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Most projects and social networks encourage users to upload a personal ID or photograph. Student safety, however, is paramount to shelter identities. Clever and quirky avatars, therefore, can help students distinguish their profiles and still remain incognito. An avatar is a customized online icon that represents a user's virtual self. A signature avatar can give a child great pride in his or her masterpiece. Among the many cartoony or creative avatar generators available on the web, many require accounts or email addresses or are not safe for school. To take advantage of all that the Web affords, workarounds can be used to protect privacy but still allow for a personalized identity. A few ways to do this include generating avatars, setting-up username conventions, creating email shortcuts, and screencapping of content.

The education-approved social networks and cartoon avatars will work on elementary and perhaps some middle school students, but high school kids are a whole different ballgame. Yes, content-filtering solutions can prevent students from accessing social media while they’re connected to school networks, but once they’re on their personal devices, it’s out of the school’s hands.

In the article, Cutler outlines five questions that he advises his students to ask themselves when engaging in social media activity: Do I treat others online with the same respect I would accord them in person? Would my parents be disappointed in me if they examined my online behavior? Does my online behavior accurately reflect who I am away from the computer? Could my online behavior hinder my future college and employment prospects? How could my online behavior affect current and future personal relationships?

This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish. This is despite a compelling and rather surprising branch of neuroscience that shows the importance of an area of our brain that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.

Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation

Evidence from both behavioral and neuroscience studies shows that when people receive training on ways to perceive and represent their own fingers, they get better at doing so, which leads to higher mathematics achievement. The tasks we have developed for use in schools and homes (see below) are based on the training programs researchers use to improve finger-perception quality.

when a student asked Nieto if he could bring his iPod to class, Nieto agreed, and neither teacher nor student has looked back since.

said mobile devices are particularly useful because of the many learning applications and basic language tools, such as spell check and grammar check, which increase the speed of learning. Rather than view the mobile applications as learning shortcuts tantamount to cheating, Nieto sees them as motivational tools that increase his students’ interest in reading and writing by giving them instant feedback. It’s a perspective most of his students seem to share.

as motivational tools that increase his students’ interest in reading and writing by giving them instant feedback.

Finally, technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. It’s part of how we research, how we capture information, and how we display our learning. It’s never an accessory tacked on at the end.

My students started by creating a Flickr feed, Facebook page, a YouTube account, a Tumblr blog, and a Twitter account. They decided that visual representations of their knowledge would be the most powerful. So some of my students created photographs depicting images that they felt best represented modern trafficking. These photos were then edited in Picnik, and posted to our blog.

A few years ago I tried to teach this idea to a grade 12 class when we were studying essay writing. They didn’t get it. But in the context we were using, after comparing social media content, it made perfect sense to my grade 11 students.

The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed (i.e., reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells as illustrated below.