NEW YORK -- Los Angeles' school system, the second largest in the United States, is ordering iPads for all its students, handing Apple a major success in its quest to make the tablet computer a replacement for textbooks.

To hear executives at inBloom tell it, their $100 million education technology start-up is shutting down after only 15 months of operation because it was too far ahead of its time. The seed money for this nonprofit corporation came from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

We've all seen presentations - from students and from colleagues - that leave a lot to be desired. There's the one where the presenter wants to play with all the bells and whistles in the presentation, so we get different transitions, different fonts, different sound effects.

Google's launch into the learning management system world was received with a lot of buzz. Classroom, a centralized place for teachers and students to communicate, work on assignments and have discussions, is scheduled for release in September 2014. As a teacher who utilizes Google Apps for Education every day in his classroom, this has certainly piqued my interest.

The panel convened by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to review New York's troubled rollout of the Common Core learning standards will present its recommendations this spring.