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[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.

There’s an idea that’s been gaining ground in the tech community lately: Everyone should learn to code. But here’s the problem with that idea: Coding is not the new literacy.

Selling coding as a ticket to economic salvation for the masses is dishonest

Girls should play more video games.

spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements

spatial skills can be improved by training; these improvements persist over time; and they “transfer” to tasks that are different from the tasks used in the training

he video game Portal 2 is better at improving cognitive skills than the "brain-trainer" Lumosity—a web based system that has been designed to improve such skills

The researchers found that those who had played Portal 2 showed a "statistical advantage" over those who'd played Lumosity—they note that the reverse was never true with any of the volunteer

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.

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

It’s amazing, he adds, that people don’t see that the alarm around tech is just a repeat of a very old storyline. “In the 1950s, fearmongers were saying the exact same thing about comic books, literally verbatim: it’s reducing kids’ attention spans; it’s causing them to commit suicide; it’s leading to mental health issues.” Distraction, he stresses, is an age-old problem that is far bigger than technology

Media Literacy … provides a framework to access, analyze, evaluate, create and participate with messages in a variety of forms — from print to video to the Internet.

any media literacy strategy requires sustained attention, resources and commitment

critical thinking is not a skill that can be improved through practice—like a golf swing—nor is it a “general” capability. Instead, it is an abstract description of what humans can do as a result amassing a wealth of underpinning knowledge and skills relevant to the particular context in which thinking is to be deployed

young children are capable of thinking critically about subjects they know a great deal about, whereas trained scientists can fail to think critically in areas where they are less knowledgeable

not all knowledge is created equal. We need to differentiate between knowledge and information. Much of the information stored on the Internet is pictures of kittens or videos of people singing sea shanties. This can keep increasing exponentially without any need for school children to become acquainted with it

kids really do not like educational games; in fact, they hate them. And as I watched more kids play video games, I realized Sid was 100% correct. If given a choice between a game designed with a learning goal or a commercial game designed for fun, kids’ll choose fun every time.

when we reject the games that boys play, the games are merely a proxy for the boys themselves.We reject games because they’re violent, individualistic, competitive, engrossing and largely foreign to us as teachers, parents, leaders, adults. And these are the precise characteristics of boys that we reject when we enforce zero tolerance policies

We don’t have specific limits, because their lives are full of other things that are equally as fun and engaging for them. So, yes, it’s OK for your child to game, as long as they do it in a careful, balanced and sustained way (yes, sustained: deep engagement, grit, perseverance and other good skills are not built by grazing). Valuing their gaming activities amounts to respecting them and their culture

the ability for a game to teach multiple skills simultaneously

does not build video games to ‘teach mathematics.’ Rather, we build instruments which you can play, and we design them so that when you play them, you cannot fail to learn about mathematics. Moreover, each single game can be used to deliver mathematical challenges of increasing sophistication.

I love the instrument analogy because I’m often explaining to my students why the Ancient Greeks saw math and music as part of the same realm–that area of experience that belonged to the god Apollo. Of course, the relationship has to do with intervals. But both math and music are also related to Apollo’s other domains, such as light, prophecy, healing, etc. The connection has been hard to understand from the rigidly measured viewpoint that has dominated Western thinking since Nietzsche inadvertently cemented the Apollonian into strict opposition with the Dionysian in The Birth Of Tragedy.

these are examples of how technology may make the process a bit more efficient or less dreary but does nothing to challenge the outdated pedagogy. To the contrary: These are shiny things that distract us from rethinking our approach to learning and reassure us that we’re already being innovative

The first involves adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores, and it requires the purchase of software. The second involves working with each student to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests, and it requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well

it increasingly feels as though scientific evidence has become a casualty in the process.

the factors which underlie why the public discourse around technology is so dysfunctional

these factors aren’t just focused on debates around the effects of technology – they speak to wider debates around science and evidence-based policy

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

sedentary screen time

The use of computers, when combined with collaborative learning, positively affected: Knowledge gain (+0.45) Skill acquisition (+0.53) Pupil perceptions (+0.51) Group task performance (+0.89) Social interaction (+0.57) Lastly, extra technology-related learning tools during CSCL positively affected knowledge gain (+0.55), as did the use of strategies (+0.38).

we might be overlooking the “educational and psychological benefits of using social media sites,” such as developing critical thinking and perspective-taking skills

parents and educators have been led to demonize what could simply be an evolving means of social connection

a constant stream of interruptions