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Our students need adults to stop being afraid, and stop hiding, so education can get out of the shadows and into the light of the world in which our children live.

were not created to keep students stuck in the past, educated in a disconnected school environment that shares little resemblance to the real world for which we should be preparing our children.

Students can access websites that do not contain or that filter mature content. They can use their real names, pictures, and work (as long it doesn’t have a grade/score from a school) with the notification and/or permission of the student and their parent or guardian.

Some have to ask friends or family to print off coursework and physically post it to them, while others are only able to do their work during school hours so have to rush everything. The same tools that helped students with homework were also social tools, like MSN Messenger, so students who felt left out educationally were also likely to feel left out socially.

Some questions to consider before embarking on your journey to personalize learning: Why do you want to personalize learning for your learners? What problems or needs have you identified in your school, organization and/or community? What data can you show that demonstrates the need to personalize learning? What does teaching and learning look like now? What are stakeholders beliefs about learning and change? Why is it critical for your organization and/or community to change now? What challenges or obstacles do you envision as you move to personalizing learning? What do you envision for your personalized learning environment?

Yes, technology plays an important role in today’s classrooms. While the pace of change has accelerated, however, one constant remains the same: Good teachers are critical to delivering an effective learning experience

Technology can play a critical role—but only when the technology supports the approach, the teaching philosophy and the goals that educators, students and families have agreed matters the most.

I think that it is reasonable to take technology "time outs," to have environments and maybe even times where the family interacts with each other and not the outside world through texts. It's sort of a return to the dinner table as a place where you learn how to engage in face-to-face, meaningful contact. Put your tech aside. You can return to it afterwards.

By focusing on quality over quantity, families can move away from fear, maintain a healthy balance, and seek out extraordinary learning.

9 Ways to Assess Students without Standardized Tests

education over a phenomenon known as the “app gap.” It’s based on studies, mostly out of the United States, that found that low-income families are less likely to own a computer, download educational apps, and more likely to stick a television in their child’s bedroom.

What's Your Favorite Transformative Tool of 2011? Dec 22 Written by: 12/22/2011 2:02 AM  As we near the end of 2011, I thought I would invite you to add to this post by linking and reflecting on the tools that have most transformed your classrooms this year.

Pew Internet & American Life Project for the Family Online Safety Institute and Cable in the Classroom--concluded that "[m]ost American teens who use social media say that in their experience, people their age are mostly kind to one another on social network sites." Nearly seven in ten (69 percent) of teens said that peers are mostly kind while 20 percent said peers are mostly unkind with 11 percent saying, "it depends."

First, great teachers tended to set big goals

they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

most online sex offenders are adults who target teens and seduce victims into sexual relationships. They take time to develop the trust and confidence of victims, so that the youth see these relationships as romances or sexual adventures. The youth most vulnerable to online sex offenders have histories of sexual or physical abuse, family problems, and tendencies to take risks both on- and offline, the researchers say.