That's So 21C Education

As Marjorie's suicide reverberated across Quebec, schoolyard bullying was exploding into the political spotlight, with Ontario on Wednesday unveiling tough legislation that could lead to expulsion for students who send classmates hateful text messages or shove them in the hallways at school. Quebec on Wednesday said it would review its school anti-violence programs, and Edmonton's school board on Tuesday evening joined the Canadian school districts that have voted to adopt an anti-bullying policy for sexual minorities.

Paul Martin, the former prime minister and guest speaker at Wednesday's We Day youth rally in Winnipeg, has been busy building his non-profit Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative to fight what he calls the federal government's "absolute discrimination" against Aboriginal students.

Many more students will be told that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. For some, this is a no-brainer while for others it is a travesty. The key question in this debate has nothing to do with Wikipedia or any other source. What we need to be asking ourselves is: What is the point of the research paper? Five, fifteen and fifty years from now, do we want students to know the information they learned from their research topics or is the real value in what future graduates will be able to do, namely seek out information, evaluate it for relevance and accuracy and, ultimately, analyze and synthesize it in order to make an informed argument?

Sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd has written a lot about how younger users respond to privacy issues around Facebook, and it's a lot more nuanced than just saying "kids share everything now." In some cases, younger users are even more concerned about privacy than older users, and they come up with interesting ways of dealing with that

But increasingly, schools are offering students more ambitious options, such as participating in an international field placement, a university-organized volunteer opportunity, or a course with a community service learning (CSL) component. CSL is a special form of experiential education that connects course material to real-life experience. During the course, students either work in small groups or individually with an organization-often a not-for-profit agency-toward a specific solution or a goal that is mutually beneficial. As part of their grade, students are required to reflect on how their community outreach experience is explicitly linked to what they've learned in the classroom

I think we should look into introducing TEDxIB or better still TEDxYouth to Mulgrave as a new platform for the Cypress Student Summit.

"The one thing I know is that as technology advances, we become desensitized to the impact our actions have on others. This was a really good message for them," Krocker said.

The services provided by nature and the qualities that contribute to human well-being are still invisible in the marketplace. Because we have elevated economics above everything else, this is dangerous. When you have a society that largely equates the quality of life with economic indicators, such as gross domestic product, and those indicators fail to track the health of its fundamental inputs, you end up on shaky ground.

This was sent to me by a G10 parent. I haven't had a chance to review it. The focus of this web site is to help your kids understand how technology affects their privacy, and what they can do to build secure online profiles while keeping their information safe. This page is to help you understand how many kids behave online - and will illustrate how important it is for them use this site as a reference point.

But some schools are way ahead of the curve. By using technology, giving students the opportunity to choose what they want to study, or even just allowing teachers to deviate from the curricula norm, these schools have already taken education to the next level and waiting for the ministry to catch up.