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African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet, and their use is growing at a faster pace than mobile internet use among whites or Hispanics.  While African-Americans are less likely than whites to use laptops to access the internet, they are more likely to use other mobile devices such as cell phones. Half of all African-American adults (48%) have used their cell phone to access the internet, compared with 40% of Hispanic adults and just 31% of white adults.

“Mobile learning is here to stay. There doesn’t appear to be an end in sight as smartphones and tablet devices become more and more pervasive. Through continual evaluation and analysis, mobile learning strategies will become an effective component of any learning strategy.”

n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.