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Children’s days are over-scheduled with sports, arts, functions and additional classes. Yet the need to connect and socialize has not gone away in these overly adult-managed times.

Many of the young people interviewed here said they would actually rather be hanging out with friends in real spaces than posting updates in online spaces, but the hemmed-in reality of their lives makes that nearly impossible.

We teachers are not “digital immigrants.” We are their guides, and our role, along with parents, has never been more important, nor more complicated.

To a B.C. (before computers) generation, today’s students are courageous thinkers, innovators and fearless warriors.

The Teacher’s Role in the New World of Blurred Boundaries

The Value of Private Space

Members of any profession need to communicate and collaborate with colleagues to understand and improve their skills. Face-to-face collaboration is personal, but is limited by boundaries of time and space. Participants must have a common time and place for collaboration. Digital collaboration has no bounds of time or space, and collaboration can take place anytime with anyone, anywhere.

Technology is not a generational thing, it is a learning thing. It may be outside many educators’ comfort zones, but comfort zones are the biggest obstacles to education reform.

The time has come for educators to accept that they no longer have a choice about technology. To maintain relevance as educators, they need to employ relevant technology learning tools for education, connect and collaborate with other professionals to improve their skills and knowledge within their profession, and use PLNs to improve their profession and hold off the barbarian politicians and business people banging down the gates of education

However, without a shift in pedagogical practice, the device and space are rendered nothing more than substitutive tools in nature.

Digital space expectations would include communication, collaboration, sharing, messaging, appropriate use, etc. Here are a few to get you started: