Today students have many more tools at their disposal for research and studying. For example Samsung will be offering 1,000 Galaxy Tab 10.1 units to 1,000 students at the University of South Mississippi. The tablets will be given to selected Honors College, McNair Scholars, Southern Style and Gulf Coast students, and the goal is to give students and educators mobile access to their courses, textbooks, grades and schedules.

It will be interesting to see if grades improve after they receive the tablets or if it just means more playing of Angry Birds.

Here’s a creepy tale involving a Pennsylvania school, and an abuse of technology and power. A Pennsylvania school district has been accused of spying on its students through webcams. Webcams in laptops which the school provided. Spying on them at home.

The district gave laptops to all of their students and were apparently able to activate the webcams remotely. Beware school officials bearing gifts…

Several students from Yale University have created a bicycle wheel that does away with the spokes entirely. Pretty awesome. All of our future bicycles will probably look like this one. They should all be patting themselves on the back.

But I’m sad to see the spokes go. Where will we put our baseball cards so we can make that weird noise? It also leaves less room for reflectors. If only bicycle spokes had had a spokes-person, perhaps they wouldn’t now be facing extinction.

This DIY gadget is dubbed the “smart charger” and it’s from two Kenyan students who reside in rural areas without electricity. They also use bikes to get around. Jeremiah Murimi and Pascal Katana use a dynamo attached to the bicycle in order to charge cellphone batteries. The whole process costs practically nothing.

They used parts from old discarded radio and television sets to assemble the small charger. The user is able to plug the dynamo lead right into the device. An hour of pedaling can fully recharge the battery in about the same time it would take if it was plugged into an electrical outlet. The idea is that the user would avoid paying $2 each time for battery recharges by making a one-time smart charger purchase worth about $4.50.

The Nintendo DS Classroom will feature around 60 applications which will cover kanji, math, civics, physics and history. These will be available to students in junior high and high school in 2010. The idea is that the students will be able to do their homework, take tests, and even get real-time feedback from the teachers.

The system will be shown off in Osaka at the New Education Expo 2009 this month. This is one DS that you won’t get in trouble with at school, but it’s one that you will not be thrilled to use.

Vail Christian High School is educating students about the dangers of texting while driving. Students hold the motion sensitive wheel in one hand, and a cell phone in the other. It’s unclear if they are required to drive as Toad, Mario, or anyone else. But were they sorry when they ended up getting hit by a turtle shell? Did they learn not to text while driving?

Apparently some did. One player said, “I ran into a lot of things and it was very stressful,” Which is interesting, because how stressful can texting and Mario Kart really be? Still, I’m sure it drives the point home to these kids.

The air-powered bike you see in the video above was designed by a team of engineering students from India. To help combat the ever-increasing pollution levels in the atmosphere, they designed themselves a working model that runs on air rather than gasoline.

Sure, it will only cover 18km/h. But at least this bike isn’t dirtying the air. It only emits Oxygen. This bike runs on air and emits air. That’s an eco-win all around. Now if they can just figure out how to get more out of it…

Beginning this fall, journalism students at the University of Missouri, Columbia will need to add an iPhone or an iPod touch to their already expensive shopping carts. It seems ridiculous, but there is a method to this madness.

Brian Brooks, associate dean of the journalism school, told the Columbia Missourian that the requirement “will not be enforced, however, and there will not be a penalty for students who chose not to buy an iPod touch or iPhone.”

The goal of the JaipurKnee Project was to create a prosthetic leg that was amazingly sturdy as well as amazingly cheap. That’s no easy task. Otherwise it would have been done by now. Somehow they did it and created the leg you see in the above pic. It only costs $20.

Expensive and high-tech prosthetic limbs are nothing new. But what about the majority of the world who can not afford them? Legs like the one above may not make you the bionic man, but they will let you function and walk. For cheap. Pretty awesome.