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?

When we ran a post called "Short Words Are Best" a few weeks ago, subscribers jammed our Inbox with comments. One in particular caught our attention:

"Sure, short words are more readable, but what about the joy that comes from solving the innermost puzzle of a long word? For a linguaphile like me, the purest ecstasy arises from finding the Latin or Greek roots in a word, putting them together, and discovering the story of a word. For example, the word "peninsula" comes from "paene" and "insula," which mean "almost" and "island," respectively. So the word peninsula literally means "almost island." Sure, it's a long word, and some students may not like to read it, but the pleasure of the shape of the word and the story of its creation makes reading it worth the while."

We appreciated this spirited defense of long words, plus we noticed the word "students" in the comment. So we emailed this person, a teacher obviously, to find out more about how she teaches language. Well, maybe not so obvious. Here was the reply:

"You just made my day! I'm no English teacher -- I'm a high school freshman!"

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: