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Lately I have been thinking a lot about thinking. More specifically, I have been thinking hard about the absence of thought in education. The absence of thought in students, teachers, administrators and policy-makers. This year's political discourse is a wider-world reminder of the ubiquitous lack of thought on the part of otherwise educated adults. We know more but are oddly - increasingly? - thoughtless. Why? Thinking, in the sense in which I am interested, is not mere mental work (or idle mental noodling). There is certainly lots of that going on everywhere. Thinking in the educational sense is not about doing one's work. Little thought need go into a typical course pacing guide or by a student in filling in a Venn diagram. Those are mental tasks. Such work cannot by itself yield a truly thinking person.

Dr. Yong Zhao is an internationally known scholar, author, and speaker. His works focus on the implications of globalization and technology on education. He has designed schools that cultivate global competence, developed computer games for language learning, and founded research and develop institutions to explore innovative education models. He has published over 100 articles and 20 books, including Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization and World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Student

This is a great article outlining the success of the Finnish education system. They don't standardise test, they don't track or target teach, they have smaller class sizes, train, educate and pay their teachers better. Dah!! That's why they top the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results. What's happening in Australia???

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

A useful collection of education videos 

a list of the top ten sites visited by those interested in ipads and education

"Art does not solve problems, but makes us aware of their existence," sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz has said. Arts education, on the other hand, does solve problems. Years of research show that it's closely linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement, and equitable opportunity.

If you are a teacher and want to keep your finger on the pulse of whats going on globally in education or even locally. Get tweeting. This blog posts explains twitter for educators and why its import to develop a Personal learning network

Every Australian student will study the arts from their first year of school under the new national arts curriculum, which was released today for public consultation.

It disturbs me to read this and how familiar it is to what the LNP have been spruiking. Is this the future of Australian Ed?

Great list of music teachers who blog

Read this for great reasons as to why teachers should blog

"Want to help out students and colleagues with handy tips on improving search results and using popular Google products like Google Earth? Just print out these posters and hang them where everyone can see them." Some of these are essential for every classroom. 

Interesting article about how to use minecraft in an educational setting. 

This looks to be a great resource for all things iOS in education. I am emphasizing this page for some of the funky looking Math apps. Has anyone used used any of these and if so are the good?

For years, almost no-one wanted to talk about education policy. Suddenly everyone is. Of course, just because you can invoke the name of "Gonski" doesn't mean you've read the Sydney businessman's talismanic report on schools funding reform, much less understood it. Schools funding is a complex topic. There's an alphabet soup of abstract acronyms (SES, AGSRC) and a spaghetti diagram of administrative structures. Funding for a particular school could include money from parents, from a major church, from a state or territory, and from Canberra. The formula is set with a bewildering array of equations, fed by the demographic chance of Census data.

An essay I wrote inquiring into the notion of everyday creativity and its significance in its application in the education context. If you have time and are interested... :-)

Fantastic article that discusses the complexities of being a teacher that in an impoverished school. A must read for perspective. 

10 tips for personal learning networks