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more than two-thirds of their students had fair or poor abilities to digest long and complicated texts and understand plagiarism issues

found such advantages as greater creativity, personal expression and increased collaboration

promoted a deeper interest in writing because students could see their works published in such online forums as http://www.figment.com

Some 77% of advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers surveyed say that the internet and digital search tools have had a “mostly positive” impact on their students’ research work.

While kids may initially love technology-inspired lessons in schools simply because they are different from the paper-driven work that tends to define traditional classrooms, the novelty of new tools wears off a lot quicker than digital cheerleaders like to admit.

What students are really motivated by are opportunities to be social — to interact around challenging concepts in powerful conversations with their peers.

Technology’s role in today’s classroom, then, isn’t to motivate. It’s to give students opportunities to efficiently and effectively participate in motivating activities built around the individuals and ideas that matter to them.

Mathematically proficient students can explain correspondences between equations, verbal descriptions, tables, and graphs or draw diagrams of important features and relationships, graph data, and search for regularity or trends

the ability to contextualize, to pause as needed during the manipulation process in order to probe into the referents for the symbols involved. Quantitative reasoning entails habits of creating a coherent representation of the problem at hand; considering the units involved; attending to the meaning of quantities, not just how to compute them; and knowing and flexibly using different properties of operations and objects.

They justify their conclusions, communicate them to others, and respond to the arguments of others.

And here’s the thing: He wrote that at the age of 14, in his spare time, at a point when the longest assignment he ever had in school was maybe 500 to 1,000 words. What motivated him? Other gamers. He had written a little bit of the guide and put it online – when he started getting e-mails saying how much other players liked it, were using it and asking when he was going to complete it.

Part of what makes the online environment so powerful, as Prof. Lunsford says, is that it provides a sense of purpose: “[Students are] writing things that have an impact on the world – that other people are reading and responding to.