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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.

Several local teachers and professors see Second Life as a tremendous opportunity. There are educational islands in Second Life where teachers can go to digitally swap ideas, conduct research or attend real life conferences.

However, a teacher can take students on a virtual field trip in Second Life - using his or her own login - to places like the Alamo or the Louvre Museum, both of which have been impressively recreated in Second Life.

The University of Alabama is using Second Life too. In fact, Professor Rick Houser, Chairman of Educational Studies at the Capstone, is working on building an entire virtual University of Alabama campus in Second Life.

Children and teens treating each other cruelly is nothing new, but what’s changed in recent years is educators’ sense of their own role in prevention, said Jon Hisgen, a health and physical education consultant at DPI. The idea that being bullied is an unavoidable part of growing up has faded as adults have realized how much bullying interferes with students’ learning.

“If there’s fear that they could be hurt or have things said about them, that preoccupies their thoughts all the time they’re in school,” Hisgen said. “The ability of the brain to take in and analyze information is shot because they’re thinking about what could happen when they leave that classroom.”

This past academic year, Bullyfree Basics was used in 34 districts statewide, including Greendale, Oak Creek and Kenosha Unified, Clementi said. Gaenslen Elementary, where Kasdorf teaches, was one of 13 Milwaukee public schools that took part.

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.

Her reaction was to block all these sites, ban her daughter from the home computer and demand the school district to install content filtering that would prohibit any access to social networks.

social networking should be taught in the homes

Teachers are our best filters at school