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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.

Every day that first week, even in the first meeting, teach something substantive in the curriculum. Make it something that is brand new, not something reviewed from the previous year. Students are hungry for intellectual engagement after a summer off, and they want to think great thoughts and do great works.

Mix academics with administrative and Get-to-Know-You activities. It should be about 50-50: half engagement with interesting academics, half focused on forms, announcements, or activities meant to build classroom community. Keep the ratio: students will grow impatient and disillusioned if too much time is spent on get-to-know-you activities. It sounds weird, but most students are not looking for continued summer camp experiences so much as they are seeking confidence and engagement.

choose poems related to growing up or modern culture, or read share the lyrics of powerful songs of any generation.

Today we kick off Scientific American's Bring Science Home initiative, which will offer 20 free tabletop science activities during the month of May. We hope they will make for easy—and fun—ways to enjoy science at home

These annotations, rather than being on paper, can be collected with different web tools so that students can collaborate

One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.

Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.

In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.

students were challenged to think deeply

I gave the students complete autonomy on how to execute the task, which also increased their excitement about the assignment.

Assigning students to teams: CATME Team-Maker Self and peer evaluations and rating team processes: CATME Peer Evaluation Training students to rate teamwork: CATME Rater Calibration Training students to work in teams: CATME Teamwork Training Making meetings more effective: CATME Meeting Support

Gather information from students and provide feedback to students. Understand their student teams’ processes, team-members’ contributions, and students’ perspectives on their team experience. Be aware of problems that are occurring on their students’ teams Hold students accountable for contributing to their teams. Use best practices when managing student team experiences.

disadvantages