And it all began with a simply Facebook page. Michelle Ryan Lauto, a freshman at New York’s Pace University, decided to create a group called “Protest NJ Education Cuts — State Wide School Walk Out” after Gov. Chris Christie’s sweeping cuts — about $1 billion overall — were released a month ago.

“It feels like he is taking money from us, and we’re already poor,” 16-year-old Johanna Pagan of Newark told the New York Times. “The schools here have bad reputations, and we need aid and we need programs to develop.”

Lauto’s page caught fire as more than 18,000 people signed on to protest the reductions and her Facebook group became a place for students to trade tips on contacting the media and identifying alternative methods to spread the word.

Some districts have already suspended those who participated in the student strike, while others applauded the activism, but not the loss in class time.

The governor’s press secretary was quick to question whether the protest was prompted by youth rebellion, spring fever or some nefarious political ploy.

Seems that he should start a Facebook account. It’s a great way to learn what’s going on.

“We must make this the decade of vaccines,” Bill Gates said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before.”

“Vaccines are a miracle—with just a few doses, they can prevent deadly diseases for a lifetime,” said Melinda Gates. “We’ve made vaccines our number-one priority at the Gates Foundation because we’ve seen firsthand their incredible impact on children’s lives.”

This is just another in a long line of initiatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which includes a deep commitment to education reform. Last year the Foundation focused much of its energy on U.S. teachers and training. “Helping teachers teach more effectively is the best way to improve high schools,” Bill wrote in his recent Annual Letter. “It is incredible how much the top quartile of teachers can improve the skills of even students who are quite far behind.”

To stay abreast on what’s going on in the mind of Bill Gates, he has recently opened his mind for all to see (on the web), so check out The Gates Notes.

Now her film has drawn the interest of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who writes:

The president should also vow to bring the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NFTE, to every low-income neighborhood in America. NFTE works with middle- and high-school teachers to help them teach entrepreneurship. The centerpiece of its program is a national contest for start-ups with 24,000 kids participating. Each student has to invent a product or service, write up a business plan and then do it. NFTE works only in low-income areas, so many of these new entrepreneurs are minority kids.

In November, a documentary movie — Ten9Eight — was released that tracked a dozen students all the way through to the finals of the NFTE competition. Obama should arrange for this movie to be shown in every classroom in America. It is the most inspirational, heartwarming film you will ever see.

That was just one suggestion in Friedman’s story, which offers suggestions for President Obama’s education agenda, things similar to his National Lab Day initiative. Friedman thinks that without innovation and invention, the U.S. cannot climb out of its current hole:

Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

One Indianapolis group we intend to join, RefreshIndy, a collection of web designers, developers and graphic artists, is taking that notion to the extreme — a 48-hour marathon to develop separate websites for three local non-profit organizations. The non-stop event began Friday night at the Informatics and Communication Technology Complex on the IUPUI campus and will conclude on Sunday night.

“This is a fun and challenging way for our students to learn from some of the top professionals in the city while also giving their time and energy to a greater cause,” said Mark McCreary, Assistant Dean for Student Services at the IU School of Informatics at IUPUI. Among the professionals donating services to the cause include Justify Studios, Squish Designs, Web Easy Media and Cassis.

“Typically, developing a website can be an intensive process. There’s a lot of planning and artistic work,” Justin Harter of RefreshIndy told the Indianapolis Star. “But we’re cramming all of this work into a very, very short amount of time.”

The non-profits receiving a new or enhanced website — selected based on need as well as the ability to maintain the site — were Talbot House, a residential care facility for adult male recovering from alcoholism and substance abuse; Progress House, a recovery center for alcohol and/or drug dependent men; and My Sister’s Place, a service providing transitional support and resources for formerly incarcerated and at-risk women and their families.

“The impact of this is huge,” said Carol Wellman, Director of My Sister’s Place. “I developed our website myself using a book, so receiving this type of expert assistance is invaluable. It helps us increase visibility and communication with the women, families and organizations who need our services.”

We will detail Schools Building Communities plans for MLK Day tomorrow.

That’s because passionate and motivated bloggers across the nation are challenging traditional college newspapers for readership. And as for journalistic rules? Well, Cody Brown, founder of the NYU Local, suggested to Marc Perry of The Chronicle of Higher Education that it is responsible to publish rumors as long as they are labeled as such.

Of the group at Penn State University, Perry wrote:

They may hold radical views on what’s acceptable practice in journalism, but the operators of these sites aren’t necessarily anti-establishment bomb-throwers. Onward State’s leaders are the kind of clean-cut academic aces who could appear on college-recruiting brochures. Eli Glazier, the assigning editor, is a V-neck-sweater-wearing honors student who buys philosophy books for fun and took a class with the university president last semester. [Davis] Shaver, the publisher, is an honors student who uses words like “duopoly” and dreams of being a boarding-school headmaster.

Sometimes he seems like one already. Standing in front of a half-dozen mostly male Onward Staters gathered in a campus computer lab on a recent Thursday night, the publisher kept things polite while the staffers around him wisecracked.

In general, they only get together like this once a week. Onward State is a virtual organization whose members do much of their business digitally.

The universities are generally standing aside, probably guarding against blowback, as the new kind of reporting — which uses Twitter and Facebook — takes hold on campus.

Yes, technology changes almost everything.

It certainly appears that way to the Obama Administration, which is touting the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Indiana Teaching Fellowship, designed to identify, educate and place those with specific academic backgrounds into teaching positions in high-need schools throughout the state. In fact, President Obama has announced the expansion of the program into Ohio and Michigan, one of five initiatives which have received a combined commitment of $250 million in financial and in-kind support.

“America’s leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in science, math and engineering,” said President Obama. “That’s why I’m pleased to announce the expansion of our Educate to Innovate campaign today and applaud the several new partnerships launched that will help meet our goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.”

It must be noted that among the top 40 countries in the world in education assessment, the U.S. is in the bottom 25 percent in both science and math. Investment in teachers, high-need schools and students and assessment measure have been keys to success for high-achieving nations.

“The Wilson Teaching Fellowship is helping Indiana address a critical shortage of great math and science teachers,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said. “I agree with President Obama and Secretary Duncan that providing our students great teachers is imperative to increasing academic achievement. Hoosier students will benefit greatly from having expert teachers in their classrooms through the Wilson Teaching Fellowship, and I am encouraged our state’s success means students in other states will have the same opportunity.”

Four Indiana universities — Ball State University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Purdue University and the University of Indianapolis — participate in the Wilson Foundation program, which gives Indiana a promising possibility to close the opportunity gap.

The webpages the teachers began in August were uniformly abandoned before October, leaving parents in the dark about homework assignments and pending tests and quizzes.

How can that be in this age of technology? Couldn’t the homework assignments be posted on a Twitter account in about 10 seconds? And, if teachers are supposed to be guiding the nation’s children into the 21st century, is it excusable that they don’t have the skill necessary to provide this simple data online?

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post recently tackled this topic and a number of teachers posted excuses ranging from time consumption and difficulty to the lack of parental use of the data. But the prevailing claim, that it is the student’s responsibility to write down homework assignments, misses the point entirely that parents and teachers need to work together to create structure for the student. Why would any teacher determine that a child’s education is not a collaborative effort with the parents of the pupil?

Mathews concluded his post by penning:

I am sure some teachers see this as one more chore added to an already long day. But wouldn’t it save time otherwise spent fielding parent calls or dealing with their children’s incomplete work? Other school districts told me they get few complaints like this, but make sure principals take them seriously.

When that doesn’t work, what should parents do? The wonders of computer-based 21st century education fade quickly if the information doesn’t get online.

I couldn’t agree more.

5. Technology Advancements. This dumps a lot of things into one category, but schools and universities have begun to understand the value of Facebook, Twitter and hand-held mobile devices in education. Add in the advancements in digital textbooks and the Kindle and technology is approaching a cost-cutting tipping-point for education administrators. That’s Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with his Kindle pictured.

4. Swine Flu. Some schools found a new way to deal with the flu this year, simply closing and locking their doors. This happened at every level of education, causing many learning outlets to turn to the internet for both information and lessons. Microsoft even launched a website to aid teachers in creating a page for their classroom through Office Live Workspace.

3. Charter Schools. They have been around for 15 years now, but this year charter schools have forced an alliance between the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rev. Al Sharpton and caused Catholic schools to look at stripping their religious identity to secure tax dollars. And the evidence of success? Hurricane Katrina brought an end to the struggling New Orleans School System and, in its place, the city is performing much better under largely charter options.

2. Focus on Innovation. While the administration is demanding change in traditional education for those who want to secure Race To The Top dollars, the U.S. Department of Education is also driving innovative measures through grants, which can be awarded to districts, museums, corporations, universities and individuals who invest in new methods to achieve academic successes.

1. Race To The Top. The Obama administration has made education such a cornerstone of its agenda, it allotted 100 times more funds than previous administrations. And the Race To The Top, which will financially reward states that are most committed to education reform, has already forced states to adopt 21st century practices without the award of a single dime.

Immediately after the lesson, those who had been teachers didn’t withhold their distaste for technology enroaching on the classroom. And the truth is, among the accepted methods of traditional curriculum, it isn’t a surprise that mobile devices would be considered anything but a distraction. It happens across the Atlantic as well.

But the folks at Abilene Christian University in Texas have opted to embrace and harness the power of learning through hand-held devices. Writes Brian X. Chen of Wired Magazine in a feature entitled “How the iPhone Could Reboot Education:”

How do you educate a generation of students eternally distracted by the internet, cellphones and video games? Easy. You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum.

That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.

The initiative’s goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there’s even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand.

Now nearly 50 percent of the students have free iPhones. “It’s kind of the TiVoing of education,” said Professor Bill Rankin, who helped initiate the program. “I watch it when I need it and in ways that I need it. And that makes a huge difference.”

Also in iPhone higher education news, both Stanford University and the University of California at Davis are making classes in iPhone application development available.