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I have just had the opportunity to spend the weekend learning alongside a large group of mathematics teachers. After a day and a half of talking and thinking about mathematics teaching, I am excited to get back to school and try out some new ideas. There were also some key takeaways for me that I share below. These are the questions or wonderings that my mind wandered to while listening to the numerous talented speakers over the past two days.

These two powerful questions framed a recent webinar presented by Professor David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero. Answering these questions and helping teachers find meaningful and contextually relevant answers to these questions has been a focus of Perkins' work, especially in recent times. His book "Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World" introduced us to the notion of lifeworthy learning or that which is "likely to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live". This is a powerful notion and one that has the potential to change not only what we teach but also how we go about teaching what we do.

The PZ Sydney Network has achieved many of its goals in the past five years. Most importantly the network has been able to provide high-quality professional development to many educators through free events large and small and both face-to-face and online. The PZ Sydney Network has been able to expand its reach and in recognition of this is transforming to become the PZ Australia Network.

"According to the Australian Disability Clearninghouse on Education and Training (ADCET) The number of students with disability in university study has increased from 11,656 in 1995 to 42,111 in 2011 and that one in five people in Australia have one or more disabilities, which is increasing. This means that 1 in 20 students has a disability that impacts on their study. Improving student outcomes requires us to "build-in" equitable policies and practices across the organisation, as statistically as much as 20% of the student-body need it, and have a right to it."

"alexphrodisiac Version 1.0 - Oct 11, 2008 This app is extremely professionally done and highly useful to Stanford students. It's not the smallest campus, and the maps feature comes in handy when navigating, or to find a specific building or place on campus. The directory is also incredibly useful, and the athletics and courses features are great to have. Soon, the ability to actually register for courses will be made available on this app, and that will only further increase its utility. Great job in nearly every aspect of the app. Again, this is an absolute MUST HAVE for Stanford students. "

"PeP allows students to enter log and journal entries about their clinical experiences that are tied to specific competencies as required by the CRNBC (College of Registered Nurses of British Columbia) and CNA (Canadian Nurses Association) provincial and national nursing organizations. … It also allows students to export their portfolio information outside of the system to use throughout their professional careers."

The paper identifies a set of universal instructional design (UID) principles appropriate to distance education (DE) and tailored to the needs of instructional designers and instructors teaching online. These principles are then used to assess the accessibility level of a sample online course and the availability of options in its LMS platform (Moodle) to increase course accessibility.

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) provides a framework and support infrastructure to facilitate trusted electronic communications and collaboration within and between universities and research institutions in Australia and overseas. The AAF uses cutting edge technologies to provide a range of automatic identification services, which will allow authentication of people (researchers, teachers and students) and resources (servers, services, networks, instruments and data). It enables resource owners to identify and authorise a researcher to access online resources, such as computer facilities, data and other research infrastructure, at their home institution, at other Australian institutions, and around the world.

theory and practice in teaching for a digital age Summary of the main learning theories Educators have had to work out how to move from the theoretical position to the practical one of applying these theories within an educational experience. In other words, they have had to develop teaching methods that build on such learning theories. - See more at: http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/07/29/learning-theories-and-online-learning/#sthash.xcYNEKOe.dpuf

Sometimes, it seems everyone who ever went to school is an expert on education and has a plan to make it better. Actual teaching experience, years of professional learning and formal training are all easily swept aside. The result is an ongoing dialog around what schools should do, what teachers need to do more of or less of and how the academic success of the nation is linked to strategy x or y.

Understanding the "Why" of any initiative should be a key step prior to implementation. Without a clear understanding of our "Why" how are we to judge the success of what we are implementing. How will we know which steps take us in the right direction if we have no concept of why we are journeying. In our implementation of ICT (Information & Communication Technologies) and now Digital Technologies, a lack of clarity on the matter of "Why" has often been the most significant challenge to success. 

How we see ourselves, how we describe ourselves reveals a great deal about how we see 'others'. In May of this year, speaking to the audience of the International Conference on Thinking, Bruno Della Chiesa invited us to consider how we might approach the question of "who we are?". In responding to such a question, what list of affiliations do we invoke to define ourselves?

Data occupies a somewhat curious place within education. Mention it to teachers and you tend to get one of two responses. One group will roll their eyes and with great sarcasm how data is "so exciting". The other group responds with something akin to "actually I quite like data" indicating that experience has shown them that they are members of a small group. The question is why do some people find data to be a useful and fascinating tool while others see it as a good method for inducing sleep? 

How might we prepare our students for an unknown future? If we accept that we are living in times of rapid change and that the world our children will inhabit is likely to be very different from the world of today, or perhaps more importantly, different from the work our current education system was designed to serve, what should we do to ensure our children are able to thrive?

We live in a time of chaos, complexity and contradiction. (Sardar, 2010 [1]) Where rapid changes and transformations through technology, politics, globalisation and the climate, conspire against normality (Friedman, 2016 [2]) These times demand a fresh approach to education, one that provides learners with the thinking dispositions they need to turn challenges into opportunities, to connect their learning to their passions and emerge from their years of formal education as self-navigating life-long learners. 

It seems that thanks to COVID19, educators, parents and students are in a rush. It seems the rush started moments after the decision was made to promote social distancing by offering remote learning. From quality learning in classrooms focused on deep learning we shifted into top gear. Packets of work were prepared, online tools rapidly expanded, new options for content delivery were examined and quickly deployed. We wanted to make sure that our students would be kept busy. Parents wanted their children to be busy. - Maybe slow looking is the solution?

Our collective ability to learn and by doing so, adapt to changing circumstances through the acquisition of new skills and dispositions is what Edward de Bono refers to as EBNE; Essential But Not Enough. - What then might education need as it develops a response to times of rapid change?