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“Are we asking our students to collect dots or connect dots?” asks author Seth Godin

The last 15 Web-frenzied years have upended the basic premise of school. The idea that content and knowledge and teachers are scarce and have to be collected into a local classroom during a certain time period in order to educate our children is no longer true.

Given the enormous impact that technology has had on nearly every other aspect of our society, how can that be?

Today our collective vision for education is broader, our nation is more complex and diverse, and our technical capabilities are more powerful. But we continue to assume the factory-model classroom and its rigid bell schedules, credit requirements, age-based grade levels, and physical specifications when we talk about school reform.

our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do.

unless traditional teaching practices morph to adapt and fully take advantage of what mobile devices can afford, some fear the promise will go the way of all the technology collecting dust in the corner of the classroom. Worse, it might eventually lead to what everyone unequivocally dreads: the mechanization of teaching.

“Right now, the iPad craze is using the same content on a different device. Schools must change the pedagogy.”

Off the grid-for-little-kids videos and other smart stuff collected by Rion Nakaya and her three year old co-curator.

Dual Browsing is one way of multitasking on your iPad that works easily and well. Take a look at this collection of dual browser to find one that is right for you.

Content Curation is an apt term that makes a lot of sense in this era of social networking.

So, what is Content curation? It is a technique of collecting videos, tweets, blogs, images, presentations, slide shows and any other content  from several websites (Internet) and present them all in the same window, categorized or grouped under interesting topics

John Seely Brown on Interest-Driven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play

in the past, it was likely to be very hard to find other people around you with your specialized interests. For example, when I was obsessed with building transmitters and radios as a kid, there were maybe five other kids in the entire state of New York who were also designing electronic equipment. I had no cohort group. Today, no matter how specialized a kid’s interest is, he or she will find a cohort group. When my godson was 9, he became fixated on penguins. He went on the internet, and he found himself a group or a collective that was deeply engaged with penguins. I said to him one day, “Well, who is this group?” And he said, “Well, they have a funny name.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Johns Hopkins!” He’d locked into a research group at Johns Hopkins! Yes, as a 9-year-old.

I personally feel that in order to get hooked on something—well, that’s the role of a great teacher, a great mentor. The role of the mentor is to get you to discover things you might not actually know you were interested in, to confront topics you may not be very good at understanding, but once discovered, you will.

As we push forward with the digital transformation of education, it's worth taking a look at just how greatly technology can impact teaching and learning in this country -- and what's at stake, not just for our students but our society as a whole.

students thirst for connections between what they're learning in the classroom (and how) and what they see happening in the real world

Increasing engagement is about