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"To acquire and practice literacy skills today, students and educators in Oklahoma City Public Schools require access to Evernote, Google Docs, Gmail, Edmodo, Posterous, Celebrate Oklahoma Voices, and other educationally appropriate, interactive websites. All these websites are currently (as of February 9, 2012) blocked by OKCPS for student access. OKCPS must stop its "draconian" and unjustified Internet content filtering policies and adopt BALANCED policies. The district must TRUST teachers and empower them to directly bypass the content filter with their login credentials when it is professionally justified for instruction and learning."

"The National Academy of Education (NAEd) released a new report on Big Data in Education: Balancing the Benefits of Educational Research and Student Privacy. The report addresses a fundamental tension of how to reap the educational benefits that access to comprehensive "big" data provides while ensuring student privacy."

"We're in a technology tsunami," says her coach, Ms. Klaus. "Whether you love it or hate it, ultimately we have to figure out how to survive it and make it work for us."

Most of us recognize that schools should be helping students learn how to do deep, rich, technology-infused knowledge work that prepares them for future citizenship, college, work, and other life needs. Many principals and superintendents, however, are struggling to balance the need to technologically empower students with countervailing organizational concerns regarding safety, respectful behavior, and the law. In my conversations with school administrators about Internet safety and student technology usage, I use many of the talking points below. Use some of them to spark a conversation with your local educators and community.

If wanted to take a mooc - do you have any recommendations on what to avoid? I am interested in digital storytelling and all things video game (and gamification).

"For the fiscal year 2017 budget, the U.S. Department of Education (Education) estimates that all federally issued Direct Loans in Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans will have government costs of $74 billion, higher than previous budget estimates. IDR plans are designed to help ease student debt burden by setting loan payments as a percentage of borrower income, extending repayment periods from the standard 10 years to up to 25 years, and forgiving remaining balances at the end of that period. While actual costs cannot be known until borrowers repay their loans, GAO found that current IDR plan budget estimates are more than double what was originally expected for loans made in fiscal years 2009 through 2016 (the only years for which original estimates are available). This growth is largely due to the rising volume of loans in IDR plans."

"I created the document below as a menu of choices between iPad apps and Web 2.0 applications that can be used to employ types of formative assessments. It is organized to encourage a balanced approach to formative assessment so that teachers can easily see the various options they might have to encourage Write, Do, and Say in the classroom."

" I thought I would outline that range of public and private interactions in my classes, starting with the very most public and then progressing step by step to the most private: email. Although I have made a lot of changes to the content and procedures and technology in my courses over the past ten years, I have really not changed this balance of public and private - somehow or other, I blundered into a configuration of public and private that worked perfectly for me right from the start of my online teaching career."

"LeBlanc and College for America are calling it a "learning relationship management system," a composite term to describe a learning management system build on top of Salesforce, the popular customer relationship management software. LeBlanc said the system aims to strike a balance between "lots of things that CIOs love" -- such as software as a service and cloud hosting -- with "what educators love.""

instead of two years, it would last 10 months-long enough to make friends, participate in experiential parts of the program, and become members of the club. They would pay a fee for the immersion, but not the balance of their tuition. After that, students would graduate into the work force, but they would stay enrolled at Wharton on a subscription basis. One day, a Wharton subscriber working in investment banking might get put on a team that oversees mergers and acquisitions. Instead of aching to recall the lessons she learned back in business school (and later forgot), she takes an online "minicourse" from Wharton. "The new pattern becomes learn-certify-deploy, learn-certify-deploy," the professors write in their paper.

"The key question we face is whether online learning should aim to replace teachers and instructors through automation, or whether technology should be used to empower not only teachers but also learners. Of course, the answer will always be a mix of both, but getting the balance right is critical."

"If everyone on the planet were to step on one side of a giant balance scale, and all the bacteria on Earth were to be placed on the other side, we'd shoot violently upward. That's because all the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans."

"We were happy to find no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings,  or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office. Well-being standards were uniform across the board as well; Googlers or teams who work virtually find ways to prioritize a steady work-life balance by prioritizing important rituals like a healthy night's sleep and exercise just as non-distributed team members do. At the same time, we did hear from Googlers that working with colleagues across the globe can make it more difficult to establish connections-in many senses of the word. Coordinating schedules across time zones and booking a conference room for a video chat takes more logistical brain power than dropping by a coworkers desk for a meeting over coffee. The technology itself can also be limiting- glitchy video or faulty sound makes impromptu conversations that help teammates get to know, and trust each other, seem like more trouble than they're worth."

"The Center for Educational Measurement (CEM) at Excelsior College and Cengage Learning recently partnered to begin planning and development of a product called a CourXam, which combines a self-paced digital course with a proctored, college-credit-bearing examination and is powered by Learning Objects, a subsidiary of Cengage Learning. Unlike a college course, CourXams will be available directly to consumers."

Created by William Horton (2006), this model is most useful in 1) providing a lens for instructors to be intentional about the variety and balance of activities provided in a course, and 2) building scaffolded activity sequences that require progressively higher order thinking skills.

"Our eyes are weird and often mislead us. But if you know the peculiarities of human vision, you can construct better designs. Not only do type designers utilize optical tricks for creating readable and well-balanced fonts, but it's also helpful for designers, who craft user-computer interaction."

Many companies now search candidates' social-media accounts to get a better feel for their personalities, to see if they have creative flair, and to find out how well they communicate. Done right, your profile can work in your favor. Of 2,184 hiring managers recently surveyed by CareerBuilder, one-fifth said a candidate's online profile helped them land a position. More often, though, it backfires: 43 percent said they found information that led them not to hire a candidate, up 9 percentage points from last year. That trend means either that more job applicants are behaving badly online or that human resources is getting stricter in sniffing out problems.

I think this article raises a point that we should absolutely acknowledge. Although I don't believe I am "behaving badly" online, what if some of my viewpoints do not entirely mesh with a future employer. Are they less likely to hire me because I have critical opinions about certain policies, etc.? I think it is this issue in particular that makes people reticent to fully participate. However, this is our new reality. How to balance it?

"Horror stories have been published about employers asking for job applicants' Facebook passwords. Recently, psychologists discovered that employers frown upon applicants without a Facebook presence. The lack of a profile raises many red flags: is this person anti-social? Was once tagged in too many party photos? Is he or she just pretentious?"

"Working 24/7 is not the only way to achieve success in academia. There, I've said it. A recent article described the working week of people across academia. This included the science professor who "compensates for the time he spends with his young children in the evening and at weekends by getting up before they do", and the early career researcher who "tries to take at least a half-day off a week". While many colleagues have similar working patterns and are happy (or at least not unhappy) working in this way, I am meeting increasing numbers of promising academics who reject it."