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1. Just-in-time learning. Videogames give you just enough information that you can usefully apply. You are not given information you'll need for level 8 at level 1, which can often be the case with schools that download files of information that are never applied. Videogames provide doable challenges that are constantly pushing the edge of a player's competence. This is similar to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. Lev Vygotsky 2. Critical thinking. When you play videogames you're entering a virtual world with only the vaguest idea of what you are supposed to do. As a result, you need to explore the physics of the game and generate a hypothesis of how to navigate it. And then test it. Because games are complex, you are continually reformulating and retesting your hypothesis -- the hallmark of critical thinking. 3. Increased memory retention. Cognitive science has recently discovered that memory is a residue of thought. So what you think about is what you remember. As videogames make you think, they also hold the potential to increase memory retention. 4. Emotional interest. Videogames are emotionally engaging. Brain research has revealed that emotional interest helps humans learn. Basically, we don't pay attention to boring things. The amygdala is the emotional center of the brain and also the gateway to learning. 5. We learn best through images. Vision is our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources. The more visual input, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled. Videogames meet this learning principle in spades as interactive visual simulations.

Though Facebook will occasionally talk about the transparency of governments and corporations, what it really wants to advance is the transparency of individuals – or what it has called, at various moments, “radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”. The theory holds that the sunshine of sharing our intimate details will disinfect the moral mess of our lives. With the looming threat that our embarrassing information will be broadcast, we’ll behave better. And perhaps the ubiquity of incriminating photos and damning revelations will prod us to become more tolerant of one another’s sins. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly,” Zuckerberg has said. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated. The textbooks compare them to recipes – a series of precise steps that can be followed mindlessly. This is different from equations, which have one correct result. Algorithms merely capture the process for solving a problem and say nothing about where those steps ultimately lead.

For the first decades of computing, the term “algorithm” wasn’t much mentioned. But as computer science departments began sprouting across campuses in the 60s, the term acquired a new cachet. Its vogue was the product of status anxiety. Programmers, especially in the academy, were anxious to show that they weren’t mere technicians. They began to describe their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of the greatest of all mathematicians – the Persian polymath Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During the 12th century, translations of al-Khwarizmi introduced Arabic numerals to the west; his treatises pioneered algebra and trigonometry. By describing the algorithm as the fundamental element of programming, the computer scientists were attaching themselves to a grand history. It was a savvy piece of name-dropping: See, we’re not arriviste, we’re working with abstractions and theories, just like the mathematicians!

Are we teaching students to look for help everywhere to solve their problems? 4. There should be a K-12 agreement about which skills and software knowledge our students are going to graduate with. A expected skill set sounds like a good idea but is a list of required software competencies too prescriptive and unrealistic to maintain? Yes….first of all this is exaclty why the NETs for Students does not list software. If we teach software we are teaching a program not a skill. Let’s teach skills and use the appropriate program needed to accomplish the task at hand. Like Andrew points out, it really is unrealistic to maintain a list of all the programs that students have mastered, been exposed to, or know exist. I have seen schools try and do this and I have only seen a mess as the outcome. Students come and go, programs come and go, one year we are teaching X and the next year Y. Teach the skill and choose the program that fits.

Create can be met with paper and pencil, with glue and scissors, with a hammer and nail, or with movie maker and it should be the job of every teacher to expose students to different ways of creating content that fits within their discipline.

Where, perhaps, when considering how to best set up learning spaces for our students, we once thought it was a choice between a regular whiteboard and an interactive whiteboard, we now have a full array of options to choose from.

In our senior school, on the other hand, what a lesson looks like has been more radically shifting. Recently we have been able to flood our senior school with MacBooks and iPads.

Students have access to the tools and devices that can empower them to discover things for themselves. They can take charge of their learning, and personalise it in a way that never before has been possible.

Who would have thought starving partners of support would yield bad results?

For me, the Surface is a "Wordbook", a new device form-factor for running Word in ultra-portable, cloud-connected mode that also happens to be one degree away from a market ready post-PC tablet.

Does the market actually want a device that runs Office first, and does all the other tablet tasks second? Hardly.

Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge.

Having an audience can clarify thinking. It’s easy to win an argument inside your head. But when you face a real audience, you have to be truly convincing.

Once thinking is public, connections take over

Try out Google Docs new demo that lets you write collaboratively with your favorite dead famous writers. Then you get to save and share your creation. As Next Web explains: A “famous writer” will start typing and then it’s your turn. Once you’ve typed in the next line, the writer takes over

As internet usage has grown, so too have the various online networks which connect family, friends, colleagues and people with shared interests. Whilst it is often easy to gain a numerical overview of connections, friends or followers, this tends to add context, rather than insight – the fact remains, it can be difficult to dig that bit deeper and see how people within networks are linked. This poses a challenge for digital communicators as we want to tap into big, social data and visualise networks; so we can see how ideas may spread, understand who knows whom and identity people that are influential within a particular context. After all, if you can understand a network, you gain insight into who people may trust, find influential and credible.