If your child is seriously into videogames – and Pew Internet research has found that 97% of US 12-to-17-year-olds are – it may help to read about New York teacher Peggy Sheehy's heroes, also known as students. The middle school humanities teacher calls them heroes because she co-created the WoW in School curriculum "A Hero's Journey" (WoW is short for the multiplayer online game World of … [Read more...] about Students called heroes in this 6th-grade class
In the face of school violence, what do we default to?
Certainly what all the coverage of the Murrysville, Pennsylvania, school stabbings indicates is a society trying to make sense of a so far inexplicable tragedy, but there is no – zero – sense or accuracy in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's "report" that this is "the latest face of the national epidemic of school violence." There is no such epidemic. In fact, the latest national data available shows a … [Read more...] about In the face of school violence, what do we default to?
Popularity: The other kind of vulnerability
A study cited in "When Popularity Backfires" at Time.com found that socially ambitious kids can be just as likely to experience bullying and harassment as "social outcasts" at school. Interested in the "hotspots" of social aggression in students' social experiences at school, sociology professors Robert Faris at University of California Davis and Diane Felmlee at Pennsylvania State University … [Read more...] about Popularity: The other kind of vulnerability
FB & Oculus VR: The potential of a virtual-reality platform
For years we've heard about the potential of virtual reality, but even when the virtual world Second Life was a hot tech-news story, it hardly felt like a second life to most people. I wrote about it a number of times because of the amazing work some very cutting-edge educators and their students were doing in Teen Second Life, when it existed. Then it faded into the background, and those teachers … [Read more...] about FB & Oculus VR: The potential of a virtual-reality platform
What’s (importantly) different about Snapchat
It's not what you might think – or what you might've read in the news. What makes Snapchat stand out in the crowd of social media apps, in fact what makes it "matter," as social media researcher danah boyd put it, "has to do with how it treats attention." Snapchat users don't just swipe through a gazillion photos in a stream or album. The app doesn't work that way. They actually pause and pay … [Read more...] about What’s (importantly) different about Snapchat