Why Teens Are Impulsive, Addiction-Prone And Should Protect Their Brains iStock By NPR Staff Teens can’t control impulses and make rapid, smart decisions like adults can — but why? Research into how the human brain develops helps explain. In a teenager, the frontal lobe of the brain, which controls decision-making, is built but not fully insulated — so signals move slowly. “Teenagers are not as readily able to access their frontal lobe to say, ‘Oh, I better not do this,’ ” Dr. Jensen, who’s a neuroscientist and was a single mother of two boys who are now in their 20s, wrote The Teenage Brain to explore the science of how the brain grows — and why teenagers can be especially impulsive, moody and not very good at responsible decision-making. “We have a natural insulation … called myelin,” she says. This insulation process starts in the back of the brain and heads toward the front. “The last place to be connected — to be fully myelinated — is the front of your brain,” Jensen says. Interview Highlights On why teenagers are more prone to addiction Copyright 2015 NPR.
20 Basic Rules For Digital Citizenship The definition of digital citizenship has to do with the quality of behaviors that impact the quality of digital content and communities. To help clarify what that “quality” can look like, knowthenet.org.uk put together the following infographic framed around Dos and Don’ts. While seemingly written for a more general audience than students and educators, the thinking is sound, including “Treat others they way you want to be treated,” “Don’t forget the human behind the screen,” “Listen first, talk later,” and “Use proper grammar.” (Yes, please do.) Overall it’s a bit basic, but it does take the important step of moving beyond rhetoric to offer concrete tips to realize the idea. 20 Basic Rules For Digital Citizenship
Yik Yak app concerns P.E.I. high school - A smartphone app that allows users to post anonymous comments that only other users in close proximity can see is gaining popularity among students, but it has officials at P.E.I.'s largest high school concerned. "As each day goes by, more and more students seem to be getting affected by this site," said Gordie Cox, a guidance counsellor at Colonel Gray high school. Students told CBC News that Yik Yak started to become popular in early December and has led to trash-talking because users are anonymous. Colonel Gray students say Yik Yak has been growing in popularity since early December. Const. "There are students that aren't attending school because of it. Geo-fencing offered In an email to CBC News, Yik Yak said, "We recognize that with any social app or network, there is the likelihood for misuse from a small group of users, so we have put specific algorithms in place and continue to improve our monitoring tools to prevent this from happening." 'Answer is education'
Why Schools Need to Teach Technology, Not Ban It Image courtesy @LBPSB During my last seven years as a teacher and consultant, I have borne witness to the technological digital shift in education. When I began my education career in 2005 at the tender age of 23, I had little idea what I was about to face. I was given an unheard of mixture of classes and was thrown to the sharks wearing my new heels and best “teacher” clothes. NaÏve and idealistic, nothing had prepared me for the challenges and incredible joys I would face in the classroom. Nor did I realize that a revolution in education and social media was under way. Looking back to when I began teaching, I can now appreciate what was developing. By my second year of teaching I had become the media teacher (along with a long list of other subjects) and was introduced (by a student of course) to Facebook, founded only a few years before. As an educator or parent it is easy to forget how quickly things changed in those few years. Where do we go from here? Do we educate? The Lester B.
Online Safety Redefined: The 3 Key Elements | Stephen Balkam Online safety has come of age. It is 21 years since "Child Safety on the Information Highway" was first published by journalist and online safety expert, Larry Magid. A year later, after the release of the notorious Rimm Study and the Time Magazine cover article on porn on the Internet, the U.S. Since then we've had what one observer called a "technopanic" over online predators, which reached its apotheosis (or nadir) in NBC Dateline's To Catch a Predator. Kids now create the content we used to try and keep them away from and they do it with immensely powerful devices they carry around with them in their pockets. So it behooves us to take a step back and ask ourselves what we mean by online safety in 2015. At our recent annual conference, we asked the attendees in the hall and those following along on Twitter, to help us redefine online safety for a new generation of users growing up on Snapchat, Yik Yak and Tinder as well as their tech-challenged parents and grand-parents. 1. 2. 3.
Man Regrets Posting Video on Facebook of Paris Cop's Killing PARIS — When Ahmed Coulibaly laid siege to a kosher supermarket in Paris last week, the bloody assault which left four hostages dead came as a shock — but not a surprise — to many Jews in France. The number of French Jews emigrating to Israel has jumped dramatically in recent years thanks to an uptick in perceived anti-Semitism, according to The Jewish Agency. The agency — a nonprofit which facilitates emigration to Israel, which is known as "aliyah" — said 7,000 people moved from France last year — double the 2013 total. While those numbers were expected to rise to 10,000 for 2015, such estimates are now being revised in wake of Friday's brutal attack on the Hyper Cacher store. "A lot of people thought that it was only a matter of time for something like this to happen," agency spokesman Avi Mayer told NBC News. He said that calls coming in to the agency's global service center have "literally doubled" since Coulibaly's hostage-taking and rampage in the kosher supermarket.
Teach Them Kindness Posted by Shelly Terrell on Sunday, December 21st 2014 Included in the Digital Ideas Advent Calendar with a new idea each day! Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change. – Bob Kerrey Teaching citizenship isn’t an additional part of the curriculum. Ideas and Activities The slideshow below provides students ideas on how to be kind in small quick ways. Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad Make an advent calendar in which everyday you suggest a small way for your students to be kind. Other Resources Challenge: Inspire your students to perform at least 5 simple acts of kindness and reflect on the experience. If you enjoyed these ideas, you may want to get your copy of The 30 Goals for Teachers or my $5.99 ebook, Learning to Go, which has digital/mobile activities for any device and editable/printable handouts and rubrics. BookmarksDigital storytelling, by shellyterrell Included in the Digital Ideas Advent Calendar!
Excellent Chart Comparing The Best Digital Storytelling Tools of 2014 December 26, 2014 Digital storytelling is a power way to get students engaged in learning. Using a variety of web tools students will be able to experiment with a set of important skills and literacies in a multimodal environment. They can use text, audio , video, images to communicate their ideas and enhance their visual literacy and writing competencies. Some of the pluses of digital storytelling in education include: You can access and download the Google Doc version of these charts from this LINK. Online Safety: A Teacher’s Guide to Dealing with Cyberbullying, Sexting, and Student Privacy Social media and text messages have blurred the lines between students’ school lives and private lives. While most schools take clear steps to protect students at school, more schools are beginning to consider the need to set policies that apply to students’ activities outside of school. When it comes to questionable online activities like cyberbullying and sexting, kids sometimes feel pressured to follow the crowd. Teachers can play a crucial role in setting high expectations for online behavior. Schools can open conversations about online safety so that students learn to set personal boundaries and feel more comfortable reporting incidents like bullying and harassment. Image via Flickr by Brad Flickinger. Privacy Since the birth of the Internet, adults have been worried about kids sharing too much online. On the plus side, teens are becoming increasingly aware of the need to protect themselves online. What can you do? Have students commit to following school rules. Cyberbullying Sexting
Vermont Students Rally Against Cyberbullying MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) — Students at a Vermont high school are winning praise for their efforts to fight back against online bullying. After a burst of negative posts last week on an anonymous school news app, students at Rutland High School organized a counterattack. They petitioned the creators of the After School app to take their school's message board down, and then launched a "Positive Post-it" campaign, in which small notes offering praise and encouragement to fellow students were stuck to bulletin boards and windows around the school. The also petitioned the tech giant Apple to remove After School from its App Store. The app's intended use is to help students to form groups tied to a specific school and post anonymous messages about local goings-on. Instead, comments on Rutland High School's app were "negative, obscene," said Principal Bill Olsen. Senior Eric Gokee said he was labeled on the app as "the biggest Jew at Rutland High School."
Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web When Reuben Loewy took up his first teaching gig in 2012, he had a major revelation: The digital revolution has dramatically transformed the way that kids perceive reality. Perhaps that makes the 55-year-old teacher sound like a dinosaur. What he discovered is, after all, one of the most obvious realities shaping education policy and parenting guides today. Indeed, although many of today’s teens are immersed in social media, that doesn’t mean "that they inherently have the knowledge or skills to make the most of their online experiences," writes Danah Boyd in her 2014 book It’s Complicated: The Secret Lives of Networked Teens. Educational institutions across the board are certainly embracing (or at least acknowledging) the digital revolution, adopting cutting-edge classroom technology and raising awareness about the perils and possibilities of the Internet. According to Loewy, this dichotomy amounts to a major missed opportunity. Boyd, it’s worth noting, draws similar conclusions:
Teacher's Guide to Digital Citizenship The horror stories of young people not grasping the reach and influence of the content they put online are familiar to all of us. From the loss of job opportunities due to unprofessional pictures or comments on social media, to the more serious threats of abduction, and even the self-harm inspired by cyber bullying, the stakes are high. While students may often seem clueless to these dangers, some are starting to understand the risks. Still, millennials know just as well as any other demographic just how important digital literacy is and will continue to be to their working lives. Teaching digital citizenship means embracing the reality that we’re all interconnected through the Internet, and that we therefore need to understand the responsibilities and risks that come with life online. Image courtesy of Flickr and Thomas Galvez Why Digital Citizenship Matters Neither educators nor parents have the means to completely control how students use technology. Online Safety Information Literacy
10 Interactive Lessons By Google On Digital Citizenship YouTube has a firm place in the current classroom. From Khan Academy’s videos to YouTube EDU and beyond, there’s a reason all these videos are finding a home in schools. In an effort to help keep the ball rolling, Google just launched a set of 10 interactive lessons designed to support teachers in educating students on digital citizenship. A topic obviously quite close to Google’s heart. Google (which owns YouTube) built the lessons to educate students about YouTube’s policies, how to flag content, how to be a safer online citizen, and protect their identities. Below is a list of lessons, and the recommended flow for delivery. Or you can download the Full Teacher’s Guide or the Full Set of Slides in PDF. The killer feature for this curriculum is the extra features that come with each video. —Via Edudemic
Infographic: Citizenship in the digital age By now it’s become clear: For all its wonders, the digital age has also introduced its fair share of challenges. From social media and cyberbullying to cybercrime, internet addiction and online privacy concerns, today’s students face a wide range of difficult issues that previous generations never had to think about. As a result, teachers, school leaders and parents are called on to add a whole new idea to our curricula: digital citizenship. And yet, we don’t have to start from scratch. The elements of digital citizenship, it turns out, are not so different from the basic tenets of traditional citizenship: Be kind, respectful and responsible, and just do the right thing. What’s new — for educators as well as students — is learning how to apply these ideals to the digital age. Check out the infographic below to see how the characteristics of a good citizen parallel — and differ from — those of a good digital citizen.