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"New high-tech standardized tests are coming soon to schools across the country, but will these new tests really revolutionize how we measure whether children are learning? The designers of the new tests, which a majority of states plan to adopt in two years, are allowing a sneak peek at sample questions."

I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.

After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the "alphabet song," and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word "Lion."

This organization has a mission of providing laptops to children all over the world, especially in poverty stricken areas.

"These children have grown up with digital technologies, but in a very limited way. They know a few things quite deeply, but they - as we did at their age - have no great appreciation of the subtleties of the tools. The expanse and use of the tools. The possibilities for tools that don't yet exist. They can push buttons, but they can't make them."

"If you want humans to fear and respect their robot overlords you have to start early. Elementary school children in Korea in the cities of Masan and Daegu are among the first to be exposed to robotic teachers. "

""For some people, [the] path to college is so easy that they can get out into life and they've never really been challenged," he tells NPR's David Greene. "I think they get into their 20s and 30s and they really feel lost - they feel like they never had those character-building experiences as adolescents, as kids, that really make a difference when they get to adulthood.""

"TechChef4u offers multiple resources to support teachers and parents in their search for FREE quality apps to support their children and students. While the TechChef4u app is an educational app store that provides searchable and categorized lists of 500+ FREE apps for PK-12, the app doesn't stop there. "

"Anyone who works with children with autism knows the difficulties in regulating emotions.  Within an hour, a child can go from 'sleepy' to 'boiling' and not have strategies to get to the 'green' area."

"As soon as I walked into that dusty, remote town and the smiling children started coming up to me, I just knew my Facebook profile photo would change forever,"

"The definition of "a state education" may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages."

"And honestly, given three things-that, according to what a school administrator told me, Colorado law allows parents to refuse the testing on behalf of their children; that the testing enrollment forms include an option to "refuse testing"; and that we currently live in Boulder, one of the most liberal, individualistic towns in America-we truly didn't think this would be a big deal. Boy, were we wrong."

"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."

"Let's face it, a resume doesn't really tell you much more than the prospective candidate's background and credentials. Though this information is important, is it really the most important information you are looking for when hiring an educator you are going to charge with helping to shape the minds of children who will ultimately dictate the future of our world?"

"Mass higher education, conceptually, is practical, low cost, skills oriented, and mainly concerned with teaching. It caught on because state legislatures and businesses saw it as a means of economic development and a supplier of personnel, and because families saw it as a way of ensuring a place in the middle class for their children. Research universities, on the other hand, grant extraordinary freedom and empowerment to a small, elaborately trained and selected group of people whose mission is to pursue knowledge and understanding without the constraints of immediate practical applicability under which most of the rest of the world has to operate."

"Until we address the scarcity in children's lives and schools, addressing teacher quality is a futile distraction, just as continuing to change standards and tests is a futile distraction. Instead of labeling, ranking, and then firing teachers, our first best step would be to end the cult of high-stakes testing because the problems of education are mostly systemic (social and educational) and not the adults who choose to teach or the children we seek to serve."

The New York Education Department recently stated that in the first 11 months of 2011 there were 69 cases where teachers were accused of inappropriate conduct with students on Facebook. Some were fired as a result, and there is a growing trend by schools across the country to put a ban on social media. This raises a question: Is prohibiting social media in schools the right way to protect children?

""The whole NCLB era, and really back to the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s, was about getting kids to grade level, to minimal proficiency," says Peters. "There seems to be a change in belief now - that you need to show growth in every student.""