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Multimedia presentations can enrich education and enhance learning for many students, but it can also pose barriers for others. Audio and video are inaccessible to people who are unable to hear, and video is inaccessible to people who are unable to see critical information that is presented visually. Other students are impacted by low bandwidth Internet connections. Multimedia players can pose barriers as well if the player controls require use of a mouse or if they are not labeled sufficiently to be usable by screen reader users.

It is almost precisely eighteen years since Donald Rumsfeld uttered his now well-regarded commentary on the danger of "unknown unknowns". At the time his remarks brought more confusion than clarity and reinforced for many a belief that politicians use words to conceal the truth. Somehow though, Donald's words from 2002 seem to fit the world of today, and the challenges confronting educators all too well.

It's not just Google. The Web has wiped out all the basic knowledge about practical critical thinking and problem solving that we used to learn through reinforcement learning - which made us far more able to be independent entities in all kinds of unique and atypical situations. Perhaps this is contributing to the rise of anxiety in young people: without those cognitive tools and skills, people are no longer sure of themselves as they once were.

The bushfire crisis that is currently impacting Australia is beyond devastating. The scale of these fires defies the imagination. For so long now we have lived with skies laden with smoke as a constant and inescapable reminder that this is not an ordinary summer. This is weather and drought at its most extreme. Our only salvation will be rain but this is not the season for that and the long term forecasts are not promising. Our young people, in particular, will be affected and will need special care in the weeks and months to come. What might this mean for schools and for student agency?

Our language choices communicate both intended and unintended messages. In the choices we make, in the subtlety of these choices, lies a truth more powerful than that conveyed by a literal reading of our words. When we look closely and critically at our use of language, we begin to see particular patterns which reveal much about what we genuinely value and expect from our learners. 

The Future of Education is a topic often discussed, and at the recent gathering of educators in Florence, it was the title and theme for the conference. Now in its ninth year, The Future of Education is an international conference that attracts educators from around the world and across all domains touched by education. The conference is an inspiring two days of discussion and sharing, with the city of Florence, the centre of the Renaissance, providing a constant reminder of what might be possible when creativity and critical thinking combine. Here are my key takeaways from this event.

"A recent study revealed students at an international school in Finland significantly outperformed U.S. students on tasks which measure digital literacy in social media and online news. The researchers suggest this may be due to the Finnish and International Baccalaureate curricula's different way of facilitating students' critical thinking skills compared to the US system and curriculum. The results of this study were published in the Journal of Research in International Education in April. Critical thinking is a 21st century skill considered essential for today's students to navigate the Information Age and for their future work life."

This is a segment from NPR's HIdden Brain about Dr. Martin Levy's use of a clicker, usually used to train dogs, to train surgical students. It's fascinating. Essentially, the argument is made that clickers work so well because it is a form of feedback that does not use any verbal signals - no praise, no reprimand, no "good job," no "not like that." Praise and criticism distract a learner from mastering the skill being taught, making a learner focus instead on pleasing the teacher. With nonverbal feedback, the learner doesn't focus on the teacher but on the skill being taught

"When we set out to create and encourage critical thinkers and problem solvers. We need to look at various aspects. How people will respond and adapt to the change. We need to further establish what our students need, do they need constant attention or space? Decoding a teenage brain, is it really difficult to understand teenagers?  I took workshops this year to enhance my understanding and sharing my know how with others.  I have realised that I always look for what's going to push the student, egg them on to ask questions, to look at themselves as stakeholders in their learning process and something that adds value to their existing experience of learning. "

Or the Elements of Euclid.

"In 1970 Paulo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed in response to the antiquated notion of education as filling empty vessels, where an oracular educator lectures ignorant learners, arguing instead for a change in the power balance in the classroom so instead of authoritarian teachers choosing the path of learning, a collaboration of teacher-students and student-teachers would form to make learning bespoke through critical dialogue and critical assessment of the knowledge is being, and in the process, change the world around them."

For most marketers, trying to organize and analyze spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel can feel like walking into a brick wall over and over again. You're manually replicating columns and scribbling down long-form math on a scrap of paper, all while thinking to yourself, "There has to be a better way to do this." Truth be told, there is -- you just don't know it yet. Excel can be tricky that way. On the one hand, it's an exceptionally powerful tool for reporting and analyzing marketing data. On the other, without the proper training, it's easy to feel like it's working against you. For starters, there are more than a dozen critical formulas Excel can automatically run for you so you're not combing through hundreds of cells with a calculator on your desk.

"Angry, threatening and highly critical parenting is more likely to result in children with defiant, noncompliant and revengeful behaviour that spills over to adulthood and impacts relationships with all authority figures. Now a study by researchers at UC San Francisco has confirmed this link and found that kindergarten may provide a unique opportunity for these harshly parented children to retool negative behaviour. The study is published in the journal Development and Psychopathology on Nov. 21, 2018. In the study, the researchers looked at 338 kindergartners in six public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. They found that 10 percent of the children met the criteria for the oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Among this group, 71 percent had been exposed to high levels of harsh parenting, versus 29 percent who had been raised with lower levels of harsh parenting."

"What are those key phrases you hear from frustrated teachers in the staffroom during breaks? Or on those rare occasions, you get to meet up with teachers from other schools on training courses? For me it is the following: 'They give up so easily,' 'Where is their stickability?' 'Why do they fear making a mistake?' However it is phrased, you get the gist, that pupils today have no resilience, they aren't prepared to keep going in the face of challenge or set back. They can't think their way around a problem. In discussions with staff within my own school (a large primary in an area of high deprivation in the north of England) I am frequently asked how we can help these children. As part of our school's SLT I have already supported staff to make daring changes to our curriculum but we still seem to be falling short of what we state in our vision; that we want our children to become resilient learners, confident individuals, critical thinkers and lifelong learners. (Traits that I am sure many schools up and down the land wish for their pupils to develop.) Why are our pupils struggling with 'resilience'? What opportunities can we, as a school, provide our children so that they develop these skills? After reading the blurb and the introductory pages, I was, as you can imagine, excited to delve further into this book to see if it could answer some of my questions."