95 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 use the Internet? And all of this is happening while we are in the midst of an explosive rise in mobile technology.

Access to richer graphics and data, as well as superior tools, is still limited on many affordable mobiles. At the same time, many schools continue to demonize cell phone use during school, which may be an outdated policy. Not only are there an increasing number of educational applications for mobiles but, as Blake-Plock suggests, prohibiting phones now means "disconnecting the kid from what's actually happening in most of our lives."

In 2009, the FCC began developing the National Broadband Plan, a work-in-progress that aims to increase broadband access across the country by providing additional infrastructure, incentives for companies to create low-cost access, educational programs, and much more.

tips for safe social networking:• Learn about and use the privacy and security settings on social networks. Consider restricting access to your page to a select group of people—for example, your friends from school, your club, your team, your community groups, or your family.• Think twice before posting pictures you wouldn’t want your parents or future employers to see.• Be cautious about how much personal information you provide on social networking sites. The more information you post, the easier it might be for a hacker, thief, or stalker to commit a crime.• Install a security suite (antivirus, antispyware, and firewall) that is set to update automatically.• Use tools to manage the information you share with friends in different groups. If you’re trying to create a public persona as a blogger or expert, create an open profile or a “fan” page that encourages broad participation and limits personal information. Use your personal profile for trusted friends.• Let a friend know if he or she posts information about you that makes you uncomfortable.• If someone is harassing or threatening you, remove the person from your friends list, block the person, and report the incident to the site administrator.• Make sure that your password is long, complex, and combines, letters, numerals, and symbols. Ideally, you should use a different password for every online account you have.• Be cautious about messages you receive on social networking sites that contain links. Even links that look they come from friends can sometimes contain malware or be part of a phishing attack.• Be aware that people you meet online might be nothing like they describe themselves, and they might not even be the gender they claim.• Flirting with strangers online could have serious consequences. Because some people lie about who they really are, you never really know who you’re dealing with.

Organize Staff Into Meaningful Teams Provide Teams With Time to Collaborate Provide Supportive Structures That Help Groups Become Teams Clarify the Work Teams Must Accomplish Monitor the Work of Teams and Provide Direction and Support as Needed Avoid Shortcuts in the Collaborative Team Process Celebrate Short-Term Wins, and Confront Those Who Do Not Contribute to Their Teams

The same can be said of the PLC process with its emphasis on a collaborative culture.  There is growing recognition that the process represents a powerful strategy for improving student achievement, but bringing it to life in the real world of schools remains difficult.  Educators are asked to change long-standing assumptions, expectations, and habits regarding schooling.  They are asked to relate to colleagues and students in new ways.  They are called upon to abandon the tradition of pursuing the latest educational fad and instead are asked to sustain a commitment to a very different way of operating schools – forever.

Where to go to begin to learn how to transform their classrooms for 21st century learning?

Chances seem good that video games, once con­sid­ered only an obsta­cle to get­ting home­work done, may take on an impor­tant role in edu­ca­tion in the near future.

he two groups that used video games to pre­pare demon­strated a marked increase in knowl­edge reten­tion. The increase was attrib­uted to the psy­cho­log­i­cal effect of par­tic­i­pants being able to engage their minds to a greater degree than that of the group that pas­sively observed the Pow­er­Point presentation.

“Children’s starting point is one step ahead of ours,” Sakaria says. “They are beginning their lives in a world where the Internet is integrated into their everyday experiences – not only through mobile technologies – but soon through the mainstreaming of RFID, NFC and other ‘Internet of things‘ based developments. As a result, digital natives allow us to see unrestrained possibilities for Web-based developments.”

The more you give, the more you get. The more you share, the more you are shared.” Today’s children understand that intuitively. They’re also comfortable with shifting between multiple virtual identities via online games and virtual worlds. Meanwhile, ‘mixed reality’ environments like those you experience while playing with a Nintendo Wii or Xbox Kinect, are no novelty to today’s children – they’re just an obvious way to interact with technology.

5 key trends for the future of education In this, my last post here about the conference, I want to give a quick overview of five trends which jumped out at me. These were mentioned by several speakers during the conference: Openness - This has been going on for a while, but there's a real drive towards open access for academic research in particular.There is a feeling that education and public services should be open and transparent. Greater insight into the knowledge creation process - This is similar to openness but pertains to the creation of articles, books and other material. It's not just the output that should be shared, but the context of how it was put together. Mobile learning. - The big movement at the moment outside the conference is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) but the focus at Mobility Shifts was upon mobile for ubiquitous learning. It's not so much about the mobility of the device but the multiple ways in which the learner is mobile. Alternative forms of assessment - This is a big one with Mozilla's Open Badges leading the way. Because assessment often drives the structure of learning, this is key. Rethinking the classroom environment - This goes hand-in-hand with the curricula redesign necessitated by alternative forms of assessment. How should we build new (or reorganise existing) classrooms?

The best way to understand the expectations of a particular medium is to participate in that medium and identify its genre expectations as they emerge.

Students need to think of their online data along the dimensions of: * accessibility* searchability* persistence

teaching our students about the kairos of digital media, its accessibility and persistence, and the extent to which it is public and private will prepare them not only for the writing situations that they find themselves in now, but also those they will face in the future.

Implicit in these very different proposals is the assumption that urban schools are failing because they are run badly, and that the solution lies in improving their management.

enacting policies that address the underlying problem of economic inequality will our country remain a place where education opens the door to opportunity and upward social mobility and the kind of society in which all Americans can take pride.

There are two key areas where this is happening and where it is having an impact on organisational learning.Extensive use of public social media sites like YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Blogger, Wordpress, Wikipedia, and so on, that support the creation, sharing and commenting of content, as well as the co-creation of content, means that workers are now using similar approaches in their organisations to co-create and share their own content within their own work teams.Extensive use of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc where individuals have built a personal network of trusted friends, means that they are using similar approaches to build networks of trusted colleagues (both internally and externally), as well as power team workspaces and internal communities of practice.

This new approach will embrace both the use of external social media tools as well as internal tools, but what is clear these tools will need to support - as well as power - far wider approaches to learning, than has hitherto been the case. In fact as learning and working become much more closely integrated, “learning” will not be seen as a separate activity requiring separate, dedicated learning systems or platforms, but will need to be supported and enabled within the normal workflow collaboration systems.

there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.

codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era.

Our global environmental, economic and social challenges require non-standardized skills such as creativity, problem-solving and collaboration. Accordingly, these are becoming indispensable skills for learners and workers who hope to stay at the innovative edge of today and tomorrow. While these 21st century skills are essential, they aren't enough. There is a growing expectation for these abilities to be leveraged and expressed using digital tools.

As media scholar Henry Jenkins has said: "Traditionally we wouldn't consider someone literate if they could read but not write. And today we shouldn't consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media."

The literacy of the future rests on the ability to decode and construct meaning from one's constantly evolving environment -- whether it's coded orally, in text, images, simulations, or the biosphere itself. Therefore we must be adaptive to our social, economic and political landscape. Those of us living in this digital age are required to learn, unlearn and learn again and again.