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The campaigns are collected in a website and can be viewed here. 

We were pretty sure that the G² students would mostly comply with the new policy because they had invested so much time and effort (note: ownership) but we were uncertain just how effective the Responsible Use Campaign would be for everyone else.

groups researching the potentially negative consequences of cell phone use in schools, we came to realize that we needed a way to address these proactively if the proposal we were planning to make to administration had any chance of approval.

What’s the impact of messages related to classwork when they’re part of a large stream of messages students receive from friends, family, horoscope advice, sports scores and so on? What sort of learning happens best (or is reinforced best, perhaps) via SMS? How can these sorts of messages be adapted to students’ progress and how can they be sequenced and scaffolded over time? How many students are able and willing to participate in these sorts of educational activities via their mobile phone? Can students afford the texting fees? Do they want to use their text-messaging allocations for this purpose? Can we subsidize this sort of SMS traffic for student populations? If these sorts of messages between home and school become more common, will there be a way to include parents and parents’ phones in the loop? Can these quizzes be sent to parents’ phones so that they can have the opportunity to pose a question to their children? “This would, in a very small, modest way, alert parents to what students are supposed to be learning,” suggests Trucano. “If students don’t know the answer, this may trigger parents to push their kids more, and/or to question whether the school is doing a good job in this area (including whether or not the official curriculum is being followed at all!).”

Students work in groups, and when they have a question, they call him over. He arrives with iPad in hand and records his voice and his writing on the iPad, which he immediately uploads to the class website so other students can benefit from the explanations instantaneously. (This, by the way, is another form of flipped teaching, he says.)

we find that ownership of a mobile phone and participation in a variety of internet activities are associated with larger and more diverse core discussion networks. (Discussion networks are a key measure of people’s most important social ties.)

having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds.

For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race.

By forbidding the use of social media sites in 52% of our nation’s classrooms, schools are suppressing a learning revolution that is characterized by several truths: 1) facility with social media tools is critical to learning and working in the 21st century; 2) 75% of online adolescents are already social networking outside of school; 3) many students hack through Internet filters during class; and 4) exploration of social media sites is part of the adolescent identity.

Workshop reports that, on average, kids can actually stuff eight hours of media exposure into five hours of non-school time by media multitasking—phone texting while participating in seven separate Facebook chats and posting to Tumblr.

Dr. Howard Rheingold, on his final exam, asked his Stanford students to demonstrate their understanding of the literacies that accompany new media by creating, rather than writing, an essay. B

this is what collaborative learning looks and sounds like in 21st-century schools. “Why shoul

”Top-down authoritative teaching styles – and, in some cases, courtesy titles as teachers become peers, friends and resource facilitators – are out, along with desks arranged in tidy rows, all seats facing forward. In the classroom of the past, students memorized and regurgitated on tests the facts teachers presented in lectures. In the classroom of the present and future, students increasingly take personal responsibility for their own educations. “We have given them res

Every single day, I am finding new connections that make kids’ education more exciting. If our kids didn’t see this vision and they didn’t see what is so powerful about it, it wouldn’t work.

discuss a framework for optimizing our relationships with technology. “We are merging with technology — we are techno-bodies engaged at work and play. Can we achieve a happiness that transcends the digital and the physical realms, thereby transforming into a new state of being?” she asks.

Too much technology can impede our happiness. We have to disconnect. Akbari suggests to go on periodic media fasts, a “technology cleanse”, if you will. Turn off your phone and drink some wine.

Organize reminders of your resulting to-do lists — for the e-mails you need to send, the phone calls you need to make, the meetings you need to arrange, the at-home tasks you need to complete. Park the inventory of all your projects in a convenient place.

In other words, our attraction to a world of infinite possibility, information and complexity is here to stay. The challenge is how to participate productively in this new and turbulent world, and not be paralyzed by it.

that it no longer makes sense to consider the world as divided between developing and industrialised countries; and that people everywhere respond similarly to increasing levels of wealth and health, with higher material aspirations and smaller families. “There is no such thing as a ‘we’ and a ‘they’, with a gap in between,”

The best measure of political stability of a country, he believes, is whether fertility rates are falling, because that indicates that women are being educated and basic health services are being provided. “

Innovation in infographics has always been driven by the need to explain difficult things,