While students are out, teachers are in class finding out what it's like from a 21st century kid's perspective.

"What I know is this, is that kids find school incredibly slow," Ray McNaulty of the International Center for Leadership in Education said.

McNaulty is the one with the lesson plans. His message -- a system that bases progress on test scores isn't working in a changing world.

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With chalk boards hanging in classrooms, students are going home to keyboards.

"They're on wikis, they're on blogs, they're out there finding out information. In school, it's like slow," McNaulty said.

To pick up the pace, McNaulty said educators should focus more on engaging students in real world problems and make them find not so ordinary solutions.

"That's the true goal of education, not that you be taught everything, but that you become a learner, so the focus is to get kids to become confident learners," he said.

To build confident learners in a global environment teachers certainly have to have an understanding of what's happening outside of the classroom in the world of technology. But they also have to understand what's happening inside their students heads.

"They're really the front line providers for massaging the human brain," Paul Nussbaum, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh Professor of Neurology said.

Nussbaum said teachers should view their classroom like a trainer views a gym.

Pushing students to exercise their head in all kinds of different ways.

"Using multiple kinds of stimulus inputs, not just verbal, even the sense of smell and taste. When I went to school we didn't use those sense very much to learn," he said.

Change won't happen overnight. But over the weekend, perhaps.

When students turn to the head of the class Monday morning, they'll have some sympathetic faces looking back.