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competitive, violent fantasy games contribute to the development of strong future leaders and citizens.

My children were not using their iPads in every spare moment—they still liked other classroom tools such as Lego, dominos and drawing paper—but the iPads were a popular choice

I didn’t get around to figuring out how to use it, but my students did. They taught themselves and then taught me as well.

Some students preferred digital and some preferred non-digital, but most moved seamlessly back and forth between the two.

An excessive focus on coding ignores the current plight of existing developers.Technology changes at a rapid pace in this industry.

The line between learning to code and getting paid to program as a profession is not an easy line to cross.Really.

If becoming an engineer is what you want, don’t let me — or anyone, for that matter — get in the way of your goal. And don’t let traditional confinements like the educational system slow you down

the effectiveness of learning is determined primarily by the way the medium is used and by the quality of the instruction accompanying that use

The crucial factor for learning improvement is to make sure that you do not replace the teacher as the instrument of instruction, allowing computers to do what teachers would normally do, but instead use computers to supplement and amplify what the teacher does

the use of both e-learning and contact education—which is known as blended learning—produces better results than lessons given without technolog

the medium does not influence the learning

the medium seldom influences teaching, learning, and education, nor is it likely that one single medium will ever be the best one for all situations

students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the newest technologies, such as blogs, wikis, and virtual worlds

the main reasons young people use technology. These reasons are mainly social

Digital natives! Whenever the question of digital innovation in education is discussed, this is a term that immediately comes to the surface. But it should be avoided. Even the person who coined the term digital natives, Marc Prensky, admitted in his most recent book, Brain Gain, that the term is now obsolete.2

Prensky’s coining of this term—and its counterpart for people who are not digitally native—was not based on research into this generation, but rather created by rationalizing phenomena that he had observed

The students use a large quantity and variety of technologies for communicating, learning, staying connected with their friends, and engaging with the world around them. But they are using them primarily for “personal empowerment and entertainment

university students do not really have a deep knowledge of technology, and what knowledge they do have is often limited to basic Microsoft Office skills (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), emailing, text messaging, Facebook, and surfing the Internet

There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus. Of course, the brain changes any time we form a memory or learn a new skill, but new skills build on our existing capacities without fundamentally changing them. We will no more lose our ability to pay attention than we will lose our ability to listen, see or speak.

Note that many of these studies examined the influence of television rather than the influence of interactive technology, such as smartphones and social media

when people think that young people today read less, it’s not about reading online content or text messages, it’s about reading book

young people are still doing a lot of reading, and these statistics make clear that many of them are reading for pleasure. However, we need to be careful about making too many sweeping assertions, since the reading figures in many countries are falling. Even so, we know that reading continues to be important: both reading by young people themselves and parents reading to their childre

a teenager's "news-gathering process" alternated skimming or "grazing" with a "deep dive" when she found something she could really get her teeth into

such nutritious, dense, lengthy pieces of writing are, of course, becoming ever more popular on the very same internet that pessimists blame for destroying our attention spans

Can we really blame kids for being so taken by Fortnite? The game itself—a combination of army guys, building forts, and king-of-the-hill battles—would have taken place with sticks or toy guns in the vacant lots or wooded strands that are increasingly designed out of today’s suburban neighborhoods

look beyond the immediate content of the game (its characters and themes), and focus more intently on what kids are doing with it

Although there are no established links between games and violence, there are some obvious connections between gaming too much and wider problems

Rather than focusing on what games kids are playing, we should attend more to who they are meeting and gaming with online, what type of talk they are engaged in, and what kinds of groups they are becoming a part of

For kids growing up today, laptops and mobile phones aren’t high-tech tools — they’re everyday tools, just like crayons and watercolors.

Of course there’s a problem if children spend all their time interacting with screens — just as there would be a problem if they spent all their time playing the violin or reading books or playing sports. Spending all your time on any one thing is problematic. But the most important issue with screen time is not quantity but quality. There are many ways of interacting with screens; it doesn’t make sense to treat them all the same

Rather than trying to minimize screen time, I think parents and teachers should try to maximize creative time. The focus shouldn’t be on which technologies children are using, but rather what children are doing with them

In an ever-more intricate and connected world, where software plays a larger and larger role in everyday life, it’s irresponsible to speak of coding as a lightweight activity.

The digital deficit, they suggest, isn’t a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book

It wasn’t the screen that disrupted the fuller synthesis of deep reading; it was the allure of multitasking on the Internet and a failure to properly mitigate its impact

We need to be aware of the effects of deeper digital immersion, Wolf says, but we should be equally cautious when we draw causal arrows or place blame without adequate longitudinal research

Deep-reading skills, Wolf points out, may not be emphasized in schools that conform to the Common Core, for instance, and need to meet certain test-taking reading targets that emphasize gist at the expense of depth. “Physical, tangible books give children a lot of time,” she says. “And the digital milieu speeds everything up. So we need to do things much more slowly and gradually than we are.” Not only should digital reading be introduced more slowly into the curriculum; it also should be integrated with the more immersive reading skills that deeper comprehension requires.