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I would say that they primarily need protected from themselves… that they need help moderating their web presence until they understand the full ramifications of things they say online.  I don’t think that means they need to be anonymous.  I do think that anonymity tends to foster less responsible behavior, in both children and adults alike

The time to advocate for NWP is now! We need all teachers and site leaders to call their two senators on Monday, November 29. Please ask them to VOTE NO on Coburn amendment #4697 to S. 510 that would ban all congressionally directed spending in FY2011, FY2012 and FY2013. We expect a vote to be held on this amendment on Monday, November 29, 2010. Read about what's at stake: "Earmark Ban Would Result in Catastrophic Cuts for Children" (Huffington Post)

One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics. Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers. “Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.”

We are not working under these conditions because of our zip code or because of some unavoidably cyclical function of our reality. These constraints do not happen like weather patterns that we simply have to hunker down and wait out. They happen because of decisions that people make due to greed, misinformation, politico-social agendas, or ignorance.

“What was good enough for me is good enough for ‘your’ children.”

What interests me are products that help students learn to learn by empowering them to gaze upon the world they are learning about and to interact with the world, not by giving them better access to the classroom and instructor.

We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work.

Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.

"Will what I am about to do or say bring me closer to the person with whom I am communicating—or will it push me further away?"

"Is what I am doing (or about to do) going to connect to the student's self-interest?"

"Who's doing the work?"