer and producer Greg Whiteley casts a light on the shortcomings of established education methods by focusing on one school that's defying convention, San Diego's High Tech High. While following two ninth-grade classes for a year, with classroom instruction unlike anything you've ever seen, the doc offers some inspirational ideas for how to help students rise to the occasion of an innovation economy that requires critical thinking."

"The iPad is well-known as an amazing creation tool, but with Google Drive's "Open-In" feature on the iOS platform - the iPad has quickly become a collaboration device extraordinaire. Google Drive is best known for apps like Docs and Slides, and these are great platforms for students to work collaboratively on documents and presentations. However, Google Drive has one under-used feature that offers a secret collaborative power . This hidden power of Google Drive sits in the layers of the "i" button."

"The beginning of the school year is a time to set the tone for a student's learning experience, including what teachers expect from students and families. But that first week of school is also the time to teach valuable learning skills that will be used throughout the year. Alan November, a former teacher turned lecturer, consultant and author, challenged teachers to rethink how they start the school year by outlining skills that are crucial to students to learn in the first five days of school. He shared his vision at the International Society for Technology in Education conference in Philadelphia."

"I often wonder if what we see as teaching at professional learning events would be acceptable in a high school classroom. If the purpose of professional development (Pro-D) is professional learning, then what is our evidence that learning does, in fact, occur? Are we using effective teaching practices in Pro-D? Although Pro-D is evolving, the "Sit'n'Git" way of learning seems to still be alive and well in many conferences and workshops throughout Canada and the U.S. In the past five years, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat in a large conference room for a number of hours with hundreds of other dedicated educators and not been provided with the opportunity to even talk to the person beside me. People are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars to attend these events to listen to a series of lengthy lectures without the opportunity to network and wrestle with the presented ideas. I'm not opposed to a keynote address to start off the day with some inspiring, thought-provoking ideas; however, if there is no opportunity to take these ideas and move deeper, many of the thoughts that are initiated in the keynote get lost as I move on to the next session or listen to the next presenter. It's no secret that in order for deeper learning to occur, we must DO something with a new concept; we must apply new learning to take it from an idea to implementation. Our current typical model of Pro-D makes deeper learning a challenge and often only leaves participants with a few ideas that are unfortunately left on the shelf with the many glossy white binders from workshops of years past. At some point we need to stand up and say that a high volume of "Sit'n'Git" style of Pro-D is no longer acceptable and is an insult to those who have spent money, time, and effort to attend. While doing this, we also need to rethink the conference model and professional learning so that it better aligns with what we want to see in classrooms."

We have one mission: helping you find the right software for your computer or mobile phone. To do this we wanted to rethink the whole process of searching for apps. No more browsing through categories with long lists of crappy software.

So the question is, how do you ensure that students are truly taking their writing to a new level? How do you make sure that instead of just participating in low-level recall, students are moving on to the higher levels of analysis and reasoning that we want them to reach? One way is to rethink how you pose your writing topics. Here are some ideas and examples:

Schools in two states are piloting a game development program that weaves Web 2.0 skills, such as blogging, advanced social networking, and wiki contribution and use, with the full range of 21st-century skills, including collaboration, problem solving, decision making, and digital citizenship.