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Net Smart is a book for an era where we’ve moved past just creating online identities and communities, but still have to educate ourselves on how to operate in day-to-day life. Rheingold said he believes a better understanding and deeper use of things like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are “essential survival skills” that will last beyond today or the lifespan of those individual companies.

Rheingold sees as important: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts.

In today’s Internet age, not having a social media understanding or even more importantly, a yearning for it, can spell trouble in the job market.

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,

I understand we need to keep kids safe. I think that we would do more good keeping kids safe by teaching them how to use these tools and navigate this online world rather than locking it down and pretending that it is not in our realm.”

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smartphones just haven’t been around as long as TV; we haven’t yet established norms, or language, for what's socially acceptable and what's off limits.

struggling to make sense of a technology he didn't completely understand and the affect

smartphones move from Stage 2 to Stage 3. What is the indicator for this grand cultural shift? Dilbert

With the huge potential that Information and communication technology has to offer for teaching and learning also comes a matching potential for distraction, illicit and inappropriate activity, and poor judgement.

The teacher holds a cornerstone role in the development of understanding, the appreciation of culture and diversity, and the formation of the moral and ethical basis that, like the cornerstone of a building, provides a strong and stable foundation for life in both the real and virtual world they co-inhabit.

The most salient lessons are not learned by avoidance but by facing you action, its impact, and the consequences.

John Seely Brown on Interest-Driven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play

in the past, it was likely to be very hard to find other people around you with your specialized interests. For example, when I was obsessed with building transmitters and radios as a kid, there were maybe five other kids in the entire state of New York who were also designing electronic equipment. I had no cohort group. Today, no matter how specialized a kid’s interest is, he or she will find a cohort group. When my godson was 9, he became fixated on penguins. He went on the internet, and he found himself a group or a collective that was deeply engaged with penguins. I said to him one day, “Well, who is this group?” And he said, “Well, they have a funny name.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Johns Hopkins!” He’d locked into a research group at Johns Hopkins! Yes, as a 9-year-old.

I personally feel that in order to get hooked on something—well, that’s the role of a great teacher, a great mentor. The role of the mentor is to get you to discover things you might not actually know you were interested in, to confront topics you may not be very good at understanding, but once discovered, you will.

Perhaps more important than the content we teach are the life skills we model by embracing these ­concepts. Using social media in the classroom allows teachers to remind students of the power their words can have online. This understanding will be crucial as they head to ­college, start a career and become adults in a ­digital world.

As needs change over time, addressing them might mean switching devices (remaking the choice). As schools progress in their technology implementation, they may find that their needs have changed, and should not hesitate to change devices as their understanding of their students’ needs develops. This seasonal view of devices (rather than “device as school identity”) is essential to helping schools move forward, meet their current students’ needs, and keep the curriculum relevant and timely for the future. A focus on pedagogy and key technology skills will transfer from one device to another, making the shift easier; a focus on being a device expert, or mastering device specific mechanics, will not. Students will graduate into a world that will demand technological fluency, the ability to move and process information across various platforms and devices.

The real promise of the new technology is that it can bridge the distance between teacher and students, between students and texts, in truly innovative ways. But it takes time and understanding of the new applications and devices to make good on this promise.

When we wag our fingers at students about inappropriate digital behaviors without concurrently and equally highlighting the benefits of being connected and online, we send the message that we are afraid of or don’t understand the technologies that are transforming everything around us.

So what is the Internet of things? Simply put this is the concept of basically connecting any device with an on and off switch to the Internet (and/or to each other). This includes everything from cell phones, coffee makers, washing machines, headphones, lamps, wearable devices and almost anything else you can think of.

Do you master the device or master the pedagogy? Are you going to ask ‘what’ or are you going to ask ‘how?’ It’s key to understand that technology is not a magic bullet, but only a tool for learning. It takes time to master before you can unlock its potential.

It really comes down to the tool fitting the task and learning target. An understanding of the SAMR Model allows educators to reflect on their own progress while investigating ways to use educational technology in a useful and productive way.

study what happens when students use these devices to connect, develop, grow and create. We also need to understand that success in the 21st century can not be measured by the bubble tests that were created to measure an industrial model of schooling.

 Do we want students to read, write, calculate, receive instant feedback, make global connections, develop a learning network, publish to the world? Of course we do.