Critical thinking is, among many things, the ability to understand and apply the abstract, the ability to infer and to meaningfully investigate. It’s the skills needed to see parallels, comprehend intersections, identify problems, and develop sustainable solutions.

sound critical thinking is imperative to social progress.

Cultivating critical thinking may be accomplished with modeling

have kids read (and write) mostly on their own -- if your goal were to cause them to lose interest in what they’re doing.

every single study that has examined grades and intrinsic motivation has found that the former has a negative effect on the latter.

What matters is not what we teach; it’s what they learn,[14] and the probability of real learning is far higher when the students have a lot to say about both the content and the process.

1. A personal profiler that would collect and store personal information. 2. An information and resource aggregator to collect information and resources. 3. Editors and publishers enabling people to produce and publish artifacts to aid the learning and interest of others. 4. Helper applications that would provide the pedagogical backbone of the PLE and make connections with other internet services to help the learner make sense of information, applications and resources. 5. Services of the learners choice. 6. Recommenders of information and resources.

Try and find that balance between learning and living. Understanding that you can not know it all, and begin to understand that you can rely on your network to learn and store knowledge for you.

The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity

For older students, Silvia Tolisano, a technology and 21st-century learning specialist, offers a comprehensive blog post on helping students take their blog skills to the next level. She focuses on the ability of blogs to help students become better writers, and be part of a network and contribute to a larger community.