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Creativity is often said to be the key to the future. The essentially human attribute that will ensure our utility in a world dominated by automation. It is said to be an essential ingredient in education but it will not be truly learned unless we provide students with opportunities to dive fully into its waters. 

This much-maligned question seems so appropriate for education's recent history. All that was normal, everything that was routine, all of our structures, have been turned upside down and hurled into the wind of COVID19. From having spoken of a future dominated by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), we have found ourselves living in it. Innovation and creativity became the new normal as we "Apollo 13" schooling into a model that met the demands of emergency remote learning. The pressure, the workload, the demands on our time and the cognitive load have all been immense, and so it seems fitting to ask "Are we there yet?".

Google Docs is a user friendly suite of online collaborative tools that come with tremendous potential for use in the classroom. Last year all of the students in our school  received Google Docs accounts and I was kept quite busy getting students and teachers up and running with the new tools, then discovering innovative ways to use them as effective tools for learning. Here are some of the favorites.

Not that long ago I was a writer of interesting and engaging educational programmes. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. The programmes that I wrote and shared with a team of teachers were generally well accepted and the feedback offered was always politely positive. I enjoyed writing these programmes but in recent times I have enjoyed even more stepping away from this process and in doing so empowering the team of teachers that I learn with. The programmes that this team produces far exceed the quality I could ever have hoped to produce but more importantly the students are benefiting from their experience of highly engaged and thus engaging teachers.

"a free public service to teach children to read with phonics" pointed out by Ken Bain (2012)

I have created a playlist of tools to help students efficiently find information using a variety of digital tools to match unique learning styles. If you would like to use this with your students, click the Share Playlist link at the bottom to grab the embed code or link.

Comparison of Moodle Quiz Tools with Articulate Quizmaker 1.2 by Loren Rochester. Finely detailed point by point comparison between the Open Source Moodle Quiz system and the Rapid E-Learning Design and expensive ($399]

Spend time in any school talking to teachers and even students about thinking and learning and you are likely to hear the phrase 'Bloom's taxonomy' passed around. More than likely you will see it displayed on a wall as a set of processes learners engage with when working in the cognitive domain but how might we maximise the benefits of Bloom's Taxonomy?

This traditional pedagogy results in students developing a negative attitude towards mathematics. Many develop a mathematical phobia and believe that they are not a "maths person". When confronted by challenging mathematics they retreat and have no or only poor strategies with which to approach new ideas. This all leads to a decline in the number of students pursuing mathematical learning beyond the years where it is compulsory. Fortunately there is a growing body of research that shows there is a better way. 

Teachers are a busy lot. We are a profession whose workload seems to be forever on the rise and as much as you do, there is always more to be done, more to be learned, new challenges to be surmounted and exciting new opportunities to be explored. For all of this it is important to make the most efficient use of the tools we have at our disposal. Google Forms can help. 

Understanding the "Why" of any initiative should be a key step prior to implementation. Without a clear understanding of our "Why" how are we to judge the success of what we are implementing. How will we know which steps take us in the right direction if we have no concept of why we are journeying. In our implementation of ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) and now Digital Technologies, a lack of clarity on the matter of "Why" has often been the most significant challenge to success. 

Recently I have been diving into the world of Assessment, seeking to better understand how we might design effective processes around this essential phase of the learning cycle. In doing so I have found a wealth of resources and quality reads that offer insights and strategies to be applied into our classrooms. Here then is a sampling of what I have been reading. 

Create an avatar and connect with Your Digital Self through multimedia. Create links to whatever it is that helps you define your digital self. This is fun! . Revisit it often and link to your favorites. Turn it in and receive a badge.

Teachers embracing technology to support the Common Core and new ways of teaching may want to get organized and prepared for some positive changes. Here are 3 ways to get  ready for change in the New Year.

Wizer is a fantastic free tool for creating simple digital worksheets that enable learners and teachers to do some pretty complex things. When I first discovered the tool a few months back I was really impressed by how easy it was to create really engaging blended learning content for class or homework, so it's great to be able to publish this Q & A with Nira Mayorchik Sheleg the Co-founder & CEO.

Society confronts educational change in an odd, entirely counter intuitive manner. On one hand we acknowledge that education can and should do a better job of preparing our children for the future while on the other we cling to the models of education that we knew. This led educational writer Will Richardson to state that 'the biggest barrier to rethinking schooling in response to the changing worldscape is our own experience in schools'. Our understandings of what school should be like and our imaginings of what school could be like are so clouded by this experience that even the best evidence for change is overlooked or mistrusted.

We struggle to achieve balance with so many parts of our lives. We see things in dichotomies and try to weigh one against the other believing that we must give time to one and not the other. This tendency to see things in often false dichotomies leads to the problem of the "want to' vs the 'have to'. Unfortunately, when we are faced with this dilemma we often make a choice in favour of the 'have to' but we chose this option for the wrong reasons.

Recently I have been thinking about the role I play in encouraging my students to think and to trust in themselves as capable learners. This is largely due to the topic of our Term Four Unit of Inquiry.

A well made site for teaching young learners phonics through interactive video presentations. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English