Really, there are so many apps available it can be hard to know where to begin and once you find something that looks useful, it's difficult to assess it properly until you've download and installed it on your iPad. iPad music apps that are free can take away the risk of choosing a dud and they can be useful when book-listing apps for students on a tight budget.

"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. 

These are great template for some of the thinking routines from the "Making Thinking Visible" book from project zero. Team leaders all have a copy. 

The Literacy Shed is home to a wealth of visual resources that I have collected over my 10 year career as a primary school teacher.   I trawl youtube, vimeo and other sites looking for suitable resources to use in the sheds. The sheds are broadly thematic but sometimes a resource could go in 2 or more sheds, I slot it in where I think it works best. 

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.

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.

I was even more intrigued when he made reference to the work of Bernard Suits that claims there are three constituent parts that make up games: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

Great list of tools for creative thinking. Tools for creating ideas. From the usual suspects like brainstorming and mind mapping through to less discussed notions like incubation and morphological analysis. 

Great getting started and how to for edmodo: Edmodo is a 'walled garden' social networking tool designed by teachers for teachers and students. 

I was even more intrigued when he made reference to the work of Bernard Suits that claims there are three constituent parts that make up games: To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].

A+ Click is a free site full of online mathematics games for students at all grade levels. You can find games on A+ Click by selecting a grade level then selecting a topic. Alternatively, you select just a topic or just a grade level and browse through all of the games. Students do not need to register in order to play the games.

Everyone loves paper planes. These are ace! Says my 3 year old. It was a great morning of paper plane making and testing. 

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.

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.

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?