Plenty of professors still allow laptops. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at U-Va., generally permits them in his classes. He remembers his own college diversion: reading newspapers surreptitiously on the floor beneath his desk. He believes that, ultimately, it is a professor's job to hold the class's attention.

"If students don't want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems," he said.

Vaidhyanathan, an Internet scholar, senses a losing battle. In an era of iPhones and BlackBerrys, Internet-ready cellphones have become just as prevalent in classrooms as laptops, and equally capable of distraction. If professors had hoped to hermetically seal their teaching space by banning laptops, they might be about three years too late.

When Rhee took over the D.C. schools in 2007, "8 percent of our eighth graders were on grade level, but all the adults in our schools were rated as exceeding expectations," Rhee recalled to NEWSWEEK. "How can all the adults think they are doing an excellent job but producing at an 8 percent success level? There's a wild disconnect there.

What's this look like in your school district?

To reshape pedagogy, Tapscott says that we must consider eight norms for the Net Generation: freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation.

success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

Imagine it’s 1991. A principal of a large school has students that are doing some really nice writing and art. Imagine of a large publishing company comes to the school and wants to try something different. They offer the principal a chance for every student in the building the opportunity to publish any or all works of their choice. They’ll publish these books of writing and/or art and distribute them to libraries and book stores all over the world. And they’ll do it all for free.

The principal listens to their offer and says, “No thanks.”

Now imagine you’re a parent of children from this school and find out about the offer and the principal’s decline of that offer. Would you be satisfied with that or would you be marching into her office and find out if she’s gone completely insane?

Are we insane for not accepting that same deal that every school on the planet has been offered in 2010?

You know what I got to do today? I got to talk to young adults about science. I got to pick their brains, and they picked mine.

I ate basil grown in my classroom.

I dragged a human skeleton through the hallways, eliciting the usual stupid jokes.

I helped a student teacher become even better than she already is.

I found a rattlesnake bean in our classroom, cultivated by a student who grew up in an urban town. He planted it in November. It grew, using our breath to make the stuff we can now eat. Communion.

I got to sing, to teach, to dance, to play, and I got paid to do this.

In teachers' lounges, I've heard teachers complain about kids who are poor and disadvantaged. But I've also heard other teachers complain about those who are spoiled and overly advantaged.

Why? Because that's what teachers do. They complain. They can't help it. It's in their professional DNA. Everything is always someone else's fault. They never want to accept responsibility for kids who drop out of school but they're the first in line to claim credit for the kids who wind up in the Ivy League.

"These layoffs are wrong, and these layoffs are toxic to children," ACLU lawyer Mark Rosenbaum said.

The organization has filed a lawsuit alleging that the teacher layoffs constitute a violation of the constitutional rights of inner city students to an education.

Attorney Catherine Lhaman, who also is working on the lawsuit, said, "There is something profoundly wrong when children in some schools lose two-thirds of their teachers while children in other schools get to keep all their teachers and continue learning in a stable educational environment."

higher education has this tripartite challenge:

1.Quickly and intelligently adapt to the new higher education learning ecology enabled by digital tools; the current curriculum, seat-time business model, credit model, and learning approaches are re-structuring far too slowly.

2.Understand the skills needed in the knowledge economy, which is itself a new ecology. In just ten years, the nature of work has changed so much that many of the personal qualities needed to succeed now have no obvious roots or antecedents in the classroom-based part of the total learning experience in undergraduate education.

3.Align learning experiences in the undergraduate years with the knowledge economy. High-impact learning experiences are the best model for change.

The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

But you can always try different.

…

If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.