Elementary school teacher Brian Crosby is a technology-in-the-classroom innovator whose efforts have earned him an Apple Computer "Apple iLife Educator Award" honor. He's also the author of a popular educational blog called Learning Is Messy, the tagline of which is, "rollup your sleeves and get messy." It's a credo Brian puts to work at the Agnes Risley School in Sparks, NV, where he teaches at-risk students with the help of a wireless connection and seven-year-old laptops. Reading his blog, we were impressed by Brian's creativity, determination and passion for teaching and technology. When we contacted him we found his enthusiasm infectious -- and deeply inspiring. Here's our conversation:

VT: How can technology energize teaching?

What books should your kids read? Just ask Betsy Bird. As a senior librarian at The New York Public Library's Donnell Central Children's Reading Room, she talks to parents and kids of all stripes about great reads. When she's not at the library, she's blogging on A Fuse #8 Production, her popular website dedicated to children's literature. And when she's not blogging, she's on the radio, talking about kids' books on NPR. All this as "a mere slip of a 28-year-old." We called Betsy for a book-filled conversation about children's lit:

VT: Do you still remember the books you read as a kid?

If you scroll down to the end of this article you can enter a comment on what you just read. It's a small deal that hints to a bigger deal: The evolution of the Internet into a collaborative universe. Educators have lately grasped the power of this in the classroom -- and are beginning to use collaboration tools to enhance learning. To find out more, we called up two education technology experts, Cristina Lopez and Kurtis Scaletta, both Instructional Multimedia Consultants at the Digital Media Center of the University of Minnesota. They've been studying the potential of a collaboration technology called "wikis" and run a website called Teaching With Wikis. We asked them how wikis can improve learning -- and the challenges teachers face using them.

VT: What in the world is a "wiki?"

We recently spoke with Francisco Abeyta, the Education Technology Coordinator at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, CT. The school introduced Visual Thesaurus to its 250 students last October. Francisco tells us how it's working out.

VT: How does Visual Thesaurus fit in your classroom?

Francisco: In one of our high school-level reading classes, students have laptops that connect to the internet. The teacher has a laptop that connects to an LCD projector. The students have their books open, and their laptops open to the Visual Thesaurus. When they come to a word that they don't understand they'll enter it in the Visual Thesaurus. When the teacher wants to go over some of the language, she'll project the entry from her laptop.

When Sharon Simeon isn't teaching special ed at a Flint, Michigan, elementary school, she's working on her second masters at a local university. We asked her how Visual Thesaurus helps her in -- both -- of her classrooms.

Gina Peebles teaches English at the Continuous Learning Center in Camden, South Carolina. It's an alternative school for problem students expelled from the district's junior high and high schools. Gina's a "core academic" teacher, the only English instructor at the school. She works with fifty students and teaches many different levels, often in the same classroom. Gina has to get creative to get through to these challenging students. So she puts technology - and the Visual Thesaurus - to work in her classroom in innovative ways. She explains how.

Lori Pope runs a busy New York literary agency called Writers Represent. When she's not reading manuscripts, developing authors and closing book deals, Lori pursues another passion: Teaching writing. She leads two kinds of classes. One for post-graduate students at the Columbia Publishing Course at Columbia University. The other for high school dropouts earning their GED and Associate's degree at a school called the Interboro Institute. As you'd expect, Lori uses different techniques to teach the different classes. As you might not expect, the two groups have more in common than you'd think. Lori explains: