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"FOR ALL THE FEAR they inspire, school shootings of any kind are technically still quite rare. Less than 1 percent of all fatal shootings that involve children age 5 to 18 occur in school, and a significant majority of those do not involve indiscriminate rampages or mass casualties. It has been two decades since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ushered in the era of modern, high-profile, high-casualty shootings with their massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. According to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, just 10 of the nation's 135,000 or so schools have experienced a similar calamity - a school shooting with four or more victims and at least two deaths - since then. But those 10 shootings have had an outsize effect on our collective psyche, and it's not difficult to understand why: We are left with the specter of children being gunned down en masse, in their own schools. One such event would be enough to terrify and enrage us. This year, we had three. Teachers are at the quiet center of this recurring national horror. They are victims and ad hoc emergency workers, often with close ties to both shooter and slain and with decades-long connections to the school itself. But they are also, almost by definition, anonymous public servants accustomed to placing their students' needs above their own. And as a result, our picture of their suffering is incomplete. [Watch educators as they tell us in their own words about what it's like to to teach in an era of school shootings.]"

"THE CONCEPTS OF "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings," hotly debated on college campuses for years, are now reaching high schools too. It's easy enough to say that college students are supposed to have their assumptions challenged daily, even if that sometimes means experiencing discomfort. But the question of what high school students should be exposed to, and protected from, feels murkier in 2018. Today's high school students are more precocious, more politically engaged, more tuned in to their gender identities and nascent sexuality. They are already flooded with uncensored, unedited information, 24 hours a day: What would a safe space even look like for a 16-year-old with an iPhone? At exclusive private schools like Friends, the question is further complicated by the involvement of wealthy parents. As these schools have grown more expensive - Friends costs nearly $50,000 a year - administrators have found themselves trying to balance their own institutional values with the demands of parents who are in a sense high-paying customers. Teachers are increasingly caught between the two."

"Michael Brennan, who founded the award-winning safeguarding platform tootoot, was himself a victim of cyberbullying at school. "There were too many barriers for me to speak up, especially in high school. It was all happening on places like Bebo and MySpace, where there was no way to tackle it. So, I vowed to find a solution to the problem." Since Michael launched tootoot in 2014, the reporting app has worked with more than 1,000 British schools, with over 400,000 children registered on the platform. Children can log in and report problematic messages to their school or local council, and are assigned a unique number when they log in to report bullying. Schools can keep track of how many times an individual child has experienced bullying, build a chronology, and identify patterns on a dashboard. If they feel it's necessary, they can click to reveal the identity of a child reporting bullying."

"At least 17 people are dead following another school shooting on American soil, this one in the South Florida town of Parkland. Yesterday's tragedy is the US's third-deadliest school shooting, and one of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern American history. Coverage of the event followed a now-familiar pattern, with cable news shots of students being evacuated, and somber contributors speaking with anchors who seemed resigned to covering these sort of tragedies on a regular basis. Wrapping up an interview with a congressman, CNN's Wolf Blitzer said, "Let's hope it stops. But clearly it won't." One notable difference from coverage of past school shootings was the prevalence of social media postings from students still in the building. Videos of students sheltering in classrooms as gunshots echoed from offscreen provided a terrifying window into the experiences of those trapped in the middle of the chaos. Several outlets also shared text messages that students sent to loved ones. A common theme across the coverage was just how normal these mass casualty events feel. Every few months, it seems, early reports of a shooting-at a school, a church, a concert-lead to news bulletins and breaking coverage followed by hours of somber analysis, thoughts and prayers from some and calls to legislative action from others. But nearly two decades after Columbine, the only thing that's changed is the technology by which audiences experience the carnage. As Blitzer said, it's clear we will be back here."

"A new musical explores life in high school in a way that's eerily familiar. It's called Ranked, and it's set in a dystopian world where your class rank - determined by grades and test scores - governs everything from where you sit to what your future holds." This musical, written by a high school teacher, explores some really interesting questions inspired by the students including: "How do we know the difference between who we actually are and what people want from us?" Usually, Granite Bay announces its spring musical by posting headshots of the performers in the hallway. But this year, it tried something a little different: Holmes asked students to anonymously submit personal text messages, exchanges and emails that depicted the pressure the students were under from parents and counselors. One text exchange reads: A: How was the test? B: I got an 86%! A: Oh no what happened? Another: A: I'm watching you B: Where am I currently then A: Failing class They used the messages in a collage that included headlines from recent news stories ("The Silicon Valley Suicides," "Is class rank valid?") and hung it in the hallway instead of the headshots. A banner at the top reads: "Pain is temporary. Grades last forever."

Last week, 17 people, most of them teenagers, were shot dead at a Florida school. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School now joins the ranks of Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine and too many other sites of American carnage. What do these shootings have in common? Guns, yes. But also, boys. Girls aren't pulling the triggers. It's boys. It's almost always boys. America's boys are broken. And it's killing us. The brokenness of the country's boys stands in contrast to its girls, who still face an abundance of obstacles but go into the world increasingly well equipped to take them on. The past 50 years have redefined what it means to be female in America. Girls today are told that they can do anything, be anyone. They've absorbed the message: They're outperforming boys in school at every level. But it isn't just about performance. To be a girl today is to be the beneficiary of decades of conversation about the complexities of womanhood, its many forms and expressions. Boys, though, have been left behind. No commensurate movement has emerged to help them navigate toward a full expression of their gender. It's no longer enough to "be a man" - we no longer even know what that means."

"NEWARK - The fifth-graders of Yolanda Bromfield's digital-privacy class had just finished their lesson on ­online-offline balance when she asked them a tough question: How would they act when they left school and reentered a world of prying websites, addictive phones and online scams? Susan, a 10-year-old in pink sneakers who likes YouTube and the mobile game "Piano Tiles 2," quietly raised her hand. "I will make sure that I don't tell nobody my personal stuff," she said, "and be offline for at least two hours every night." Between their math and literacy classes, these elementary school kids were studying up on perhaps one of the most important and least understood school subjects in America - how to protect their privacy, save their brains and survive the big, bad Web. Classes such as these, though surprisingly rare, are spreading across the country amid hopes of preparing kids and parents for some of the core tensions of modern childhood: what limits to set around technologies whose long-term effects are unknown - and for whom young users are a prime audience.

""Initially, helicopter parenting appears to work," says Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult. "As a kid, you're kept safe, you're given direction, and you might get a better grade because the parent is arguing with the teacher." But, ultimately, parents end up getting in the child's way. In the first episode of Home School, The Atlantic's new animated series on parenting, Lythcott-Haims explains how helicopter parenting strips children of agency and the ability to cultivate their own tools to navigate the world. "Our job as parents is-like it or not-to put ourselves out of a job," she says. This episode of Home School was produced by Elyse Kelly."

"News of the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., has been circulating on social media as news outlets try to find out more details. Here's a snapshot of how the information has played out so far." A sampling of how the news spread via social media through the use of Storify.

"Deadly school shootings and street shootings have put young men and boys in front of-and behind-the trigger. Meanwhile, news reports proclaim a "classroom crisis" in which boys are being left behind in American schools. Are boys really at risk, and could masculinity itself be the culprit?"

"Kent State University is one of only 15 universities across the country to receive a grant from the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) to screen Eyes Wide Open: This is Media, a documentary that explores individual roles in the changing media landscape. Kent State's School of Journalism and Mass Communication will host the premiere at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 20, in the FirstEnergy Auditorium in Room 340 of Franklin Hall. The event is free and open to the public. Produced by Pivot TV, the documentary is a call to awareness about the critical balance between being connected, being responsible and being private. "This is a must-see and an eye-opening video for everyone, especially millennials engaged with social or traditional media," says Federico Subervi, Ph.D., professor in Kent State's School of Journalism and Mass Communication and National Association for Media Literacy Education member."

"A Chicago Tribune photojournalist says another newspaper's single photograph of a star high school basketball player seeming to "flip off" the opposing team's fans was taken out of context. And Tribune photographer Scott Strazzante released all of his raw images capturing the incident as proof that the player did nothing wrong. Now, the photographer who posted the image that caused an online firestorm, and nearly cost the player a chance to play in a tournament, says he should not have used the image."

"When Marsha Richins started researching materialism in the early 1990s, it was a subject that had mostly been left to philosophers and religious thinkers. One focus of Richins's research has been how that pursuit begins in childhood, and in particular accelerates in middle school. That's the time when kids, on average, give the most materialistic responses to the question of what makes them happy. In a paper published last year, Richins described how the social dynamics of middle school can lead children to place more importance on owning and having things. (Movies, TV, the internet, media, advertising, and parents' own habits, of course, can have similar effects.)"

"Yassiry Gonzalez goes to bed early. But often she wakes up around 1 or 2 in the morning. And from then on, sometimes all the way through dawn, the New York City high school student is on her phone - on FaceTime with close friends, or looking through Instagram. "Sometimes, I'm so tired that I'll just fall asleep in school." She estimates the all-nighters happen once or twice a week. And on the weekends? "There's no sleep. No sleep." Looking back, 2018 may be the year that a critical mass of people started wondering: Am I spending too much time on my phone? The World Health Organization officially designated "Internet Gaming Disorder," as a diagnosis similar to gambling addiction. And after Apple shareholders asked the company to address compulsive use of the iPhone, CEO Tim Cook announced new tools to track your use. Cook told NPR's Steve Inskeep in June: "I think there are cases in life where anything good, used to the extreme, becomes not good. I can eat healthy food all day, but if I eat too much it's no longer good anymore.""

"Articulate, witty and digitally native, the survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, are using social media to debunk conspiracy theories and amplify their voices in a way the world hasn't seen before. With thoughtful tweets about gun control, a fearlessness for taking on politicians and sharply worded messages to shut down conspiracy theorists, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are leading a movement. And in classic teenager fashion, they're doing it their way. "I tell my students, 'Don't ever let adults tell you what you are doing [on your smartphones] is a waste of time or it's silly or antisocial,'" said Jeremy Littau, an associate professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "When [this generation] has something to say, they now know how to use these tools in sophisticated ways. That would not have been happening if they hadn't spent last 10 years preparing themselves through these tools.""

"The owner of video game marketplace Steam said it has removed a game where players could simulate a school shooting, a premise that sparked outrage among the families of survivors and turned out to be the work of a previously restricted publisher.  Valve Corporation said it has pulled Active Shooter, which was scheduled to launch on its Steam platform June 6. Steam offers a developer program allowing smaller game designers to publish their video games - commonly played on PCs or Macs - on the platform. Active Shooter was described as a "dynamic SWAT simulator" where players can choose to work as the member of a SWAT team attempting to disarm the shooter, or the shooter themselves."

"This week my daughter's school became the first in the nation to pilot facial-recognition software. The technology's potential is chilling."

"A research team at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication put 48 college students on a "complete and extended media fast for 48 hours." More cruelly, it required them to write "multiple-page essays" about their experiences. Among the reactions, shared in a press release about the study, called "Turn Off Everything: The Challenges and Consequences of Going on a Complete and Extended Media Fast":"

"This past Sunday in Steubenville, Ohio, high school football stars Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond were convicted of raping an intoxicated and barely conscious 16-year-old girl. Author and cultural critic Jackson Katz talked about the implications of the case in this wide-ranging two-part interview with Media Education Foundation (MEF) Production Director Jeremy Earp."