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need to move beyond the heavy reliance on text.

lot of digital books floating around, being hailed as amazing advancements in teaching and learning. Although I know the majority of materials currently available to students on their portable multimedia consumption devices are still primarily text-based, maybe including a static image or two (see Figure 3, a color, static digital page with a Venn diagram that is no different from the same page in the printed book5),

Students need a learning environment that encourages success, but how can a teacher create such a place?

In the classroom, a technical success arises when a teacher prepares her students to succeed, and a technical failure exists when she sets them up to fail.

Just as a store owner must lay out his store for maximum sales, a teacher must set up her classroom as an effective learning environment. The structure may vary with the teacher’s style of teaching and her students’ needs.

Students’ brains continuously adapt to the environments where they live and work.  As students learning in these places, these experiences gradually sculpt the architecture of the brain.

Students’ genetic predispositions interact with learning experiences to give rise to a wide range of individual differences.

Students learning English as a second language are processing written information in somewhat different ways than native English speakers so standard reading instruction techniques may not be the right fit for their needs.

Most students don't care about FERPA - stuffy administrators do. If students cared in the slightest none of them would have Facebook accounts. Have them sign a FERPA waiver and get back to work! If they don't want to waive then provide alternate ways to earn credit.

I think it is really important to keep the spaces where we learn private. Students need to ability to test out ideas within a safe environment that is protected from outside search engines. We need an opportunity to test ideas and fail without a future prospective employer able to access student work. Materials that are public in the digital world lose their contextual basis and therefore can be misinterpreted at a later time.  Therefore, if I have students post and reflect, I do it all within the confines of a password protected website. Password protection is not perfect but at least it is an honest step at protecting a student's right to be a student.

A classroom that has successfully integrated technology into the curriculum would be one where you would not really notice it because it would be so second nature. The teacher would not have to think up ways to use whatever tools were available, but would seamlessly use them to enhance the learning of whatever content was being covered. Technology [would be] used to assist in acquiring content knowledge, and the acquisition of technology skills [would be] secondary. Contrast this depiction with what the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S; ISTE, 2002) say about technology integration: Curriculum integration with the use of technology involves the infusion of technology as a tool to enhance the learning in a content area or multidisciplinary setting….Effective integration of technology is achieved when students are able to select technology tools to help them obtain information in a timely manner, analyze and synthesize the information, and present it professionally. The technology should become an integral part of how the classroom functions—as accessible as all other classroom tools.

his urging to shift the focus from the learning tools to what is being learned and how that learning happens still needs to be heeded—almost 20 years later.

Integration is defined not by the amount or type of technology used, but by how and why it is used.