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Why are you penalizing the 95% for the 5%? You don’t do this in other areas of discipline at school.

There’s a difference between a teachable moment and a punishable moment. Lean toward the former as much as possible.

Consider for a moment that this is an age of information–and that’s not as flattering as it sounds.

HOWEVER, none of this, for a moment, displaces the teacher. On the contrary, it amplifies teacher skills. It may also facilitate the ability for teachers to play to their strongest card:

We should not try to recreate what Salman Khan of the Khan Academy and others are doing so brilliantly, namely to meticulously build up entire curricula on video. No. TED is known for its ability to evoke curiosity, wonder, and mind-shifting insight.  That should be our prime goal here. Short lessons that spark curiosity.

If we are going to talk about ethics and responsibilities in the 21st century classroom, we can’t just “add on” new digital tools but we have to rethink the basics of connected, interactive, participatory learning.

The Ethics and Responsibilities of the 21st Century Classroom: A Collaborative Guide to the Best Digital Learning Practices for K-12 Teachers and Administrators.” Here’s a link to the public Google Doc that, at the moment, is open to anyone. 

We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".

The idea is that our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine "chunks" of information at any given moment (here a chunk is defined as a "meaningful unit"). So, when trying to decide how many big ideas about the internet would be meaningful for most readers, it seemed sensible to settle for a magical total of nine. So here they are.

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

competitors will now face a new iteration of the iPad, one that's faster, smaller, and lighter than the model introduced a year ago--all while retaining the $499 entry price that has proven all but impossible for Apple's competitors to match.

company is offering 18 different versions of the iPad 2

original iPad came in six different variations

Finnish system is praised extraordinarily highly for its global success, and yet students don’t work terribly hard, have many choices, use technology creatively, enjoy the integration of the arts, and learn in a culture which emphasizes depth over breadth and less is more.

Students are shown researching and collaborating online in their studies, and many classrooms are shown with a wide array of technological units, not just computers.   Students use wikipedia and facebook when researching very current topics, and Wagner explains that there is a culture of trust that is extended to students in their technology usage.

A particularly inspiring moment comes when Wagner reports stumbling across a project at one school, the “Innovation Camp,” in which teams of students are given 26 hours to come up with a new product or service.  

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.