Group items tagged

"Quick, before the school year ends, share this app with your teens and maybe their parents. Quick, before the school year ends, download this app yourself. You're going to want to start using the genre search to support readers' advisory tomorrow!!!"

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

"Teens Turn to Social Coding to Protect Privacy on Social Nets"

"Help teens 'own their space' online. Whether you are a parent, caregiver, or educator, you can keep up with the latest computer and online safety issues and help kids learn to avoid them. In partnership with security expert and author, Linda McCarthy, we offer a free downloadable version of her new book, "Own Your Space - Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online." Written for Internet savvy "tweens" and teens specifically, this book is also a useful resource for the adults they rely on."

"Most app-addicted teens (and younger) have no concept of leaving home early on a Saturday morning to meet friends for bike riding, pick-up ball games or just hanging out. With a world that is hyper vigilant about their children's safety (and for good reason), reaching for an electronic device has taken over the former scenario. Most parents are perplexed by this addiction when in reality we are the ones that perpetuate it. Therefore, the statistics are being tallied as a template to determine just where our children stand within this growing digital world."

"Teens can't control impulses and make rapid, smart decisions like adults can - but why? Research into how the human brain develops helps explain. In a teenager, the frontal lobe of the brain, which controls decision-making, is built but not fully insulated - so signals move slowly. "Teenagers are not as readily able to access their frontal lobe to say, 'Oh, I better not do this,' " Dr. Frances Jensen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross."

"Teens credit social media for helping to build stronger friendships and exposing them to a more diverse world, but they express concern that these sites lead to drama and social pressure"

"Many American teenagers try to put in a full day of school, homework, after-school activities, sports and college prep on too little sleep. As evidence grows that chronic sleep deprivation puts teens at risk for physical and mental health problems, there is increasing pressure on school districts around the country to consider a later start time. In Seattle, school and city officials recently made the shift. Beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, the district moved the official start times for middle and high schools nearly an hour later, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. This was no easy feat; it meant rescheduling extracurricular activities and bus routes. But the bottom line goal was met: Teenagers used the extra time to sleep in. Researchers at the University of Washington studied the high school students both before and after the start-time change. Their findings appear in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. They found students got 34 minutes more sleep on average with the later school start time. This boosted their total nightly sleep from 6 hours and 50 minutes to 7 hours and 24 minutes."

"Laurie Santos wants to help teenagers, and the rest of the world, feel happier. Santos, the psychology professor behind Yale University's most popular course, recently launched a free six-week version of the class aimed at teenagers, called "The Science of Well-Being for Teens." It was developed to address rising rates of anxiety, depression and suicide rates for kids between ninth and 12th grade, Santos says. Lesson No. 1, she preaches in one of the course's pre-recorded lectures: Our brains lie to us about what makes us happy."

"Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they're often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find. Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn't distinguish between an ad labeled "sponsored content" and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source."

"But why do teens hate school? School is a place to learn new things, discover who you are, and make friends. School doesn't sound like a bad place-to a kindergartener! However, the amount of negativity on my twitter feed is indisputable. Nobody wants to go to school. Why? Here's one answer: the traditional education system seems to have at least 20 different methods for helping a student's self-esteem plummet."

Teenagers' habit of distributing nude self-portraits electronically - often called "sexting" if it's done by cell phone - has parents and school administrators worried. Some prosecutors have begun charging teens who send and receive such images with child pornography and other serious felonies. But is that the best way to handle it?

60 Second Recap is an awesome new site that has one goal, they want to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and irresistible to today's teens. Using short (60 second) video albums, they seek to help teens engage with the best books out there ... not just to help them get better grades, but "to help them build better lives". Looks like a welcome and nice alternative for Cliff Notes and Spark Notes. Check this one out - it only takes a minute.