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managing a 15-member student team who run seminars, market the initiative, develop applications, and maintain a social network of schools and students. Travis has created team management sites, runs a popular blog, helped hundreds of students learn, and created YouTube videos inspiring tens of thousands of students and educators.

By blocking social media schools are also blocking the opportunity: 1)    to teach students about the inventive and powerful ways communities around the world are using social media 2)    for students and teachers to experience the educational potential of social media together 3)    for students to distribute their work with the larger world 4)    for students to reimagine their creative and civic identities in the age of networked media

One of the best examples I have seen of the flex model was in Morgan Hill, California. This is a district south of San Jose where about a third of its students are Hispanic and I believe over a third of its students are on free-and-reduced price lunch. The school is called the Silicon Valley Flex Academy - Grades 6 through 12. As you walk into the school there are a couple of huge open spaces on either side where every student has his/her own office. In this space, each student has his/her own computer. The students are encouraged to decorate their own space with things they like (in the same way an adult might decorate an office at work). There are break out classrooms around the perimeter of the building. Here teachers are getting the data on how the kids are doing. Teachers can pull students into these break-out classrooms in very small groups. The teacher is then able to focus on a student's individual issues. The teacher's job is totally different in this arrangement. The fascinating thing was how much ownership the students have over their learning. They all knew exactly what was expected of them the entire year. They knew exactly how they were doing at any point. Their job was to learn the material. If they could get the work done during the school day there was no homework. So it was up to the individual students to make those decisions.

The teachers I spoke to explained that they had been trained to do lesson planning, lectures to large groups of students and classroom management -- none of which they were now doing. They explained that the adjustment was difficult. Training has not been built into the formal teacher training system for programs like this, and few are really thinking about it at the moment. Now, the teacher is still doing teaching or tutoring when pulling students out into small groups for project-based work, but instead of this being determined by a pacing guide, this is now being determined by where the students are in their learning. What was so interesting was that in this model, teachers were able to do the tutoring and value enrichment work that teachers really like to do but don't always get time to do in a classroom. One of the challenges the teachers mentioned was staying on top of scheduling. How do you keep track when you have students at different places in the curriculum? Those were tough decisions for teachers to make and they were, as you say, learning on the job.

When students own their learning, they feel responsible for it and motivated to do it. What they also appreciated was that the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.

The implication that has not been expressed here or in the industry now is Mobile First - the principal of everything being developed for mobile first,' Schmidt said.

'In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,'

Every recent product announcement we have made - and of course we have a desktop version - is being made from the point of view of it being used on a high-performance mobile phone on all the browsers that are available. Now the programmers want to work on those apps for mobile that you can't get on a desktop - applications that are personal and location-aware.