At a recent teacher's conference, I presented a session called "Maximizing Technology Efficiency in the Classroom." We had lots of fun setting up home page aggregators, synching our schedules, and getting a handle on all our bookmarks.

At a recent professional-development day, I challenged my colleagues to think about how we could reduce the number of students in our lower division (grades nine and ten) -- especially the ninth graders -- who fail high school courses. "What if we decided that failure is not an option, and that success is the only choice available to us?" I asked them.

I was recently introduced to FORA.tv, a new Web site that aggregates videos of discussions and debates on interesting political, social, and cultural issues. If your schedule is anything like mine, it's difficult to find the time to travel to a bookstore to hear a famous author read or to afford the price of a ticket to see a big headliner speak.

One day, the mother of one of my fourth-grade students came in to meet with me about her son. She reported that Noah, who I knew to be extremely bright, was bored with math. Although my school district's textbooks included problem-solving activities and stories, and I augmented the curriculum with various exercises that required students to apply creativity and higher-order thinking skills, the assignments, she told me, were still too easy for him.