The International Society for Technology in Education has unveiled the report "National Educational Technology Standards for Students: The Next Generation," which covers six key areas: creativity and innovation; communication and collaboration; research and information fluency; critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making; digital citizenship; and technology operations and concepts.

I'm reading through lots of notes and mental Post-its I recorded at this year's NECC, and, in upcoming posts, I'll share a number of fun, productive conversations of which I was a part.

On June 16, 2007, Envision Schools, a nonprofit organization that manages charter schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, held its first commencement for its flagship school, the Marin School of Arts and Technology. This occasion allowed me to reflect on my journey thus far. As I think back on the successes and challenges of coleading Envision Schools with my partner and fellow CEO Daniel McLaughlin, I pondered these questions: How does a high school teacher become a cofounder of a leading nonprofit charter-school-management organization? And why would anyone want to start an entirely new school system?

A few months back, a high school history teacher introduced me to a great Web-collaboration tool called Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other Stuff). By creating a Diigo account, you can visit Web sites and mark them up by tagging sticky notes on the page with a simple drag-and-drop procedure. Imagine being able to place a tag on an image, a specific line of a poem, or a statistic on a page of data.