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Education for Well-being Education as if people and the planet mattered The purpose of education should be to create well-being. We should educate in way that places personal well-being at the center of all educational decision-making. We cannot achieve personal well-being without also simultaneously promoting economic well-being, social well-being, and environmental well-being. We must strive to understand the relationships between personal, economic, social and environmental well-being.

Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills

Most notably, perhaps, is the emergence of dozens of "green" Web sites, many from tech industry veterans, that aim to put like-minded people on the same page. These social-networking efforts enable users to assess products personally, offering a balance to green labels and ad campaigns.

Mimi Ito, one of the principal investigators of the Digital Youth project. Of particular interest to parents concerned about teen social networkers' safety are findings by C.J. Pascoe mentioned by Dr. Ito, for example that: "Contrary to common fears, flirting and dating are almost always initiated offline in the traditional settings where teens get together and extended online. Her work clearly shows there's a strong social norm among teens that the online space isn't a place to find new romantic partners, but a place to deepen and explore existing offline relationships." Exceptions: marginalized teens "whose romantic partners are restricted for cultural or religious reasons" and gay and lesbian teens (the latter are "not reaching out online for random social encounters but using the expanded possibilities online selectively to overcome limitations they're facing" in their offline social networks); and the very small percentage of teens most at risk of sexual exploitation

Sharing Data Over a Network In addition to saving placemarks or folders to your local computer, you can also save place data to a web server or network server. Other Google Earth users who have access to the server can then use the data. As with other documents, you can create links or references to KMZ files for easy access. Storing a placemark file on the network or on a web server offers the following advantages: Accessibility - If your place data is stored on a network or the Web, you can access it from any computer anywhere, provided the location is either publicly available or you have log in access. Ease in Distribution - You can develop an extensive presentation folder for Google Earth software and make that presentation available to everyone who has access to your network storage location or web server. This is more convenient than sending the data via email when you want to make it persistently available to a large number of people. Automatic Updates/Network Link Access - Any new information or changes you make to network-based KMZ information is automatically available to all users who access the KML data via a network link. Backup - If for some reason the data on your local computer is corrupt or lost, you can open any of the KMZ files that you have saved to a network location, and if so desired, save it as a local file again. Note: Before you can create a network link to an item in Google Earth, you must first store that place data on a server. This section covers the following topics: Saving Data to a Server Opening Data from a Network Server About Network Links Creating a Network Link

let students create their own labs to test hypotheses

Integrate lots of interviewing into a history curriculum and have students compare stories they hear. Add a five-minute reading component to journal-writing time, emphasizing to students that real authors share their writing and need to have a sense of their audience.

Performances, presentations, displays, publications, and entries into contests are essential for student buy-in. ULS's hula class spends the semester gearing up for a final performance, and Hamilton's seventh graders forget how hard they're working on their writing when they focus on creating podcasts. "When I tell students they are going to create a podcast of their own stories, they get excited," she says. "This buy-in from the students gives them a purpose to learn new skills and a reason to come to school."

Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment (PDF; 441 KB) Source: American Psychologist From press release (University of New Hampshire, Crimes against Children Research Center)

The YouTube Wars Prof. Akalın was probably pleased last week when, for a few days at least, we lost our access to that Eurovision winning song. In response to a satirical video that was offensive to the memory of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, a Turkish court shut down any access to YouTube.com. The offending video was uploaded supposedly by Greeks wanting to antagonize their neighbors, and it prompted a war of offensive and counter offensive videos and endless (and pointless) comments.  It is against the law here to insult Atatürk, but since the offenders were "out there" somewhere beyond prosecution on the Internet, punishment was levied on Turkish Internet users instead. The story is even sadder as I remember attending a conference in Athens last fall with several Turkish colleagues, and we were pleasantly surprised at the warmth of so many Greeks, including several who spoke with us in Turkish.

See, when you're at the front of a wired classroom, you get to watch students peck at laptops, skitter their eyes over screens and, every now and then, toss a glance in your direction. Some of them are taking notes, some are chatting with friends or cruising sports sites. Few are giving their instructor undivided attention. It's crazy making.

one of the things we ported over to new media from traditional media was the notion of the passive audience.

that chittering back channel itself isn't the problem. The problem is, as instructors, we haven't given it anything useful to do. "Students are telling us they want to be engaged. So, we need to find a way to give them specific focus for that back channel. If they're doing stuff that's on-task we're going to get engaged learning and ownership," she says.