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Time is all about decisions. When you claim to not have enough time to learn new things and provide engaging instruction to your students, that’s a conscious decision.

According to Livingstone and Blum-Ross ‘screen time’ “is an obsolete concept. As digital media become integrated into all aspects of daily life, it is more important to consider the context and content of digital media use, and the connections children and young people (and parents) are making, or not, than to consider arbitrary rules about time.”

It takes time to learn the tools, time to learn the culture, and time to learn the strategies to effectively learn through social media.

The second and maybe more important harm comes from the educator not modeling for students the need and the tools for collaboration as we move further into their future.

But, before the multiple choice, standardized testing crowd starts thumping their chests, it's important to note the kind of test the researchers administered. After reading the passage, students "wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test."

So here are some tips and examples I’ve gathered from my classroom and my work as a one-day-a-week tech coach at my school to help teachers better understand and negotiate the digital push in schools. Give Yourself the Time to Learn

After asking good questions and doing some reconnaissance on tools and apps that your colleagues love, choose a few. Let yourself dabble with the tools. Become comfortable with their interfaces, and give yourself time to understand their purpose and fit (or lack thereof) for your classroom habits and curriculum. At the same time, allow yourself time to say "no" to other flashy new gadgets and tools while you are exploring.

Tips for Tech-Cautious Teachers

they are understanding a complex text and making sense of it within the context of their own lives.   No parent wants more, no teacher does, than for kids to be able to not just "read" Shakespeare but to understand why his work still speaks urgently to the present, why it is worth taking the time to read all that odd English from another time

We are not responsible as educators unless we are teaching not just with technology but through it, about it, because of it.   We need to make kids understand its power, its potential, its dangers, its use.  That isn't just an investment worth making but one that it would be irresponsible to avoid.

education is falling behind the curve,1 as it did during the rapid changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

The last major changes to cur­riculum2 were effected in the late 1800s as a response to the sudden growth in societal and human capital needs

Having students develop deep knowledge is as essential as ever. But today, we must also make that knowledge relevant.

Collaborating and communicating for the good of ALL of OUR students has never been easier and less time consuming than right now!

for the most part, schools have incorporated these 21st century instructional techniques and tools as add-ons to the teacher-centric 19th century classroom structure, in which the majority of the curriculum is pulled from a textbook, and, despite best intentions, most students learn the same thing in the same way at the same time.

what exactly is personalized learning? And why is technology so central to its outcomes?

personalized learning as an instructional approach that encompasses both differentiation and individualization, but is also flexible in content or theme to match the specific interests and prior experiences of learners

10 BYOD Classroom Experiments (and What We’ve Learned From Them So Far)

What can Holy Trinity teach us? That when it comes to BYOD, it pays not to be overly strict with how the devices can be used in the class, as greater freedom allows teachers to work with students to develop the best uses for technology for their subject matter and teaching style.

BYOD requires much more than just changing tech policies and can sometimes mean overhauling the curriculum and spending money training teachers, though it does help students create a more personal and memorable learning experience.

robbing kids of their ability to concentrate

The question, though, is: distraction from what? And also: What’s inherently wrong with distraction?

Formal education, as we’ve framed it, is not only about finding ways to learn more about the things we love, but also, equally, about squelching our aversion to the things we don’t — all in the ecumenical spirit of generalized knowledge.

Any one of these web tools that a freshman in high school learns today will most likely not exist or will be replaced by something better in 8-10 years when that freshman graduates from college. However, if teachers change their approach to focus on transferable technology skills (i.e. the NETS-S) it will make the integration of technology more meaningful and prepare our students with skills they can take with them in the future.

blend the PLC processes and platform into processes the teachers are already following and maybe even save them some time while doing so.

if teachers can see the time savings in what they are already doing, they will adopt a digital professional learning community process.

Create windows of non-stimulation.

Keep two lists.

Schedule intense periods of processing at a consistent time every day.

Math lesson time. Math scores: Manitoba, 468; Yukon, 469; Newfoundland and Labrador, 472; Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, each 474. That's five provinces within 1.2 percentage points of each other. Put another way: Billy got 80 per cent on his test. Sally got 81 per cent on her test. Math lesson, part two: The creators of this test, the Council of Ministers of Education, rightly points out that the margin of error on these scores is greater than the differences in these scores. In plain English, that means that the statisticians who crunch the data are saying that the scores are basically equivalent.

Manitoba remains the child-poverty capital of Canada

Math lesson, part three: Manitoba was the only jurisdiction in Canada to have 100 per cent of the selected schools do the PCAP assessment.

Because the most powerful technology in the classroom was, is and will remain...a classroom teacher. But not just any classroom teacher - it has to be a classroom teacher with a love of learning, an appreciation of the aesthetic, the esoteric, the ethical, and the moral - a teacher who understands Bloom and Gardner - who understands how different students learn at different stages of their lives.

Every generation since the time of Socrates and Plato, including our parents, has looked at the next generation - including us - and said, what’s wrong with those kids? There’s nothing wrong with these kids. They’re just different – neurologically different – that’s why they see the world differently – they engage with the world differently.

Given the enormous impact that technology has had on nearly every other aspect of our society, how can that be?

Today our collective vision for education is broader, our nation is more complex and diverse, and our technical capabilities are more powerful. But we continue to assume the factory-model classroom and its rigid bell schedules, credit requirements, age-based grade levels, and physical specifications when we talk about school reform.

our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

e latest techno-fad, destined to distract administrators and upset curricula for a few years until the next one comes along. But there are two reasons why adaptive learning might prove more durable than that. The first is that the textbook companies have invested in it so heavily that there may be no going back. The second: It might, in at least some settings, really work.

“I like to think of analogies to other places where science and technology have had an impact, like transportation. We went from walking to horse-drawn carriages to Model Ts, and now we have jet planes. So far in educational technology, we’re in the Model T stage.”