Group items tagged

"The frustrations teenagers experience with school are more a case of statistics and lack of experience than that of work ethic or "attitude" problems. These statistics are not tied to socioeconomic status, weight or time spent in a seat; they're genetic and experiential. We have a bell curve of abstraction and experience, and we're only beginning to think about how to honor that."

The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

If social media sites target teenagers to join in the first place, why should they not be held accountable when they are used as vehicles for malice, asks Charlotte Lytton.

"On Sunday, a salacious article flew across numerous news channels. In print, it was given titles like "Teenagers can no longer tell the real world from the internet, study claims" (Daily Mail) and "Real world v online world: teens do not distinguish" (The Telegraph). This claim can't even pass the basic sniff test, but it was picked up by news programs and reproduced on blogs."

"As more and more competitors for traditional media outlets emerge - whether they are corporations like The Huffington Post or teenagers in war-torn countries trying to do journalism on the fly, like the 14-year-old profiled in a recent New York Times story - there seems to be a growing obsession with defining what journalism is, and who deserves (or doesn't deserve) to be called a journalist. Is the man who live-blogged the Osama bin Laden assassination a journalist? Is National Public Radio's Andy Carvin, who has been using Twitter as a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring, a journalist?"

Delaware's governor, Jack Markell, announced a program called Getting to Zero. Its goal was to get all high-school seniors with an SAT score of at least a 1,500 (out of 2,400) on the SAT to enroll in college. In recent years, state data show, about 20 percent of such teenagers did not.

"Teens are cooling on Facebook, a trend suggested by recent research and acknowledged, this week by Facebook itself. The shift was confirmed time and time again in e-mail and phone interviews with dozens of teens and their parents in CNN's reporting of this story. While the social-networking juggernaut continues to chug along among adults, boasting more than 1 billion active users, younger users are flocking to newer, and arguably hipper, networking tools."

"I think the best way to approach this would be to break it down by social media network and the observations/viewpoints I've gathered over the years."

"Hagan writes her own very successful blog, Math = Love, part of the Math Twitter Blogosphere, on which she says she has met wonderful friends - and her boyfriend. She says she never expected her own blog to get almost 3 million page views. It's a combination of project ideas and very cute "Things Teenagers Say." (Sample: "I'll be here all week with the pi jokes. I'm like a baker.") After learning so much from blogs herself, Hagan says, "I felt like I should give something back to the community I'd been stealing ideas from." But for her, it's about more than just exchanging ideas: "It reminds me that I'm not alone.""

For teens, the phone is the social device. One teen shared, "I use my phone for all of my social networking. I don't use a computer or an iPad for that." Since the go-to spot for mobile social is the phone, not the tablet, this might be encouraging news for schools incorporating tablets into the learning environment.

"Youth move between sites quickly. For example, Instagram is a current favorite among youth. Instagram is a photo-sharing site where users can post photos, "like" other people's photos and share them. Snapchat is also popular. This is a mobile service where users can take a photo, send it to someone else, and schedule it to delete within a few seconds. What is important to remember is that both are just services, and they share the same properties as many of their popular predecessors (such as MySpace, Facebook, and Chatroulette). There will always be new services that children move in and out of fluidly. Given the choice between trying to block children from a site and teaching them how to use it maturely, my hope is that parents do the latter. Especially as children are joining new services at increasingly young ages, how they use it becomes as important as what they use."

They don't see privacy as simply keeping secrets. They understand privacy as controlling information flow. It is rare these days to be able to hide information from absolutely everyone. There are too many technologies that capture images and information. Instead, people control who sees their information. They set their social media profiles to allow certain people to have access but others not to have access. They allow some companies to have their data but do not want others to access it or want it used in some ways but not others. Privacy isn't all-or-nothing - it's about modulating boundaries and controlling data.

Science class is about to look a lot more boring. One million kids logged on to Maker Camp last summer, so today Google and Maker Faire announced the second year of its online summer camp that teaches teens to build, hack and explore. The six-week program on Google+ includes virtual field trips to NASA, CERN, and Disney Imagineering plus making tensile strength towers, glowing candy, and potato canons.

Unfortunately now, there are likely dozens of bald tweenage girls crying in their bathrooms. And it's perhaps even more insane that most members of the Bieber nation still believe that Justin has cancer, and are pouring sympathy, condolences, and heartfelt love into the #baldforbeiber hashtag, despite the fact that the other half of that Twitter conversation is lawling over the hoax.

"Despite statistics showing that more college admissions officers, as well as hiring managers, check applicants' Facebook pages, many teenagers are still lax about social media security, continuing to post content that is detrimental to their online reputation. Michael P. Grace, president and CEO of Virallock, spoke with AllFacebook about the mistakes that high school and college students are making on Facebook and how they can clean up their acts for a better future."

"Instead of using Facebook primarily as a communication device with friends (there's Facebook messages for that purpose), Grace said students should use their profiles as secondary resumés. If a student is applying to a college and their application shows that they were involved in, say, Model U.N. or the choir, they should have some kind of evidence of their activities. Likewise, if volunteer work is mentioned, teens should make sure they have photos of that on their Facebook page. When a college admissions officer or a hiring manager sees a prospect's Facebook page, they want to see evidence of positivity and accomplishments. Grace says taking this kind of approach can help young people stand out from their peers."

"If you think about it for a second, the fact that young people aren't especially reliable predictors of tech trends shouldn't come as a surprise. Sure, youth is associated with cultural flexibility, a willingness to try new things that isn't necessarily present in older folk. But there are other, less salutary hallmarks of youth, including capriciousness, immaturity, and a deference to peer pressure even at the cost of common sense. This is why high school is such fertile ground for fads. And it's why, in other cultural areas, we don't put much stock in teens' choices. No one who's older than 18, for instance, believes One Direction is the future of music."

" teens are both very public and very private, often at the same time. In a behavior called whitewalling, users post to Facebook-sometimes in great detail - but then quickly delete everything, creating a blank timeline. "

""I mean, man, it's like not real life. Not. Real. Life. Why would you be on there when there's this," he gestured, with his chin, to everything around him, the bottleneck of teens, grouping off, chattering. Then he looked over at a small pack of guys dressed a little like him, ambling towards us. "Those are my boys," he said, then offered me his hand to shake. "Hope this helps," he said, adding, at the last moment, "Obviously, like, Facebook is not cool.""

"it falsely assumes that today's students intrinsically understand the nuanced ways in which technologies shape the human experience-how they influence an individual's identity, for example, or how they advance and stymie social progress-as well as the means by which information spreads thanks to phenomena such as algorithms and advertising."