It seems as though these types of laws, while intending to protect, end up regulating or imposing sanctions while providing very little in real protection. We know from the research in education that the creation of student-teacher relationships is critical to student engagement in school. Haven't many of us had teacher role models that made a big impact on our life? Facebook and other technology platforms simply create ways for us to develop those relationships in new and meaningful ways. Our recent student engagement benchmark study (see research highlights on our website: http://www.ncfsl.org/content/student-engagement-satisfaction-survey) underscores the importance of these relationships. States err on the side of protection these days and I think it's a mistake.

For schools, I am really attracted to the concept of lower cost, basic hardware and software. For years I have introduced schools to free, open-source software tools to save money. Low cost hardware should great but is that really enough computing power to teach programming? I have an old PC with 3x the memory and I run into issues related to lack of memory!