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In talking with many colleagues about Twitter, I often hear things like: “I just don’t get it.” “I don’t have time for that.” “I have to many other things going on.” “I don’t have a smartphone.” “I don’t want people I don’t know to follow me.”

one hears that important changes can be effected in education but it will cost money for a new lab of computers, for wireless access and faster routers, for iPads and other new devices. However, as readers explore “Why ___ Matters!”, you will be amazed that the suggested changes and ideas are more about “humanware” than hardware.

For this assignment the secondary 2 students from the Singapore International School (HK) were required to go to an area in Hong Kong and use their 5 senses to describe what they experienced. Their English teachers helped them by taking them on walks around the neighbourhood of our school and getting them to think about what they could see, smell, taste, hear and touch. The students then worked in groups, picked an area they wanted to explore and set off to use their newly heighten senses.

you’re likely to hear that kids today are overcorrected, entitled, arrogant, irresponsible, directionless, and apathetic. With twitter-sized attention spans—these kids lack values, character, and basic civility.

They  still want and need our guidance.

We’ve all been hearing about the importance of 21st century skills for well over a decade now. But many of us struggle to understand what these really mean and how to integrate them into our lessons and classrooms.

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.

they’re much more likely to say that spending time interacting with each other online has a positive impact on their social-emotional lives than a negative one.

, we found that for all the public attention to the amount of time kids spend with digital media, parents are logging almost as many hours as their kids

Generally speaking, the press coverage of these issues is not well balanced, and the public mostly hears negative and alarming stories about cell phone addiction and cyberbullying and children holed up alone in their rooms.