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Blue light from screens isn’t ruining your eyesThere’s a rumor that the blue light from smartphones (or other screens) can ruin your vision, perhaps even leading to blindness, but it’s not backed up by evidence. “The amount of light coming from a computer has never been demonstrated to cause any eye disease,” the American Academy of Opththalmology states in an article on their website recommending against blue-light-blocking glasses

Blue light-blocking filters also don’t block very much blue light; they just reduce it a tiny bit. (Experts have pointed out that you could get the same effect by holding your screen one inch farther away from your face

When you’re spending time in front of screens—any kind—the rule of thumb for eye health is the “20-20-20” rule. Every 20 minutes, take a 20-second break to look at something 20 feet away

One of my fears when I was able to put a device into the hands of every student was that the students might focus on the screen, the way many children do with a television or a computer. Those children become absorbed by the device, ignoring all that is going on around them. Happily, this has not at all proved to be the case for us. The students did not want to just use the iPads; they wanted to share them.  The hum of voices excitedly talking to their peers about what they were doing was just the same as it had always been. They just had different things to share.

One of the things I have come to value most highly is choice.  I have offered my students as much choice in how they learn and in how they demonstrate their learning as I can. The iPads have given my students so many more opportunities for choice.

the iPads have given us a rich variety of options that were just not available before

with schools moving towards 1:1 devices in the classroom – assistive technology for writing is no longer inaccessible or convoluted. It is, in fact, readily available, accurate and remarkably intuitive

The results have been truly astounding. Pupils that would work hard to scrawl one or two lines of text in a 45-minute writing session are now producing two paragraphs of well structured writing in 10 minutes.

with the mechanics of writing greatly reduced, there is far more time for pupils to spend on word choice, phrasing and editing their work

if the metric you used to judge whether or not a new technology is a "pirate technology" is what percentage of its use was "unauthorized," you get a very skewed picture. Early on, all sorts of new and innovative technologies are mostly used for unauthorized copies... until the industry catches up. However, people don't often deal with trends very well, and they assume, quite incorrectly, that if a technology is initially used in an unauthorized manner, it must be a "piracy tool" and no amount of discussing how trends and adaptation works will convince them otherwise.

over time, things change. Content creators begin to embrace the new, realize that it might not be evil, and suddenly we see more and more interesting case studies. And that seems to be happening with BitTorrent. The recent MusicMetric analysis of BitTorrent downloads for the first six months of 2012 found that 31% of downloads were for authorized files. Now, you can argue that this is still less than half of all files -- but it's a big step up from the standard claims that somewhere between 1% and 10% were authorized. It seems quite likely that the trend is moving in the right direction.

the idea that BitTorrent is just for infringement may have to be officially considered debunked

the way we’re taught from a young age to evaluate and think critically about information is fundamentally flawed and out of step with the chaos of the current internet.

It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information

the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.