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What are we doing as educators to meaningfully engage our students, to give them the autonomy, purpose, and opportunity for mastery which they crave and to which they respond with focus, energy, enthusiasm, and diligence?

Do we think that before technology, most students avoided distraction?

Yes, of course, students can and do get distracted when their computers and smartphones are open on their desk or lap, and teachers need to respond thoughtfully to this problem.    It is fine for teachers to ask students to put them away in certain times.    William Stites has a terrific post about how schools can confront and manage the technological distraction issues

eSN Special Report: Empowering the iGeneration

it’s now easier than ever for students to start their own companies or collaborate with peers to solve the world’s problems.

Sexting is just the silent canary in the coal mine. It's the sign, not the cause, of the dangerously cavalier attitudes toward sex and sexuality that have been building up in teen culture for years now. The only surefire cure is a full-blown evacuation -- a complete retreat from the mainstream movies, videos, video games and songs of the day that sexualize kids before they've even reached puberty (or, in some cases, potty training).

in the beginning and felt it was not your cup of tea. Initially, Google Wave did have some annoying problems. However, like most technology, it has improved with time.

The problem is that for most of us our technological tools now manage us.

offered as practical, effective activities that help shift the focus of classrooms from teacher orchestrated mastery and memory of information to student processing of information to create understanding and improve problem-solving.

Parents who try to secretly monitor their kids' online activities are wasting their time and should use an approach that builds trust and allows for conversation, says a psychologist who has studied texting, social networking and other online pursuits.

"Your job then is to learn and to assess, and to now use your parent radar to see if there might be any problems."

Because iPads deal with pdfs so easily, teachers can share out their assignments as .pdfs, either via their websites, qr codes, email, etc.    

  We have Google Apps, including email, so one option is students emailing their assignments to the teacher.

But the happiest and most powerful benefit of all is seeing all the staff and students coming together to problem solve.   Students helping teachers with utilizing an app, students sharing apps with one another, teachers showing other teachers new methods for doing things, teachers sharing with students, and tech staff and library staff all in the mix as well.  

We need to stop pretending that technology can fix problems that aren’t technological in nature. Kids are bored. They don’t know why they’re learning what they’re learning. The solution isn’t asking the question better. The solution is asking a better question.

Aristotle concluded more than 2,300 years ago that "the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine."

"We're so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It's exactly what you'd need to do the things you have to do then."

Teens take more risks not because they don't understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do.

The teacher delivers lectures on a new concept, students do some homework problems, and after a few weeks they take an exam. Some do well, some do poorly, and then it's on to the next topic.

given students and teachers the power to "flip" the traditional classroom

14th century France inhabited a relatively simple personal world with maybe three sides: farm, village, and the church. Today ordinary individuals construct amazingly complex personal worlds with many facets. The game has truly changed.

"elephant in the room," a big conspicuous but largely undiscussed problem: What should we do with tired content?

If only we could shrink some topics, we could expand others that offer much more.