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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.

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.

Love LEGO bricks? Your favourite coloured bricks are now in Chrome. Check out Build, the world's biggest LEGO set available on your browser. Over the last few months, we've been working with our friends at LEGO Australia on a new project to bring your favourite LEGO bricks to Chrome.  Created downunder and exclusive to Australia and New Zealand, Build is our latest Chrome Experiment and uses the latest in browser technology in Chrome

Another paper questioning connectivist claims that it is a learning theory.  "It seems that here, thrown away false modesty, connectivism is putting forward its candidacy to represent a new paradigm, even if this application is not supplied with a consistent reference theoretical frame."

Best techy-nerd site on the web for gadget and IT news

Transmedia is it the new way to teach storytelling/writing? This idea could fit nicely into our students multi platformed online lives and communities. Interesting. 

Great post for the new doc's user and some useful tips and tools for the experienced user. Bookmark on your tool bar if you are a regular google docs user. 

Some great ideas and activities to do when meeting that new class for the first time.

This is a great site

News reader which you use to sync with google reader that you use with your mac. Worth a look for keeping up with all your student blogs and classblogs.

Interesting post from a prolific Ed blogger who has always written about Ed and the "bleeding edge" worth following and very readable. This post posits that if we are to introduce a non Americanised version of PBL then we should expect systematic change over a long period of time so that it becomes ingrained in the learning culture of the school. I particularly like this position because it takes into account the longevity of the teachers capacity not only to with stand the change but also to be part of the new paradigm.

On June 21 2012, the Government released a discussion paper which states its vision for the improvement of the teaching profession. The 'New Directions for School Leadership and the Teaching Profession,' aims to stimulate and inform discussion on the future of the teaching profession and school leadership.  As a collective of grass roots teachers, who are not currently being asked to participate in educational debates and discussion, we see this as an opportunity to enable teachers' voice.   Teachers: A great, yet untapped, source for policy makers.

As games, particularly virtual worlds, become increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in the spaces of these massively multiplayer online games is fundamentally different than what we have come to consider as standard pedagogical practice. The distinction the authors make is that traditional paradigms of instruction have addressed learning as "learning about," while these new forms of learning deal with knowledge through the dynamic of "learning to be." It is the authors' contention that the experiences offered within virtual worlds provide a fundamentally different way of thinking about

Doing shape and or tessellation in Maths??? This blog post could come in handy. Some interesting discussion on tessellation in real life. So the next question is why do we teach tessellation in maths? Shouldn't we just get rid of this aspect of maths and create a new subject called design??

Great list of music teachers who blog

Awesome finally we have real time editing with collaborators and an in built chat function. This is going to make our team planning days easier. Looking forward to seeing if it has a Land scape function.  

What to start tweeting? This is a great article for beginners.

A whole new way to appreciate great literature - good ideas to use in all classrooms 

A great new video upload site to use for your blogs. The storage is small but at least it's free and private.