Teaching the iGeneration

With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart.

If you're a high school teacher looking for iPad resources targeting your needs, you've come to the right place. Students in grades 9-12 will engage with technology in different ways than younger children. They can create content, interact with their peers, and explore a range of topics using an iPad. Whether you're in a BYOD setting, in a one-to-one program, or simply looking to use one iPad effectively, this list has apps, activities, and ideas for your high school classroom.

"For learning to really matter to learners, to kids, and to be effective for teachers, the learning has to be relevant," Yowell says. "The learners have to care about what they're being taught."

To make learning relevant, she emphasizes, "we have to connect the three spheres of young people's lives that matter the most to them. The first sphere is their social world, their peers. The second sphere is the thing that learners care the most about getting better at, what they're interested in. The third is the sphere of relevancy, making sure that the social and the interest spheres are connected to either something in the academic world or something career related or something that makes their community better. When those three spheres come together, we see kids learning not only the basic kinds of skills that are necessary to close the economic gap but, we see them learning 21st century skills that we know are going to be necessary to solve the complex problems that they're being left with."

For six years, I taught in a basement classroom with no windows, and yet I could see what was happening around the world thanks to the Internet. Though I tried learning something new each day, until I put systems in place, I spent more time searching for materials than actually learning. I realized that to effectively engage in professional learning, I needed tools in place to curate content, save what I found, and connect to other educators.

The Background Burner quickly removes the background from any image or photo. Our patent-pending technology does all the work for you, automatically.

Made by a Nanjing International School MYP student using iMovie and the camera on a MacBook

Do Now is a weekly activity for students to engage and respond to current issues using social media tools like Twitter. Do Now aims to build civic engagement and digital literacy for young folks.

This is it. My one-stop-all-you-need-to-know-guide to Twitter.

When snow days piled up this winter, seventh-grader Emily Born was upset. It wasn't that she always loved school, or that she had a big test coming up and needed her teacher's help. No, the student from Thomas Middle School in Arlington Heights, Illinois, was sad to miss out on her "genius hour."
That's an 80-minute period every Monday during which Emily and her classmates work on projects entirely of their choosing. Over months of study, Emily and her friends have spent their time researching running shoes -- what people prefer and why.

Another story of a guy pursuing his passion. Could be used to introduce genius hour to students.

A good video for showing students that they can develop projects that make a difference for others, too. That they can do work that matters.

We all need a little encouragement every now and then. Kid President, knowing this, has put together a video you can play each morning as you wake up or to share with your friend who needs a kick in the right direction. Take a moment and spread some encouragement. "It's everybody's duty to give the world a reason to dance."

Like the music industry, Getty Images is facing a new Internet reality where content is often shared without attribution or payment. Now it's trying to catch up by riding the wave of social media. The new embed program is designed speficially to tie in with Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress and others. Watermarks like the one in the tweet above will be removed, replaced with a sleeker attribution function.
"We've seen what YouTube's done with monetizing their embed capabilities," Peters told The Verge. "I don't know if that's going to be appropriate for us or not." In the meantime, looks like small time blogs and individual users can stop worrying about take down notices and intimidating legal action - if they ever did.

Now that the meme was created, with content ready-made, it was taken from Reddit and re-posted all over the Internet. It was "pinned" over 30,000 times on Pinterest, the folks at 9gag shared it on their various personal Facebook pages nearly 9,000 times. I was awarded the "Look at Me!" award for October 2012 from "diehipster dot com." Well-meaning friends took screenshots of Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter anytime they saw the picture posted or mentioned. I had gone from Reddit curiosity to "Internet meme." My ex-girlfriend texted to ask if I was okay. My parents finally saw it. My dad didn't know why I had dressed "funny." My mom was understandably worried for me, flashing back to the times I was bullied in high school. I knew it made her feel powerless, just like it used to feel when I came home early from school because someone threatened to pull a knife on me. Now, it was dozens of someones-faceless and impossible to control.

At lunch with a friend who was trying to get her web series off the ground, she asked me how I was dealing. "Okay," I said, "I think it would bother me more if people weren't so complimentary in real life." Thinking about her own troubles in creating something viral, she remarked, "It's too bad you can't figure out a way to exploit this somehow." Other than sometimes posting my Twitter handle on pages where I saw the picture, I couldn't do much. Part of me wanted to ignore it all, dismiss it like a pop-up blocker dismisses fake contest possibilities. Still, for every hateful comment online, there was a real person who picked up a short story and promised to buy a novel, if/when I wrote one.

Students everywhere reacted powerfully to this call to action, completing jaw-dropping quests to address problems in our world. These range from:

Building a library in a rural village in Ghana;
Raising money to build wells for communities without water;
Starting and scaling non-profit organizations to support issues in education, environment and other social causes; and
Creating innovative support mechanisms to help others in crisis.
Choose2Matter was created in response to this breathtaking reaction. It invites the world to make "mattering" a new way of life. This is not mere talk. This is the new standard where apathy and complacency are not tolerated and inaction is NOT an option.

DoSomething.org is the country's largest not-for-profit for young people and social change. We have 2.5 million members (and counting!) who kick ass on causes they care about. Bullying. Animal cruelty. Homelessness. Cancer. The list goes on. DoSomething.org spearheads national campaigns so 13- to 25-year-olds can make an impact - without ever needing money, an adult, or a car. Over 2.4 million people took action through DoSomething.org in 2012. Why? Because apathy sucks.

As Tony Wagner says in Creating Innovators, it's not a choice between structure and no structure to allow for more authentic learning. It's a choice to build a different structure for School 3.0 - one that allows for student-learners to explore their passions and real-world purposes while engaged in challenges that exist in the world and yearn to be defined and solved. Structures that empower learners to engage in more authentic learning flows.

In her new book It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (February 25, Yale University Press), Microsoft principal researcher danah boyd addresses the fears and misconceptions that adults have about teens' use of social media, revealing that online networks can be a lifeline and a safety valve for a generation under extreme pressure.


danah boyd
Based on 10 years of research, including conversations with teens across the country, boyd explores the motivations and even sophisticated etiquette that governs teens' online behavior, and explains how adults--including businesses looking to attract a teen audience--can ditch the fear and condescension, and embrace teens' complicated but important relationship with technology.

create and share visual ideas online
vhemes are visual themes. drag and drop a vheme onto your canvas for easy creation of your visual idea!

But globally, many thought technology would revolutionize education. Despite our collective administrative and pedagogical missteps, it has. Yet, the reasons technologies didn't work in those early lecture classes are the same reasons we continue to struggle with implementing them now. We are expecting too much of technology if we believe it will single-handedly fix problems with education. The majority of problems with education extend beyond the classroom: they are societal.

No matter how many laptops we put in classrooms or wi-fi networks we set up, if kids are in a district where schools are closing and class time is reduced due to budget shortfalls, learning is going to suffer. No matter how innovative the online textbook system, if kids are in classrooms where the teacher has received no training or even advanced notice that a new system is going to be used, learning is going to suffer. Regardless of how promising the innovation, it will suffer from the lack of technical support in a majority of districts or increasingly higher demands on teachers without appropriate increases in training and support.