Students at an education conference said it was time to tear down the wall between their digital lives outside of school and in school, where much access to technology is restricted.

A middle school principal is trying to keep morale high while working through the on-the-ground implications of the recent court ruling that halted the city’s turnaround plans at her school and 23 others.

The Department of Education this month is wrapping up a series of high school admission workshops. The last two this summer will focus on specialized high schools admissions: they will be held on Tuesday, July 24, at the Prospect Heights Campus in Brooklyn, and Thursday, July 26, at the Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan.

City officials released figures for the number of children who opted out of state testing: 113 for both the math and English tests. It’s a fraction of the 436,000-plus who took the exams, but three times the number who opted out the previous year, presumably because of a growing number of parents who object to “high-stakes testing.”

In the final Principal’s Office interview of the 2011-12 school year, Jill Hoder, principal of P.S. 161 Arthur Ashe School in Queens, said data helps the school personalize the learning experience for its diverse student body and in inclusion classes that accommodate a special-needs population of 13 percent. “The mission and the motto in this building is that we take public education personally. What you do or what you need to learn is gravely different from what the person next to you needs to learn.”

Several dozen parents gathered on the steps of the Tweed Courthouse on a sweltering Wednesday afternoon, at a news conference to announce a complaint against the Department of Education. The complaint accuses the Education Department of discriminating against parents who have limited English proficiency, and whose children require special education services.

A Brooklyn public school that had leaking light fixtures will be moved to the top of the list of schools with PCB problems, and the city will replace its lighting very soon, city officials said last week. But some health and environmental experts say the timeline for light fixture removal from schools should be expedited citywide.

At a rally that resembled a street carnival, complete with scarecrows and blowing bubbles, students and their parents said they would sit out the field tests being conducted by Pearson, the company that writes the state standardized tests.

As city students have begun a new round of standardized tests — this time so-called “field tests,” which are experimental tests that the state-contracted test-maker, Pearson, is using to try out questions on city students for future use — more parents are talking about opting out. And test resistance appears to becoming more widespread, with substantial numbers of parents at several city schools deciding their children would not participate.

For more than three hours in a packed auditorium at Public School 29 John M. Harrigan in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, on Thursday night, parents took representatives from the School Construction Authority to task for what they deemed “unacceptable behavior” involving a $7 million maintenance and upkeep project that began at the school at the end of February.