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One of the fastest growing uses of technology is for online education. Student enrollment in online university degree programs has increased in recent years, but more interesting is the increase in kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12) students who are foregoing recess and pep rallies to study in virtual classrooms.

Do you remember college and all those textbooks you couldn't sell back to the bookstore? I do. I own one of the most expensive doorstop collections in existence. For this very reason, Flat World Knowledge is announcing record numbers on their open text book program. As of this coming September, more than 40,000 college students at more than 400 colleges will access the publisher's e-learning services and textbooks. Business and economics professors from across the country are flocking to the site to meet their students' needs. Given that the program started in Spring 2009, with only 1000 textbooks sold to 30 colleges, the growth for Fall 2009 is phenomenal.

Google has given free versions of Apps to colleges and universities for two years now. But as part of the "Going Google" campaign, they've pushed extra hard on educational institutions to adopt Apps. Why?

Even if the core of Google's strategy has been to entice paying enterprises over to Apps, giving away professional-quality email hosting and other solutions to students is the classic "hook 'em while they're young" strategy. From elementary school to college, Google is flooding the market with their products in the hope that these kids will demand it when they enter the workforce.

While the down economy continues to hurt funding to our schools, more and more teachers are looking to web-based services to help educate their students. Whether it's through open resource projects like CK-12, virtual classrooms like those in Second Life, or through the repurposing of tools like Twitter, millions of teachers are finding innovative resources to engage their students. If you're a teacher, here are seven great tools to get you started.

From one of the creators of Wikipedia comes a new resource for students and educators: A web-based directory of videos designed to be searchable, reliable, and conductive to better learning for all.

According to executive director Larry Sanger's blog, WatchKnow is "deliberately flying under the radar now, because we want to make a big first impression -- launch should be early this fall... I don't know if it will be 'the next big thing.' Considering how everybody's trying to make the next big thing, it seems unlikely. But I do hope it will be really useful to school kids, teachers, and parents."

A decade ago distance learning was experimental at best. Only a few courses were offered online, instructors were often slow to respond, and at the end of it, there was always the chance that employers would scoff at your credentials. With faster internet connections and accredited institutions embracing online education, a lot has changed since then. Distance learning service provider 2tor hopes to shift the paradigm even further. Judging by the $10 million dollar Series A round they've just closed with RedPoint Ventures, Novak Biddle and City Light Capital, they're poised to build something substantial.

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying. The Professor's results so far have been mixed but it is clear that more students are participating in classroom discussions than they used to. A video about Rankin's classroom experiment follows.

Amazon just announced AWS in Education, a new program that will give students and educators free access to Amazon's Web Services (AWS) for work on research projects, class assignments, or other entrepreneurial projects on campus. Grants for researchers will be offered four times a year, and educators can request Teaching Grants, which would give every student in a teacher's class $100 in AWS credits. Students who are working on entrepreneurial class projects can also apply for grants.

YouTube launched a handy new page last night that aggregates all the videos from more than 100 institutions of higher education around the US. YouTube.com/edu now serves up campus tours, free lectures, research and other college news all in one place. Search queries can be limited to the Edu part of the site as well.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.

A computer science professor at an Australian University is doing something revolutionary with YouTube - he's offering students who can't attend his classes college credit for watching his videos. Richard Buckland, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia, was frustrated that high school students with a passion for computing and capable of studying at the college level were not able to make the commute to the university fit into their school day. Buckland then decided to turn YouTube into a remote classroom where the students could attend lectures virtually and then complete coursework just as his other students do.