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Social media and online gameplay are the most common digital venues for meeting friends

Along with texting, teens are incorporating a number of other devices, communication platforms and online venues into their interactions with friends

Video games play a critical role in the development and maintenance of boys’ friendships

Sexual predators and other bad actors have found an easy access point into the lives of young people: They are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps

Games are a common target, but predators are also finding many victims on social platforms like Instagram

Six years ago, a little over 50 reports of the crimes, commonly known as “sextortion,” were referred to the federally designated clearinghouse in suburban Washington that tracks online child sexual abuse. Last year, the center received over 1,500

there’s still no longitudinal data about digital reading. As she put it, “We’re in a place of apprehension rather than comprehension.” And it’s quite possible that the apprehension is misplaced: perhaps digital reading isn’t worse so much as different than print reading

they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again.

“What is the “right” age for youngsters to begin texting and using social media?”

If you wouldn’t say something to a person’s face, don’t send it via text or the internet.

Don’t gossip about other people

[Students need] three things: they need content knowledge, but that’s the easy part today. It’s online; you don’t need a teacher to acquire content. The world simply doesn’t care how much you know anymore because Google knows everything. What the world cares about, now that content has become a commodity, is what you can do with what you know. And that suggests the two other education outcomes that are absolutely critical, and to simplify them I call them skill and will. Students need a new set of skills to thrive for work learning and citizenship in the 21st century; and they need will, meaning motivation, and arguably the most important is motivation. Because if you are motivated you will continuously learn new skills and new content knowledge, which you will have to in this era, and its the thing we do the most damage to in our schools today.

We’re not giving kids work that is intrinsically interesting in the vast majority of our schools, and we’re spending far too much time on test prep, and the tests themselves are predominantly multiple choice factual recall tests that tell us absolutely nothing about work learning or citizenship readiness in the 21st century. Kids know it, and they’re bored out of their minds.

I think the whole idea of a digital portfolio is part of what I call Accountability 2.0, moving away from an over-reliance on stupid tests and moving towards really looking at student work and having students meet a performance standard for passing on to higher grades and for graduating from high school. And it […] can be an important factor in motivating kids to want to do better work.

pedagogy (i.e., teaching practice) and not the medium (i.e., technological tools and resources, such as whiteboards, hand-held devices, blogs, chat boards) that made a difference in learning, stating that instructional media are “mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition

there was no proof to show that a medium was capable of ensuring that pupils and students could learn more or more effectively. He saw the medium as a means, a vehicle for instruction, but that the essence of learning remained—thankfully—in the hands of the teacher

it is not the medium that decides how effectively learners learn

we see little to be concerned about with the game

Granted, kids’ enthusiasm for Fortnite can be a little much, but we are old enough to remember Garbage Pail kids and have played Pokémon.

one of the best things educators can do is bystander training. That is, we can teach kids appropriate ways to respond when they see distrustful, harassing, or hateful behavior.

The claim that the students who didn’t use tablets performed better academically is based upon exam scores, which were only one-third of a standard deviation higher for the non-tablet crowd than the others. Some might see this as a large difference; I do not, and I doubt a majority of statisticians would either. But hey–why let the fact that this was a superficial study conducted with a small sample size of atypical students examining only one type of technology deter you from claiming that all technology in the classroom is bad? This is what people in the psych business call “confirmation bias,” I believe.

no mention of pedagogy at all

They don’t even acknowledge, much less control for, pedagogy.

teens today are spending an average of nine hours a day online,

sedentary screen time

For now, anyone thinking about how much time using screens and social media is "OK" will ultimately have to make a personal judgement.

Rather than stating that social media was harmful, it suggested a more complex effect.

increasing the time spent using technology was linked to improved wellbeing

Technology makes it too easy to say things that are impulsive or unkind

Your words can be misinterpreted, manipulated, and forwarded without your permission

Once you share something online, you lose control of where it goes, who can forward it, who will see it, and how it can potentially be used