This past week, President Bush signed into law a bill that will establish a new national research center for studying digital technology and learning. The center aspires be to edtech what the National Institutes of Health have been for medical research.

Nearly 41 million school-age children in the United States have access to expensive online educational tools like Live Homework Help, thanks to their public libraries. In fact, some 83 percent of U.S. public libraries provide their community's vital-and many rural areas, only-link to Web tools that might otherwise be out of their financial reach.

For anyone who attended college before the era of e-mails and the Internet, the notion that bulky textbooks could someday become obsolete might seem ludicrous. Yet with a wealth of information on virtually any topic now readily accessible online, more people are starting to ponder if these hefty staples of education will remain relevant.

Based on the integral role technology played in President-elect Barack Obama's campaign, as well as recent announcements that he will be creating a chief technology officer in the federal government for the first time, ed-tech experts suggest that the new administration could revolutionize the way technology is viewed in the United States, and, it is hoped, in education. President-elect Obama is doing for the Internet what John F. Kennedy did for television, says Hirsch, by making it a common and essential staple of American life.

The cellphone industry has a suggestion for improving the math skills of American students: spend more time on cellphones in the classroom.

Students are using personal technology tools more readily to study subject matter, collaborate with classmates, and complete assigments than they were several years ago, but they are generally asked to "power down" at school and abandon the electronic resources they rely on for learning outside of class, according to findings from a national survey released last week.

Fourteen tips for teachers. Includes a downloadable parent letter and permission form

HE Journal recently spoke with Knezek about the myriad of opportunities schools and teachers have available to them, both for exploring new technological tools and solutions in education and for making optimal use of the resources already at their immediate disposal. "The real goal," Knezek explained, "lies in moving all the programs in a school forward toward 21st century learning, or digital age learning."

It's no surprise that Elliot Soloway would be behind this idea, given his passionate interest in Palm handhelds as educational devices for the past decade.

World Book Student's "How to Do Research" feature provides tutorials and exercises for students and educators on 21st century information literacy skills.

Excellent video from Peggy Sheehy of SECOND LIFE fame. \n\nWhen kids at the Suffern Middle School were asked to talk about education and their future, they gave Peggy Sheehy, the SMS media specialist, an earful. Listen and learn the bits of wisdom that can be gleaned from the students, if we only dare to ask them

As school leaders prepare to spend billions of dollars in federal stimulus money, the American Library Association (ALA) is lobbying to have some of those dollars used to keep school libraries up to date during hard economic times.

Neuroscientist, Gary Small, tells CBS News' Daniel Sieberg how technology may be making us smarter.

It's important to teach students that just as we don't believe everything we hear on the radio, in the newspaper, on T.V., we can't believe everything on the Internet. Although the QUICK web site hasn't been updated since 2000, it does contain 8 great tips for evaluating web site information. They are presented in a clear and concise style with colorful graphics that will appeal to kids. Usually, such tips are offered by school librarians. This site was developed as an aid for consumers seeking health information.

An academic research team -- joining people from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland -- is hosting and working on the core of this wiki, which illustrates the beginning stages of a larger research project on Digital Natives. The site offers a wealth of information in 10 topic areas:
Digital Identity, digital safety, digital privacy, digital creativity, digital opportunities, digital information overload, digital information quality, digital piracy and digital education.

Anybody can post information on the Internet, making it possible to find "proof" of any ideas or beliefs you can imagine. Yet to many students, "If it's on the Internet, it must be true."

[June 2008] How can we make education technology and 21st century learning a national priority? Four education advocacy groups think they have part of the answer. The groups came together Tuesday to launch "One Giant Leap for Kids," a new campaign designed to bring ed tech to the forefront of the minds of the presidential candidates.

The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate.

As more and more students choose online courses either as alternatives to the traditional college experience or as a supplement, a lot of colleges have started to worry about how to prevent these students from cheating on remotely administered exams

The Future of Reading: Digital Versus Print.
This is the first in a series of articles that looks at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read.