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On Wednesday, April 29, 2009 the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association (OPSBA) released a Discussion Paper entitled: What If? Technology in the 21st Century Classroom. As school trustees we want to engage the province in a meaningful focused discussion about classrooms of the 21st century. We want to be part of developing a provincial vision and strategies that will make all our classrooms connected and relevant. “Today’s students are leaders in the use of technology and we know they want their learning experiences in school to reflect this,” said Colleen Schenk, president of OPSBA. “Students want to take the technology they use in their daily lives and integrate it with how they learn. They want their learning clearly connected to the world beyond the school.” The Discussion Paper asks the question: “How can schools continue to be connected and relevant in the world of the 21st century?” It explores the relationship between the use of technology and the scope for increasing the quality of teaching and learning.

Educators, however, find themselves with mixed opinions about the role of social media in higher education and its importance in the classroom. Some see it as the technology of tomorrow, an important piece to the puzzle of connecting with students, while others try it doubtingly in their classrooms, assuming that the traditional face-to-face contact cannot be replaced.

Some people find social media to be a positive experience for education. "We’re globally connected,”  said Jason Ohler, a former professor of education technology at the University of Alaska, now a media psychology professor at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif. “It only makes sense to be globally connected when we pursue education."

As a whole, the education industry is usually relatively slow to integrate technology into the classroom. In lots of schools nationwide, unbridled access to computers and the Internet is still the exception rather than the rule.

The moment students get outside of the classroom, on the other hand, social networking is almost a daily ritual.

Dedicated commercial Web 2.0 products and social networking applications are still too new and too rich for typical school leaders to afford. So third-party providers are more likely to offer technology services to students and their schools to expand their horizons in ways never before possible. For example, some school districts are going beyond e-mail technology and using collaboration software and online services to share information, host Web conferences and assign tasks and projects.

Cyberbullying Cyberbullying or online bullying is repeated, unwanted or cruel behavior against someone through computers, cell phones, gaming consoles, or other Internet-based means. The Internet is always “on,” opening the door for 24-hour harassment. Cyberbullies can be anonymous. They never have to confront their victims, they don’t have to be physically stronger and cyberbullies may be virtually invisible to parents and adults.

Look for warning signs your child may be the victim of cyberbullying – depression, lack of interest in school and friends, drop in grades and subtle comments that something may be wrong. If your child is the victim of cyberbullying, take action. By filtering email, instant messages and text messages, you can cut off many of the ways the cyberbullies contact your child. By having your child avoid the sites and groups where the attacks occur, he/she can ignore the bully. If harassment continues, change your child’s email address, user names and Internet account. If these steps do not stop the cyberbullying, contact the parents of the child who is behind the bullying, contact the school, and if the situation is not resolved, involve the police. It’s important to compile copies of harassing emails and postings to have evidence for authorities or the school, so they can take action. Look for signs that your child may be the cyberbully themselves – if they sign onto the Internet under someone else’s name, if they use someone else’s password without their permission, if they posted rude or mean things about someone else online, if they use bad language online, or if they changed their profile or away message designed to embarrass or frighten someone. Talk to your kids about cyberbullying and why it’s wrong and hurtful.

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance and aptitudes across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic—from anthropology to biochemistry to civil engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K–12 or higher education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age.

Brown's class was discussing some of the whaling calculations in Moby Dick. When one student asked a question involving a complex computation, three students quickly pulled out their cell phones and did the math. Brown was surprised to learn that most cell phones have a built-in calculator. She was even more surprised at how literate her students were with the many functions included in their phones. She took a quick poll and found that all her students either had a cell phone or easy access to one. In fact, students became genuinely engaged in a class discussion about phone features. This got Brown thinking about how she might incorporate this technology into learning activities.

Brown noticed that many students used text messaging to communicate, and considered how she might use cell phones in summarizing and analyzing text to help her students better understand Richard III. Effective summarizing is one of the most powerful skills students can cultivate. It provides students with tools for identifying the most important aspects of what they are learning, especially when teachers use a frame of reference (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). Summarizing helps students identify critical information. Research shows gains in reading comprehension when students learn how to incorporate isummary framesi (series of questions designed to highlight critical passages) as a tool for summarizing (Meyer & Freedle, 1984). When students use this strategy, they are better able to understand what they are reading, identify key information, and provide a summary that helps them retain the information (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987).

Text messaging is a real-world example of summarizing—to communicate information in a few words the user must identify key ideas. Brown saw that she could use a technique students had already mastered, within the context of literature study.

A survey conducted by MSN United Kingdom found that 74% of teens as compared to 80% in this study did not go to anyone for advice when they were cyberbullied (www.msn.co.uk/cyberbullying, 2006). One reason some teenagers are reluctant to tell parents or adults is the fear of retaliation.

Many times parents don't get involved because they are afraid of invading their teen's privacy. Others may feel that as long as they have filtering software their teen is protected from negative material.

Parents need to be educated about cyberbullying- what it looks like, what the effects are and how to handle it. Rosalind Wiseman, educator and author of the best seller "Queen Bees & Wannabes", suggest parents consider the following: Use technology as an opportunity to reinforce your family values. Attach rules and consequences if inappropriate behavior occurs. Move the computer out of your child's bedroom and into the family room. Teach your child not to share passwords. Install monitoring and filtering software. Monitor your child's screen name(s) and Web sites for inappropriate content. If cyberbullying occurs, save and print out any evidence and decide whom you should contact for assistance.

ead teachers are being advised to draw up new rules on mobile phone use amid a growing number of cases of what is now known as “cyber-bullying”. In many secondary schools, over 90% of bullying cases are through text messages or internet chatrooms. It is hoped that the rules about mobile phone use will protect children from abusive texts, stop phones going off in class and prevent mobiles being taken into exam halls.

Although the majority of kids who are harassed online aren’t physically bothered in person, the cyber-bully still takes a heavy emotional toll on his or her victims. Kids who are targeted online are more likely to get a detention or be suspended, skip school and experience emotional distress, the medical journal reports. Teenagers who receive rude or nasty comments via text messages are six times more likely to say they feel unsafe at school.

The problem is that bullying is still perceived by many educators and parents as a problem that involves physical contact. Most enforcement efforts focus on bullying in school classrooms, corridors and toilets. But given that 80% of adolescents use mobile phones or computers, “social interactions have increasingly moved from personal contact at school to virtual contact in the chatroom,'’ write Kirk R. Williams and Nancy G. Guerra, co-authors of one of the journal reports. “Internet bullying has emerged as a new and growing form of social cruelty.'’