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a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where's the middle ground?

With this complexity in mind, I would like to introduce a question that I have been struggling with for the past few years: what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?

We fear the things – and people – that we do not understand far more than the things we do,

Mobile phones open up new learning opportunities outside of traditional educational structures and practices. Powerful mobile tools—applications, handsets, tablets, device add-ons, cloud applications, etc.—already exist, with many more developed each day. These tools expand the ability to collect, collaborate, and create in myriad ways, influencing environmental studies and service, political and civic activism, history, citizen journalism, citizen science, and community volunteerism, just to name a few.

More than a century ago (1902), his essay “The Child and the Curriculum” proposed a relationship between teaching and learning the old way (curriculum centric) and the new way (child centric). Reminding me of the typically Canadian appreciation of compromise, the essay blends a solution based on the readiness of the young learner with his/her need to acquire structured knowledge (curriculum).

In what different ways do you structure reflection and closings in your classroom?

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls. But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?’” So Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified. For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

Researchers believe growth in the time kids spend on computers and watching TV, plus a trend in schools toward rote learning and standardized testing, are crowding out the less structured activities that foster creativity. Mark Runco, a professor of creative studies and gifted education at the University of Georgia, says students have as much creative potential as ever, but he would give U.S. elementary, middle and high schools "a 'D' at best" on encouraging them. "We're doing a very poor job, especially before college, with recognizing and supporting creativity," he says.

If the subject matter was a bit unusual for high school students, the amount of time they had to grapple with it was more so — 2 hours 10 minutes, in what is called a class block. Long blocks became standard this year at Calhoun, as part of a radical attempt to alter the structure of the school day and school year.