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In You Can't Learn Much from Books You Can't Read by Richard L. Allington, the author discusses the roles of textbooks in the classroom. The textbooks that are used in grades fifth through twelfth don't match the reading levels of the students reading them. Classrooms use one textbook and go off the "one-size-fits-all" approach and now classrooms are using textbooks with a reading level two or more levels more advanced. This approached is shown by the achievements of US fourth graders shown to be the best in the US and then when they hit the misuse of textbooks, the achievements go down. The solutions to change this problem is to have multiple levels of text in the classroom, have student choice, and have individualized instruction. Student choice consists of having an assignment that can be done multiple ways so the student can pick the way they can excel and be interested in. Teaching the students different techniques to solve problems is part of the individualized instruction and seems to work very well.

In this video, Jane McGonigal talks about how individuals (online gamers) can make a better world. She mentioned that individuals play online games because it makes them happier and give them a feeling of working hard. Gamers do not give up when they fail and they tend to have a more strong social relationship than in real life. McGonigal said that gamers are human resource that we can use to do real world work. Instead of playing games and trying to save the virtual world, she had created online games intended to help gamers play and think critically about how to survive

It talks how an individual could use gaming as a source to improve daily life. Improving daily life as in improving hunger, poverty, and obesity.

This article suggests that flash mobs posess certain dangers to our way of life. "The loss of individualism."

Laura Robb the author of "Multiple Texts" realizes that students are individual and that by being in the same grade doesn't mean they are at the same reading levels. By using multiple texts that are at wide range of reading levels on same or similar topics will let every student contribute and participate.

In 2004, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was past in the United States, ensuring states and public agencies give disabled children ages three to twenty-one the "early intervention" they deserve.

Users share a commonality in the various ways they represent themselves on Facebook. These vary from the way people structure their privacy settings, to the way they represent themselves through their pictures, to what groups they identify with, and how they define themselves through text on their profile pages. It is something which when analyzed can be recognized as constructed in order to portray the desired image of each individual. With a Facebook page you use its different features to create yourself from nothing and in heart design yourself. The freedom that the virtual world provides allows people to construct their identity in any way they wish. With the freedom of constructing identity in multiple ways comes the freedom to socialize in multiple ways. Therefore, Facebook is a space where people may construct and share their identities, rather than being just a platform where one "'keeps in touch."

Most people probably feel that Twitter is nothing but a waste of time, and does nothing positive for the individuals using it. After reading this article, I must say Twitter is darn good invention, that has a postive effect and outcome for the individuals who partake in the action.

The article, Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century, is arguing the point that the types of literacies are expanding every day, and people need to be kept up on them. The authors, Barbara Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne Flannigan, state that to be a fully functioning member of society, you must acquire and understand a new literacy; a digital one. They also state, "Today, we still seek better communication methods, only now we have myriad more choices, along with new tools and strategies and greater knowledge of effective communication". Technologies will not just be used to communicate though anymore, it is being to "create, to manipulate, to design, to self-actualize". In the New Literacy and Education paragraphs, it is stated that classrooms today are less advanced for the students who are being put in them. Almost all of these students are digitally literate, but teachers are presenting ideas in the ways they always have. Maybe, it is not just the classrooms that need remodeling, but the teachers need to attend workshops and become more accustomed to dealing with these new types of literacies. Schools who are looking to hire teachers need to look at what background the interviewees have, or require a pre-requisite for computer literacy. The authors also state that today, students are "digitally savvy". They don't believe that teachers should be re-typing overheads into PowerPoint's. There are so many different technological ways to teach things to students. It just isn't the same anymore to just use a whiteboard and an overhead projector. "As an example, now teachers can do a PowerPoint presentation with streaming video, instant Internet access, and real-time audio-video interaction, and they can do it with relative speed and ease".

Barbara Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne Flannigan in their article "Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century" state the reason the definition of literacy has gradually changed through time, will always be changed, and that the history behind why it has changed leads to the definition itself. They assert that through the technological advancements the thought processes in the humans mind have drastically changed; and in order for literacy to keep up with this rapidly changing "E-generation" Jones-Kavalier and Flannigan express that our minds need to be open to this change. They state that "vision combined with practical, recognizable goals and incentives that encourage people to embrace new digital and visual literacy skills individually and collectively" will allow there to actually be a change universally.

This article discusses how literate once meant a person's ability to read and write. Now that technology is rapidly changing, our society is learning to adjust to it. Now, literacy has a new definition. According to the authors, "Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media (text, sound, images), to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments." Older generations are having a more difficult time adjusting to it than the teenage generation. Learning technology is starting to seem like learning a new language. Although, it's a priority for society to learn to acclimate to these changes in order to learn and communicate effectively.

In Yasmin Kafai's article Playing and Making Games for Learning, Kafai claims that if one individual were to write a history on the development of child education, they would be forced to include the impact video games have made on child learning. Kafai writes that teachers have picked up on the fact that video games capture children's attention and have tried to use this to their advantage by incorporating video games into their teaching style. There are many ways to incorporate video games into the classroom, but Kafai generalizes that there are two main categories of thought when it comes to teachers integrating video games into the curriculum: instructionalists and constructionalists.

The article offers viewpoints of why individuals use select networking sites.It focuses on the importance of pictures and how that affects who interacts with whom. It also notes how MySpace became dead, and how Twitter is so vastly different from Facebook.

In the chapter "Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences" from Marina Umaschi Bers book, Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, the author claims that online games, such as Zora, help our youth engage in community and civics. Zora allows it's players to create their own individual avatar, with physical, mental, and emotional traits that the players choose. Bers argues that Zora is a great way for children to think about their identity and civic life by making choices that will show them how to acquire certain sills and attitudes to become good citizens. Like many other researchers, Bers agrees that it is easiest to learn by doing, and games like Zora are helping to improve the youths social awareness. This chapter describes engagement in society not only by voting and being political, but by forming communities and volunteering.

In "Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences" by Marina Umaschi Bers, Bers discusses a scenario that is being used all across the country. Zora is a three dimensional multiuser environment that students use to think about identity and civic life. Students make avatars and are in charge of everything going on in the city or summer camp. This came to life after identity construction environments (ICEs) were found that creative things to do on the computer make children learn better. The students work mostly with different civic identities like police, Jewish people, etc. along with real life, controversial community related issues which the students try to solve. Many of the tools used in Zora can then beused in real life and the moral values can be used both on the computer and in real life. Zora is different than traditional learning because "Children are put in the role of producers, instead of consumers, of information, knowledge, and habits of mind."

In this article they have studies found that individuals tended to engage in role-play games and anit normative behaviors in the online world. They have studies that have examined identity performance in less anonymous online settings such as internet dating sites and reported different findings. The newest study investigates identity construction on facebook.

Young people are increasingly using social networking sites (SNSs) like MySpace and Facebook to engage with others. The use of SNSs can have both positive and negative effects on the individual; however, few studies identify the types of people who frequent these Internet sites. This study sought to predict young adults' use of SNSs and addictive tendency toward the use of SNSs from their personality characteristics and levels of self-esteem.

The video is about how music touches someones heart. With the sounds of music, it would cause an individual emotion to rise up and start show sympathy around others.