They exercise their minds all day and their bodies every morning.

Elementary students in San Diego have taken to jogging before school to get their days started off on the right foot. The program encourages students who get dropped off early at school because of their parents' long commutes to jog with a group of fellow early birds.

Schools have not yet performed a methodical study of the impact of the before-school runs, but teachers report that scores on fitness tests and productivity during classes have improved significantly. Teachers' endorsement is enough for me. Besides, I know exercise certainly makes a difference in my mornings!

I salute San Diego. Kids need not only playtime and unstructured time, but also regular exercise. (See previous blog.)

Technology marches forward. Many aspects of technology improve our lives (the Internet makes it possible for us to deliver Learning A-Z's rich resources in an affordable way), but it can be daunting to keep up with the pace of all the technological advances. Nevertheless, we cannot afford to fall behind.

Last year, Karl Fisch, director of technology for Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, posted a blog titled "Is It Okay to Be a Technologically Illiterate Teacher?" That post caused quite a stir in blogland (Teacher Magazine article, registration required) and won the Most Influential Blog Post award in the 2007 EduBlog awards. Fisch concluded by saying, "If a teacher today is not technologically literate—and is unwilling to make the effort to learn more—it's equivalent to a teacher 30 years ago who didn't know how to read and write."

If you are reading my blog online, chances are you already agree with Fisch, at least to some degree. We don't have to be on the cutting edge of technology—knowledgeable in the use of every brand-new gadget—but we do need to understand how to use technology as a teaching tool and to enhance the classroom experience. Many of your students likely learned how to play online games before they learned how to add. And older students do much of their research online, looking things up on websites like Wikipedia, the pros and cons with which we need to be familiar. To effectively guide students and help them make the most of their education, tech savvy is indeed a requirement.

The steps we take as early as kindergarten can keep a student in class clear through high school, reported a recent study at Arizona State University led by Gregory Hickman. The study, published in the Journal of Education Research, tracked students from kindergarten through high school to identify the behaviors that lead to dropping out. "We discovered that as early as kindergarten, differences exist between graduates and dropouts; namely, dropouts miss more school than graduates... Dropouts miss an average of 124 days by eighth grade," the study reported.

The findings suggests that a student dropping out of school is part of a long-term process rather than a single, impulsive act. More importantly, the study argues that drop-out intervention programs that target high-school students may be intervening far too late.

Clearly, we need to be watching students from the very beginning, looking for problem signs (like regular absenteeism), and intervening to help those students achieve a complete education. As Hickman says, "Kids can succeed despite their early history... There are too many windows of opportunity for change."