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This looks fantastic a must see for any class looking at water and or waterways.

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.

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

Thoughtful Classroom: Teaching to overcome educational disadvantage  conference notes from presenters. This was a great conference with some amazing ideas. A couple of the presenters have shared there presentations here. 

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.

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.

Useful website, contains lesson plans with enlargable examples for projection.  

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

Blog post with ideas about keeping students moving during Project Based tasks and encouraging students to collaborate and share 

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."

This could be fun for the more advanced maths students looking to play with a bit of Algebra. 

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

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.

Heaps of cool experiments to try in the classroom with explanations of the Science behind it!

A great site for beginning teachers to access resources to create a classroom environment rich with learning. 

"@pbeens: I've just blogged about Google Blockly - A Great Way to Introduce Basic CS Concepts - http://t.co/0Z3f4bGY want to get into some coding. Check this out. Might see how it goes with some grade 2's

Great blog with heaps of interactive student online flash games for the class room

Great sight with a huge list of sites where students can create Art Work online

wiki support site to help with wiki issues

Great article asking the question of why teachers fear technology. It poses some great quesitons in regards to how slow we are as teachers to keep up with what our students consider their world.