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"ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."

This guest blog post by New York School Superintendent Neil Rochelle provides insight about his district's journey to integrate Web 2.0 tools with teaching and learning. Neil is the superintendent of Iroquois Central School District. His personal blog is titled "Changing High Schools" and he also blogs on LeaderTalk.

Example of how blogs have been successfully implemented in classrooms (with a multi-cultural class) in Germany - much to the surprise of the teachers!

Blogs und Wikis beginnen den Unterricht zu revolutionieren. Sie verändern die Lehrerrolle und fordern auch Schüler individuell heraus, die sich in der Klasse gar nicht zu Wort melden würden.

Microsoft Word 2007 has a new built-in equation editor which is the default when you create equations. It no longer uses the Microsoft Equation 3.0 add-in by default, however you can still access and use it if you prefer. Using the Word 2007 equation editor, equations can only be inserted into Word 2007 and not into Excel 2007. However the previous Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0 is available in PowerPoint, or any application that supports OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

Blogs are naturally "publish at will" platforms. While blogs certainly CAN be configured to have new posts "moderated" by someone serving in the role of a gatekeeper, by default most blogs allow users to publish INSTANTLY. If you're interested in setting up a blog for moderated posting by students, I'd recommend using Class Blogmeister for this purpose. Wordpress blogs can be configured for contributor posts to be moderated as well, but this requires a bit of configuration. (This is the setup we're using here on isteconnects, btw.) On the Wordpress dashboard, under SETTINGS - GENERAL SETTINGS, we've checked the MEMBERSHIP box ANYONE CAN REGisteR and set the "New User Default Role" to be CONTRIBUTOR. With these configuration settings, new posts must be reviewed by a user designated as an "editor" or "administrator" before they become "live" on the site. For more on this, see the Wordpress.org CODEX article "Roles and Capabilities." To setup a free classroom or personal Wordpress blog you don't have to host yourself, I recommend using EduBlogs or Wordpress.com. Blogs setup with Blogger can similarly be setup as "team" blogs with moderated contributions from members which can include students and/or teachers. See the Blogger help article "How do I create a team blog?" for more details. My post from July 2008, "How can our school set up a team blog for teachers?" also gives more information about this for Wordpress users.

Great video of Wesch discusssing the shifts in education and why we need to transform our learning environments. He also navigates through his transformed learning environment.