IN Australia, primary school teachers receive, on average, 17 hours of mandatory music education in their teacher education courses. In South Australia it is even less. In Finland it is 270 hours. What is 17 hours of music education supposed to achieve? One has to ask: Why bother?

A great info graphic with some interesting ideas on how to promote your blog.

It seems that every school is considering purchasing iPads these days, and Apple has reported that iPad sales to schools are currently outselling MacBook sales by a very large margin. However, the rush to purchase iPads often precedes the careful planning and preparation that's so crucial to their success as educational tools. Technology alone is never the answer. Instead, iPad use needs to be integrated within a holistic approach to 21st-century education that encompasses a thorough and ongoing review of the skills and competencies required in our rapidly changing society and the educational processes that best help students acquire them.

Great list of digital story telling apps and web apps . Some of these are worth exploring if you are looking to integrate ICT into your literacy lesson.

Some great ideas here for integrating ICT to facilitate better writing and formative assessment. Any experienced English teacher knows the drill: on the dreaded due date, students bring printed copies of their essays to class, where we collect them, take them home, jot inscrutable comments in the margins, bring them back to class, return them, and then watch students promptly toss them in the recycling bin on the way out of the room. The whole cycle borders on farce. Students pretend to spend many hours writing their papers, teachers pretend to spend many hours grading them, and we all pretend like repeating this process over and over again leads to something we in education like to call "student growth."

Edublogs is built on WordPress - which was once just for blogs. But now, WordPress is used for way more than blogs and powers around 20% of the entire web! It never stops amazing us when we see all of the different ways that educators are using Edublogs and we don't get to share them all often enough. So, here's a rundown of ten of the most common, along with some examples for inspiration and ideas!

A fantastic Google Presentation by John Pearce looking at Web 2.0 tools and other cloud based apps to support thinking

OMG! Everything you need to know about Pixlr a great online photo editing tool that links in with your Google drive account.

My first year teaching a literacy coach came to observe my classroom. After the students left, she commented on how I asked the whole class a question, would wait just a few seconds, and then answer it myself. "It's cute," she added. Um, I don't think she thought it was so cute. I think she was treading lightly on the ever-so shaky ego of a brand-new teacher while still giving me some very necessary feedback.

"Sometimes a visual guide comes along and it just makes total sense. That's how I felt about Allan Carrington's clever 'Padagogy Wheel' which we featured on Edudemic last week. Check out the previous version then view the one below to see the differences. From what I can tell, putting the wheel on this site has generated a bit of buzz and I'm glad we could help spread the knowledge. But I was quite amazed this morning when I saw that the Padagogy Wheel had been updated. Now at version 2.0, it features another band around the edge focusing on the SAMR Model and on helping teachers (and admins) effectively integrate education technology. In this new model Allan sorted the dozens of apps and steps of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy into the SAMR Model (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition)."

Some great posters here. The language use on these posters could be used when formulating the Bell PS Digital Citizenship Manifesto.

"ur FREE materials are designed to empower students to think critically, behave safely, and participate responsibly in our digital world. Use our interactive SCOPE & SEQUENCE to find the lessons that are just right for your classroom. These cross-curricular units spiral to address digital literacy and citizenship topics in an age-appropriate way. Browse by grade band or click a category to highlight lessons that address that topic."

"Use our Scope & Sequence tool to find the lessons that are just right for your classroom. These cross-curriculular units spiral to address digital literacy and citizenship topics in an age-appropriate way. Browse by grade band or click a category to highlight the lessons that address that topic. You can download a PDF of the Scope & Sequence (en español)."

Thinking is pretty much invisible. To be sure, sometimes people explain the thoughts behind a particular conclusion, but often they do not. Mostly, thinking happens under the hood, within the marvelous engine of our mind-brain. As the name suggests, the basic strategy is to make thinking visible in the context of learning.

Great video of Piaget talking about his theory of how knowledge is constructed. Interesting swipe at Chomsky. I must look into it more.

A proven program for enhancing students' thinking and comprehension abilities Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study.? Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines?small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps?as well as the documentation of student thinking.?Using this process thinking becomes visible as the students'?different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon

There are 20 different 'Thinking Keys' each designed to unlock different parts of the thinking process.The use of the keys helps to develop flexible problem solving and thinking habits. The thinking keys provide a flexible and dynamic way to engage students in further learning. They are a great way to do informal assessment during the unit for measuring student understanding. The students really enjoy the range of activities that the keys enable them to choose from and subsequently produce interesting and thoughtful work.

Thinkers Keys Welcome to an exciting framework for the teaching of thinking to young people. The Thinkers Keys are twenty powerful strategies for generating quality thinking in many learning situations. They were written explicitly for 8 to 14 year-olds, although we have often found them being used in classrooms of 5 year-olds, and also in senior school and university environments. Here's a 2-min video about the electronic Thinkers Keys.

Here is a google search to thinkers keys

Type in a short message with letters and numbers, and your students can plot the points to reveal it in the grid. You can make this message anything you like, for example, "TRAVIS LOVES GEOMETRY". The best plotting exercises seem to come from messages which are three to seven words in length.