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One thing we have learned in the last 20 years is that many young people — certainly most teens– are pretty savvy about how they use the Net, though all of us can use some reminders now and then.

And parents — even those who may be technologically challenged — continue to have a crucial role to play in guiding their children and helping them sort out and deal with the stresses of life, both online and offline.

A better strategy would be to teach children to be “street smart” in order to better safeguard themselves in any potentially uncomfortable or dangerous situation.

As with learning to read, swim or play good football children will be much more effective social networkers with support, guidance and help than without

We need to educate young people to understand that it is wrong to write anything on a social networking site which you wouldn’t say to someone’s face

Second, Twitter and Facebook are, as has been well publicised, a groomer’s dream.

Society has changed. We cannot adequately prepare students for the society that exists today or will exist tomorrow, if we continue to prepare them for the society that existed yesterday. In order to prepare students to play their role in the 21st century society we are a part of, a few things need to be considered when deciding how education will look in our schools and classrooms.

We’re going from districts fearing it and blocking it off to welcoming it and making it a major part of their technology plan. We’ll be surprised if a significant portion of districts aren’t using mobile learning inside and outside of schools soon.”

Each educator, each class, each school will have to find the best way to integrate mobile devices based on its student population. The opportunity of using mobile devices and all of its utilities allows educators to reconsider: What do we want students to know, and how do we help them? And what additional benefit does using a mobile device bring to the equation? This gets to the heart of the mobile learning issue: beyond fact-finding and game-playing – even if it’s educational — how can mobile devices add relevance and value to how kids learn?

personalized learning – students owning what they learn.

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.

Social networking tools play a powerful role in building teacher learning networks, but educators still yearn for the chance to gather face to face to polish their craft.

a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where's the middle ground?

With this complexity in mind, I would like to introduce a question that I have been struggling with for the past few years: what role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?

We fear the things – and people – that we do not understand far more than the things we do,

findings presented here paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. Wherever possible, we seek to disentangle whether people’s varying social behaviors and attitudes are related to the different ways they use social networking sites, or to other relevant demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and social class.