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New education standards place more emphasis on nonfiction reading and writing over fiction works. Some say this could lead students away from a passionate engagement with literature.

Apps from Google and Apple could help third parties create profiles on children, says an FTC report that found a number of troubling practices.

We are JUST PARENTS trying to help our kids  in this club that engages in Craftsmanship, Authentic Learning,  Citizenship and Community

Science class is about to look a lot more boring. One million kids logged on to Maker Camp last summer, so today Google and Maker Faire announced the second year of its online summer camp that teaches teens to build, hack and explore. The six-week program on Google+ includes virtual field trips to NASA, CERN, and Disney Imagineering plus making tensile strength towers, glowing candy, and potato canons.

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."

The whole theme was how to get kids comfortable with failing. We teach them from the beginning that it really isn't okay, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise in my classroom that they are afraid to go there.

""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.""

"When kids are playing, they are in the discovery mode and there is little or no self-regulation happening. Children need to develop a set of cognitive skills so they can think deeper about their learning."

"In a fascinating article in Scientific American, teachers Jody Passanisi and Shara Peters make the case that, while kids today have a seemingly innate facility with technology, they are quick to become impatient and discouraged when faced with complex tasks involving digital tools"

Great quote: "Just because a child jumps at the opportunity to program a TV to record his or her favorite shows does not mean that he or she will approach a classroom learning tool with the same zeal."

"The fact is, irresponsible social media conduct could potentially ruin your education and negatively impact your career, not to mention hurt others in the process. (And we're not just talking kids, either.) But most of those consequences are preventable, often with just a little foresight."

"In "whoa buddy, I'm not so sure about that" news, one Texas school district is in the process of implementing a new way to ensure student safety and make sure that kids are where they need to be while on campus. At least, that's what they say. Others may call it a giant mandatory student tracking program."

"My prediction? Hold fast, millennials. This current wave of punditry will peak and then start declining six years from now. In 2020, about half of you will have turned 30. You'll no longer be young-and therefore no longer scary-and today's rhetoric about your entitlement and narcissism will evaporate. You'll be in charge. I can't imagine what you're going to say about the kids being born today."

What happens to the printed book in the 1-to-1 classroom? Klein: I think the printed textbook should be given a respectful and decent burial. I think it should be gone... There is no reason you can't give kids a digitized version of the textbook. I actually think the textbook itself is going to become anachronistic. The teaching experience that has curriculum and textbook elements integrated is the way of the future.

Brandon, like many blue-collar millennials, is stuck on a journey to adulthood with no end in sight. His own parents, who had just high-school degrees, were married, steadily employed at the college, and homeowners well before they reached his age. But working-class kids today are growing up in a world where taken-for-granted pathways to adulthood are quickly eroding. Since the 1970s, stable blue-collar jobs have rapidly disappeared, taking family wages, pensions, and employer-subsidized health insurance along with them. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who followed a well-worn path from school to the assembly line-and from courtship to marriage to childbearing-men and women today live at home longer, spend more time in school, change jobs more frequently, and start families later.

"I don't know who's going to send out transcripts - kids are already appying for rolling admission, so I have no idea. And some schools require a letter from a guidance counselor. So I don't know what we're going to do." "I found this app for their smartphone, which helps them search scholarships, and I got really excited. And then I got really depressed, because I'm trying to replace a guidance counselor with a dollar smartphone app."

"Louis C.K.'s daughters won't be getting cell phones anytime soon, because the famous dad/funnyman explains as only he can, phones take away his kids' ability to just feel sadness. It's a valid point; when was the last time you were able to sit idly doing nothing without reaching for your iPhone to check Twitter or something? Louis says smartphones distract us from the sadness and despair that we're all meant to feel sometimes. Sigh. Maybe it's too early in the day for existential dread, but at least his delivery is perfect."

I absolutely love it when teachers and students create, remix, and mash up media; it's a fantastic way to encourage deeper learning and media literacy. But one issue that complicates digital freedom of expression is copyright law. While many would argue that copyright law is outdated and badly in need of an overhaul, it's still critical that adults and kids alike have a basic understanding of what's legal and ethical while playing with other people's intellectual property. Here's a list of videos I collected to help you navigate the murky waters of copyright law in educational settings.

Two teachers and a few students at Monday's school board meeting questioned the decision, noting the other services provided by Google - such as Google Docs - in some classrooms. One student involved with the National Honor Society said his club uses Google's Gmail to communicate with one another. One teacher said her students use Google Docs to prepare essays. The program, she said, offers students a chance to review each other's papers and she can view students' projects from her computer as they are working on them. "My kids love this," said Laurie Davidson, a seventh-grade language arts teacher.

"Perhaps the easiest visual medium for most communicators to grasp and use is photography. There is a growing school of thought that with an iPhone or Nexus smartphone, a communicator is well equipped to meet the needs of the visual thirsty stakeholder. Don't kid yourself. Every communicator needs a real camera."

What if learning to code weren't actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn't the software they write. It's the way they think. It's a principle called "computational thinking," and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won't help if you can't think of good ways to apply it.