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A detailed discussion from the journal about launching a 1:1 ipad program beginning with leadership and cost and moving through other issues. I do wish this article had a few more links but it is a great read for those who are discussing this (like we are at my school.)

Excited to see Discovery work with an incredible nonprofit, Girls Inc to bring STEM to girls. Now THIS Is something with a lot of potential. Girls INc is a great organization that I worked with here in Albany (yes, back in the 90 - has been a while) but I was always impressed with their programs. Excited to watch this develop.

Two studies were released in an attempt to "quantify the benefits of mobile technology in education and the infrastructure needed..." In these students students had tablets and Internet access at home and at school. Of course, I'm not sure that it is tablet computers that give benefits, Internet access, cloud computing, or a combination, but I'm sure these studies will be touted by many far and wide. Of course, remember if they had strapped the tablets to the kid''s back and hadn't used them - they would have had lower scores. All improvement is all in how technology is being USED to teach. "The studies put Android tablets in the hands of students and their teachers in two schools - eighth-graders at Stone Middle School in Fairfax County Public Schools and fifth-graders at Falconer Elementary School in Chicago Public Schools - and provided wireless access to the students both in school and away from school. (The devices were HTC Evo tablets.) Researchers then followed the students' activities over the course of a year, with the aim of evaluating "how access to these devices for communication with teachers and classmates increases comfort with technology, extends the learning day, and allows students to develop digital citizenship skills within a safe and secure learning environment.""

Teachers who use technology frequently in their classrooms perceive greater benefits to student learning--particularly learning 21st century skills--than teachers who are less frequent users. That's one of the major findings from a K-12 technology study released Monday by researchers out of the Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership at Minnesota's Walden University.

"Printed books are losing out to digital resources, bringing profound change to school libraries while provoking a fierce debate over the very act of reading."

Open Source software is "not like free beer. It's more like free puppies."

That's why we're here," she said. "So I can show you not only what's out there but also how other educators are using these resources to teach their students right now."

"The biggest challenge we're presented with right now is how to take advantage of all the things the Internet has to offer without compromising our students' security or giving them access to things that are inappropriate,"

During his recent talk at the FETC 2009 conference in Orlando, FL, Benno opened with an interesting factoid: "Nine out of 10 students don't wear wristwatches," he said. "And the one that does doesn't use it as a timepiece; they use it to make a fashion statement." So why does that matter? It matters, said Benno, because it speaks to the fact that kids use technology in very different ways from what most of us are used to. From cell phones to iPods to a wide array of Web-based tools, "kids today are very fluid and open about their use of technology," Benno said. And if we are going to prepare them for a world that is constantly changing, he added, we need to rethink the ways we use and interact with these very same tools in the classroom.

Is there a link between air pollution and student performance in K-12 schools? That's what University of Michigan researchers said they hope to discover as they embark on a three-year research project to determine correlations between air quality and performance benchmarks like absenteeism, test scores, and dropout rates.

While most districts are still tackling Web-based collaboration tools from pedagogical and security perspectives, a large number of teachers are already out there using these tools to supplement instruction, engage learners, and encourage their students to become producers of information, as well as consumers of it. In other words, they're experimenting. And here are some of the free tools they're using to do it.