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New educational uses of cellphones are challenging the "turned off and out of sight" rules that many districts have adopted for student cellphones on campus.

A growing number of teachers, carefully navigating district policies and addressing their own concerns, are having students use their personal cellphones to make podcasts, take field notes, and organize their schedules and homework

"In our district, especially at high school, students have a cellphone on them at all times, just like a pencil—it's an underused too

Researchers at the Pew Internet and American Life Project polled Internet users and found that 11 percent are using Twitter and similar short-form online message services or status updates.

Profiling the Twitter set, Pew found that they are prone to mobile computing, frequently dashing off status updates from their smartphones or laptops using a wireless connection.

Roughly 20 percent of online adults between the ages of 18 and 34 said they use status-update services, compared with four percent of adults between the ages of 55 and 64, and just four percent of those 65 and older.

The Washington Post recently published a really interesting article on the ability of well-connected parents to influence the decisions of their local school districts (hat tip to The Science Goddess). The term ‘well-connected’ refers to parents’ abilities to use online tools to communicate and mobilize (rather than to their connections to people with power).

Below are a few examples of parents pushing back on their local school systems. Parent tools include blogs, online petitions, and even administration countdown timers! I’ve linked to individual posts but you can click on the headers to see the blogs in their entirety. Has MCPS dropped American History from its curriculum? Change mayoral control? Beware the mushroom cloud! Media pig Wanted: a full-day kindergarten slot - do you feel lucky?

Online communication technologies have greatly amplified the abilities of parents to voice their opinions and mobilize for desired change. Activist parents now have a bevy of new tools and strategies to help facilitate their agendas and they are not afraid to use them. School organizations are going to have to get used to this new state of affairs in which parent activism and criticism are more public, permanent, and far-reaching. I’m pretty sure that most school leaders haven’t really thought about this…

In one case, an eighth-grade language arts teacher wanted to create podcasts of poems her students wrote. "We set it up so they could type in their poems and put them in PowerPoint slides, with credits and animation. Then they would play it and record an Audacity sound clip using microphones, then attach the sound clip to the PowerPoint slide," Polen explained. "When they played the final product, it was the students reading the words of their poems as the slides scrolled through. There was a lot of learning on everyone's part for that one."

At Pittsburg High School, a 36-week Foundations for Technology course is on tap to allow students to use state-of-the-art computers, the Internet, Web design, desktop publishing, digital imaging and video editing, with a price tag of an estimated $300,000.