Interestingly enough, here in BC, we are grappling with the same issue. Our technology standards are from 1999, and while many of the standards are still current, some of them are hopelessly out date.

Maybe we should all collaborate? What would a national set of standards look like? Would that be so incredibly ambiguous so as to be useless?

One of the primary advantages of "leader as host" is that when it is time (for whatever reason) for the leader to move on, the chances of the changes they've made continuing to be implemented are greater. Too often someone innovative comes into an organization, makes some changes, and then when they leave, most of those changes end up being dropped.

I'd like to see more people in our society stand up against bullying as well. We will never end bullying in our schools, while we continue to accept it in our society outside of school.

I think that it depends on what applications you put on the devices. If you give your kids an iPad, and all they can do is watch movies, then it is no better than a television (actually, it's worse, because it's highly portable).

If you give your students applications with which they can create things, then they have the opportunity to be creative. In this case, it's not the device that is the issue, it is the use of the device.

We are trying a balanced approach with our five year old son. He has blocks, Legos, train tracks, an arts centre, and all of the physical tools with which he can be creative. He performs impromptu puppet shows for us, has created "masterpieces" (which he intends to sell for $5.55 each), and has demonstrated repeatedly that he has a creative mind.

He also gets to play Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies once in a while, and watch 20 - 30 minutes of entertainment on most days. We try hard to balance his need to get exercise, with his need to relax. We've also installed many applications which are puzzles on the iPhone which he occasionally gets to use and we often find him playing checkers or Unblock-me instead of using Netflix to watch movies. One observation: Our son will often take an idea that he has seen in one of his shows, and expand upon it, and incorporate it into his play.

I'm not convinced the technology is the problem, but we definitely need to be, as parents, careful on how our children use it. If they are using it to consume someone else's thoughts, rather than coming up with their own, that can be extremely problematic.

I'm sharing your post in some new teacher training sessions Shannon. Hope they feel comfortable enough to comment on it!

George, I'm going to retweet this for the #ISTE11 crowd. I stumbled across it while searching for your post on the Canadian Unconference planned for next year at the Calgary science school (http://georgecouros.ca/blog/archives/1821 for your readers).

Great questions Tony. Some of those converting programs are free, but none of them yet has the accuracy to be faster than touch typing. I've played around with a few options, and all of them require significant editing of the work. Maybe in 4 or 5 years, someone will have that figured out better, I know it is a major computing problem that Google is trying to solve.

Your point about the device is so true. Who knows what a keyboard will look like in 5 years? We are definitely starting a period of transition as to what a personal computing device will look like, and as Mary-Beth has pointed out, her ability to type on a keyboard does not translate smoothly into her ability to type on an iPad.

I learned how to type using a game, an actual interesting challenging game, not one of those boring "educational" typing games.

It's called a Multi-User Dungeon or MUD for short. It's kind of like playing Dungeons and Dragons online in a massive multiplayer environment. Sometimes we'd have 400 people online, all playing at the same time, although the game has died down a lot in the past 17 years. The idea is that I had to run around the game, explore puzzles, and solve them, collaborate to kill virtual monsters, and watch my character get stronger. If something goes bad, I have to type quickly to get out of the situation, or my character dies.

It helped improve my reading speed, my typing speed, and it was a lot of fun (actually I still play once in a while). Also, many of these MUDs are open source, so that students could be involved in the creation of the zones, as you could install them on your school's server. Imagine a place where kids could practice typing skills, while really enjoying themselves.

I don't type with the home row, but as anyone knows me on Twitter, this is hardly a disadvantage...

"Start anywhere" that is good advice. It's like when you are cleaning up a room. You don't spend ages trying to decide on where to start cleaning the room, you just start digging into the room literally anywhere.

My private school, by contrast, is very transparent, and our salaries are very competitive with the local public schools. We make just slightly more than they do, using the same salary scale. So not all private schools are bad, but I did work at one in London (cough, cough Southbank) which paid teachers practically nothing and expected them to work like crazy. It was a nice place to work otherwise though, I just couldn't live in London with a family on what they were paying.