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When my first born headed off to first grade, 21 years ago, she held my hand as we walked down the hallway of Will Rogers Elementary School in the Houston Independent School District. We walked into Ms. Miner's room and Meredith's steps grew more hesitant. This wasn't the University of Houston Child Care Center, the place she had gone for years while I was a doctoral student at UH. This place looked different - bigger, more official. There were big-kid desks pushed together in clusters. And though there were centers, they were not the dress-up center or the cooking center or nap center or water play center of the Child Care Center.

Teachers have set aside time. Families have rearranged their schedules. Everyone is ready for parent-teacher conferences. This can play out in one of two ways. If there is something crucial to discuss, you might wonder: Shouldn't the parents and teachers have been communicating about this already? If there is nothing crucial to discuss, is it a waste of everyone's time?

There's an array of Twitter tools that make the rounds on the ol' edtech circle. We chat about Hootsuite, Paper.li, and Bit.ly quite a bit. But there are a lot of little-known Twitter tools that don't see the light of day on sites like Edudemic. So I thought this would be a good time to start fixing that. We're creating a series of helpful posts designed to turn you on to a few tools that you may not know about - but will be anxious to try once you learn about them.

Curious about how people use "geek" and "nerd" to describe themselves and if there was any difference between the two terms, Burr Settles analyzed words used in tweets that contained the two. Settles used pointwise mutual information (PMI), which essentially provided a measure of the geekness or nerdiness of a term.

I love TED talks and I always look forward for their new releases. You can learn as deep and profound insights from these talks as when reading a non-fiction book. I know we all have our time constraints that would not allow us to sit in front of an iPad or computer for 20 minutes watching a talk but there is always snatches of time to do it particularly in the weekends. Create a list of what to watch , as I do, and bookmark the talks that interest you and watch them later when you have time.

Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer and perennial bestselling author, has a new book out. It's called David and Goliath: Misfits, Underdogs, and the Art of Battling Giants. I reviewed it (PDF) in last weekend's edition of The Wall Street Journal. (Other reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Millions, to name a few.) Even though the WSJ editors kindly gave me about 2500 words to go into depth about the book, there were many things I did not have space to discuss or elaborate on. This post contains some additional thoughts about Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath, the general modus operandi of his writing, and how he and others conceive of what he is doing.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to serve as a discussant after a group of panelists, all teachers in the "spring" of their careers (even one first year teacher), spoke on transforming classrooms and schools. The panel discussion was part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education's symposium called "Education for a New Era." This particular session was entitled "Teaching Along the Edge," and the moderator, Dr. Jocelyn Glazier (a former high school English teacher and current associate professor at UNC), shared that she wanted "to find the places where there is light" in education. She shared that "education is a practice of freedom," and she hoped the panelists would look at current inequities and move students "beyond basic skills."

Although educators tend to feel like they are left all on their own to deal with students that are getting crazier by the day, there are plenty of technology resources that can make their teaching job more effective. Educators should definitely start using some of the online solutions that are meant to promote modern education and take the classroom organization to the next level. In this article, we will cover 20 education technology tools that educators should start using as soon as possible.

Search engines are, in a sense, the heartbeat of the internet; "googling" has become a part of everyday speech and is even recognized by Merriam-Webster as a grammatically correct verb. It's a common misconception, however, that googling a search term will reveal every site out there that addresses your search. In fact, typical search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing actually access only a tiny fraction - estimated at 0.03% - of the internet. The sites that traditional searches yield are part of what's known as the Surface Web, which is comprised of indexed pages that a search engine's web crawlers are programmed to retrieve

"Over the last few years, there has been a growing awareness of the need to incorporate character development into school curricula, and various efforts to do so have received wide attention. Perhaps the best-known effort is the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, which has been implemented in close to 150 charter schools across the country."

We have started something that we can not control.  Students are gradually assuming more responsibility and ownership for what they learn and how they learn it.  This is a good thing, but like splitting an atom inside of a cardboard box, there is no hope of containing its power and potential.  Yet, by and large, we stubbornly cling to a traditional school system, attempting to control student learning in the confines of a specific space, time and method.