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"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.

why we fear creativity

great overview of different approaches to integrated  Curriculum

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.

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 post on Assessment in UK schools. Ties in with stuff about their national testing that they have had in place for more than a decade. This could be our crystal ball are we looking at our curriculum becoming narrower because we are all jumping through hoops? Assessment for learning? I dont think so. I would rather spend time planning great engaging lessons rather than lessons that are going to meet the National Testing criteria.

This is a great post on how to guide students to write powerful comments. Something that I think we should start concentrating on now that we have the blogging thing up and running. 

Wow look what we can do with google apps Ed which we are using via our student email. Plenty of things possible here. Google video is really only available for teachers at NFPS.

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.

Some ideas around why we created @motmedu Looking for a conference with a difference? What story do you have to tell? The #motm13 Unconference is built around stories for the purpose of making strong connections with other passionate educators who are integrating ICT with pedagogy.

We can't understand the humanities without understanding the cognitive processes that make them possible. Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the evolution of culture. E.O. Wilson is Pellegrino University Professor emeritus.

This ties in with the iPad Pd we did last Wednesday. Outlines and discusses the importance of documentation. Technology has the capacity to document the student learning experience and better still tech will facilitate students doing for them selves.

Another amazing Google Project. From the archaeological areas of Pompeii to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Google's World Wonders Project aims to bring to life the wonders of the modern and ancient world. By using our Street View technology, Google has a unique opportunity to make world heritage sites available to users across the globe. Street View is a hugely popular feature of Google Maps which is already available in dozens of countries. It allows users to virtually explore and navigate a neighborhood through panoramic street-level images. With advancements in our camera technologies we can now go off the beaten track to photograph some of the most significant places in the world so that anyone, anywhere can explore them.

Now, American copyright and patent laws run counter to this notion that we build on the work of others. Instead, these laws and laws around the world use the rather awkward analogy of property. Now, creative works may indeed be kind of like property, but it's property that we're all building on, and creations can only take root and grow once that ground has been prepared.

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.

Why do we bother... What I mean by this is... Dah!

This is going to be a handy resource when planning rich tasks. We have seen done of these before but is great to have them all in the one app. Worth a look.

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