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The Partnership for 21st Century Skills explicitly lists communication and collaboration together in their Framework for 21st Century Learning.

Greg Kulowiec (@gregkulowiec) reminded teachers, "Technology is not the emphasis. It's the tool to do thoughtful work." Apps will change. Operating systems, capabilities, and even devices change. However, if we focus on a core set of essential skills -- communication, collaboration, connection and creation -- and start to develop curricula that will benefit our students regardless of the technology, then we can truly embrace a mobile curriculum.

Part of such a culture is understanding that the teacher is not the only expert in the room; in fact, students can know more than the teacher about some aspects of what they will be doing together.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

e latest techno-fad, destined to distract administrators and upset curricula for a few years until the next one comes along. But there are two reasons why adaptive learning might prove more durable than that. The first is that the textbook companies have invested in it so heavily that there may be no going back. The second: It might, in at least some settings, really work.

“I like to think of analogies to other places where science and technology have had an impact, like transportation. We went from walking to horse-drawn carriages to Model Ts, and now we have jet planes. So far in educational technology, we’re in the Model T stage.”

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.

she advises teachers and parents to praise a child’s process and strategies, and tie those to the outcome

“Let’s look at what you’ve done,” “Let’s look at what your understanding is,” or “Let’s look at what strategies you’ve used, and let’s figure out together what we should try next.”

Dweck says that many teachers have to change how they teach, offering more critical feedback and giving students opportunities to revise their work

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