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or just to profit from it

potential customers

Plenty of research does indeed show that an individual student will learn more if you can tailor the curriculum to match her learning style, pace and interests; the tablet, he said, will help teachers do that

commercial opportunities

looking for higher test scores

exploit

It provides immediate feedback

The Amplify tablet helps make personalization possible.

The teacher’s tablet also has an app blocker and monitoring functions that can see and control what’s happening on student tablets

Companies with vested interests are pitching themselves as the solution to the country’s educational problems, he says, “but we don’t have research proving it’s true.”

apostles of disruption,

depend on good teaching

it can be easier to find money for cool new gadgets than for teachers.

must equip our students to compete with counterparts in India and China

Where technology makes a difference, it tends to do so in places with a strong organization dedicated to improving teaching and where students closely engage with teachers and one another.

for sale to schools

gaze tracking

Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media sites are by far the most common digital activities students undertake while learnin

“Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources.

They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”

the assignment takes longer to complete

memory of what they’re working on will be impaired if their attention is divided

The moment of encoding is what matters most for retention

This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated,

“even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.”

students who used Facebook during the 15-minute observation period had lower grade-point averages than those who didn’t go on the site

texting and using Facebook—in class and while doing homework—were negatively correlated with college students’ GPAs.

“There’s a definite possibility that we are raising a generation that is learning more shallowly than young people in the past,” he says. “The depth of their processing of information is considerably less, because of all the distractions available to them as they learn.”

academic and even professional achievement may depend on the ability to ignore digital temptations while learning

kids who were better able to delay gratification not only achieved higher grades and test scores but were also more likely to succeed in school and their careers.

hose who were interrupted more often scored worse on a test of the lecture’s content; more interestingly, those who responded to the experimenters’ texts right away scored significantly worse than those participants who waited to reply until the lecture was over.

leads to more mistakes

“Young people’s technology use is really about quelling anxiety,” he contends. “They don’t want to miss out.

Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that must be managed, he says, if young people are to learn and perform at their best.

‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”

Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cellphones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.

What needs to be taught is skills, not just information, and certainly not all the inaccurate information so much “Internet safety education” has disseminated over nearly two decades.

“properties” (“persistence,” “searchability,” “replicability,” and “scalability”) and “dynamics” (“invisible audiences,” “collapsed contexts,” and “the blurring of public and private”) – and now some of those, e.g., “persistence,” are changing with the arrival of “ephemeral,” or disappearing, digital media in services

media is both social and digital.

full, healthy participation in participatory media, culture and society.

what protects children online is what protects them offline.

life skills, literacies and safeguards that are both internal – respect for self and others, resilience, empathy, and a strong inner guidance system (sometimes called a moral compass) – and external, such as good modeling, parenting and teaching by caring adults, peer mentoring, instruction in digital and media literacy, social-emotional learning, protective technology used thoughtfully, family and school rules, well-designed digital environments, and well-established laws against discrimination, sexual harassment, bullying, and crime.

teach the skills of today’s very social digital media: digital literacy, media literacy and social literacy, which together address both media-specific risk reduction and proficiency in participatory media use.

ACCESS

ANALYZE

CREATE

REFLECT

“ACT:

These are the competencies that students need to navigate participatory media and culture.

providing access and opportunities to analyze, create, reflect and act as much with digital media as with older media right in core academic classes, schools are affording them the skills, community, and self-actualization that increase safety (resilience) as well as efficacy in and out of media. This is the real “Internet safety [or competency]” that needs to be taught in schools.

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity.

These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

we began to prefer the diminished substitutes.

it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled.

Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others.

freshman seminar course at Penn State that he calls “Failure 101.”

“the frequency and intensity of failures is an implicit principle of the course. Getting into a creative mind-set involves a lot of trial and error.”

“As soon as someone in the class starts breaking the sticks,” he says, “it changes everything.”

“Examine what in the culture is preventing you from creating something new or different. And what is it like to look like a fool because a lot of things won’t work out and you will look foolish? So how do you handle that?”

be willing to fail but that failure is a critical avenue to a successful end.

When ideas from different fields collide, Dr. Cramond says, fresh ones are generated.

rephrasing problems as questions, learning not to instinctively shoot down a new idea (first find three positives), and categorizing problems as needing a solution that requires either action, planning or invention. A key objective is to get students to look around with fresh eyes and be curious. The inventive process, she says, starts with “How might you…”

“A lot of people can’t deal with things they don’t know and they panic

make creativity happen instead of waiting for it to bubble up. A muse doesn’t have to hit you.”

most students have unfettered access to these forbidden sites through the phones in their pockets and backpacks, on their home computers and in many public libraries – often with no adult guidance

it has to be learned in context in a supportive environment,”

(a) obscene; (b) child pornography; or (c) harmful to minors.”

defining the three measures is up to each community, creating widely varied implementation from district to district

and their answer to any requests was usually no.

Their view was that if the filter is blocking it, there’s no reason for you to see it,”

Krull implemented a teacher login system that lets staff override some blocked sites. He’s working on a similar system for students that would grant varying degrees of access depending on grade level.

nearly three times as many teachers of low-income students than those with middle- and high-income students said this lack of access was a “major challenge” in their ability “to incorporate more digital tools into their teaching.”

eliminating filters isn’t the answer to debugging the problems with CIPA.

There’s not a right or wrong; it’s a lot about community values

“It’s not if you have a filter or not, it’s really about to what degree do you filter, how do you filter?”

Your future depends on it; my salary depends on it.

until I got to Central High, I literally didn't know I was a good student, because the question never came up.

There were tests, but they just gave information about what's going on. This is something we ought to be doing better.

"How can mosquitoes fly in the rain?" And then, but why is there a problem? Well, you study the force of the raindrop hitting a mosquito - it's like a person being hit by a locomotive.

It doesn't matter how much you learn in school; it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself.

Control from above, control by the administrators. No respect for the working person, whether it's a teacher or machinist.

Kids are naturally creative, and of course, you don't have to beat it out of them. That's why they're asking, "Why?" all the time.

You can't let teachers control the classroom. That's teaching to test; then the teachers are disciplined. They do what you tell them. Their salaries depend on it; their jobs depend on it. They become sociopaths like everyone else. And you have a society where it's only, "Look after me; I'll forget everyone else."

Seeing more and more aspects of our lives as games to win through maximization has a sort of self-perpetuating effect with perverse consequences, not the least of which is the impairment of what Diesing terms social rationality; the cherishing of unique relationships, personal connectedness, cooperative functioning, solidarity and sentiment.

If winning efficiently is the goal, then the rules (ethical, moral, legal, and spiritual), are essentially obstacles to game.

In our schools, competition for access to elite preschools, for grades, for social status, in sports, over positions of leadership, and for admission to exclusive colleges transforms one of our most basic institutions for fostering community, ethics and learning into competitive, individualistic corporate training-grounds. In these settings, the importance of competitive sports becomes paramount, for both financial and training purposes, and the artistry of cheating (see this year's Stuyvesant High School cheating scandal) and rule-bending (see Joe Paterno) revered. Such intense competition encourages the professionalization of parenting -- through tutors, highly-educated nannies, prep courses, and professional training camps (such as investment camps). You can imagine the deleterious effects these trends have on the ethos of care and moral responsibility in our families and schools, a critical buffer against bullying and violence in the lives of our children.

We become hyper-connected through technologies, boasting our number of "friends" on Facebook, and have less and less intimacy.

We choose friends with benefits or Internet porn over romantic relationships as they are less messy, more efficient.

Life is a race and we are losing.

The bigger threat to SnapChat and its users, though, may come from third party platforms and applications, which can easily undermine the privacy protections that are seemingly built into the platform. Early releases of Apple’s iOS operating system changed the way in which screen shots could be taken, making it impossible for the SnapChat application to detect when screenshots of SnapChat images were captured.

SnapHack Pro, for sale on the iOS App Store. It allows users to log in using their SnapChat credentials and send and receive Snaps. The difference: all images opened and viewed in SnapHack are permanent.

claims to online anonymity and privacy are falling left and right.

The only way to win, then, is “not to play

focus on involving students in the process of learning during class.

The true essence of the flip is really to focus on the student.

Flipped classrooms are interactive— sometimes even ‘messy’—because students are working together and solving problems rather than sitting passively listening to a lecture

are also risky. Instructors relinquish a degree of control when the energy in the classroom shifts to the students

“What do the students need to DO to achieve the learning outcome?”

Citizen journalists are slowly transforming the way we receive and interpret current events. But who directs the conversation? Millions of people all striving to have their voice heard? Is this what freedom of speech has come to? Let’s face it. It’s a beautiful mess.

Regardless of how they might appear, all educators think they are doing a good job and suggesting the opposite will only make them more defensive and less open to any recommendation for changing.

Fear freezes people into place and prevents meaningful change.

Most bullying-prevention efforts emphasize what shouldn’t happen:“Don’t bully others.” The implicit message is that the schools themselves don’t have to change; they just have to make sure that bullying doesn’t happen.

many students who bully learn to do it under the radar of adult supervision. Traditional rewards and consequences have little if any impact on bullying behavior in schools.

Tell a different story.

Stand on principles.

Translate principles into specific words and actions.

Get adult behavior aligned with principles.

All students can lead.

Becoming a more caring and respectful school community is the means and the ends towards preventing and reducing bullying in schools.