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And then I heard, “Mr. McCourt, the principal is at the door.” My heart sank as the principal entered, along with the superintendent of schools. Neither acknowledged me. They walked up and down, peering at papers. The superintendent picked one up, showed it to the principal. The superintendent frowned. The principal pursed his lips. On their way out, the principal said the superintendent would like to see me. Here it comes, I thought. The reckoning. The principal was sitting at his desk; the superintendent was standing. “Come in,” said the superintendent. “I just want to tell you that that lesson, that project, whatever the hell you were doing, was topnotch. Those kids were writing on the college level.” He turned to the principal and said, “That kid writing an excuse note for Judas. Brilliant. I just want to shake your hand,” he said, turning back to me. “There might be a letter in your file attesting to your energetic and imaginative teaching. Thank you.” God in heaven. High praise from an important person. Should I dance down the hallway, or lift and fly? Next day in class, I just started singing. The kids laughed. They said, “Man, school should be like this every day, us writing excuse notes and teachers singing all of a sudden.” Sooner or later, I figured, everyone needed an excuse. Also, if we sang today we could sing tomorrow, and why not? You don’t need an excuse for singing.

The noted philosopher once said, "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." My fear is that instead of knowing nothing except the fact of our own ignorance, we will know everything except the fact of our own ignorance. Google has given us the world at our fingertips, but speed and ubiquity are not the same as actually knowing something.

Socrates believed that we learn best by asking essential questions and testing tentative answers against reason and fact in a continual and virtuous circle of honest debate. We need to approach the contemporary knowledge explosion and the technologies propelling this new enlightenment in just that manner. Otherwise, the great knowledge and communication tsunami of the 21st century may drown us in a sea of trivia instead of lifting us up on a rising tide of possibility and promise.

A child born today could live into the 22nd century. It's difficult to imagine all that could transpire between now and then. One thing does seem apparent: Technical fixes to our outdated educational system are likely to be inadequate. We need to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Educators Social networking has certainly made students’ lives easier. Students share homework, notes and test information before teachers and school administrators even know about it. Grade books and lesson plans have been digital for a while but teachers (much like older people in general) have been slower to visit social sites. These social sites for teachers are going to change some outdated thinking.

Picture a classroom where every student has their own tablet PC, with wireless internet access and videoconferencing equipment to give them access to academics, industry experts and other schools around the world. The teacher begins the lesson by drawing students’ attention to a new discussion thread that’s appeared overnight on an online forum about a text they’re studying.

You no longer need to be fluent in HTML to benefit from the digital revolution. Web 2.0 tools are closing the divide between richer and poorer regions, and between the ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ of the online world. Cloud computing, where resources and software are stored online, means hardware is no longer necessary, and the growth of free programmes and services lets anyone create their own wiki, blog or podcast.

The extent to which technology can transform the world, and education, is illustrated by the ‘flat classroom’ project, run by Julie Lindsay, head of information technology and e-learning at Qatar Academy in Doha, Qatar, and Vicki Davis of Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia, USA. The project began in 2006 as an online collaboration between the two schools, inspired by Thomas L. Friedman’s book The World is Flat. It has now sprouted two sister projects – ‘digiteen’ and ‘horizon’, which have so far involved more than 800 students and 200 educators from across the world.

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