EdTech

different attitudes towards or ways of using digital technology, can have an impact on the effectiveness of teaching and learning. But many trainee teachers are left to develop this understanding by chance.

Teachers need to be supported by policy and research to help them develop expert knowledge on the use of digital technologies

a lack of detailed explanations provided to teachers “as to how, or why, using tablets within certain activities can improve learning”.

The Internet is both a blessing and a curse. Fathomless amounts of data are near-instantaneously available to all with access to computers. Except in relatively closed societies, there are few established boundaries on that vast information sump. The eminently glaring problems are lack of both provenance and accountability

No longer do most American students feel required to learn detailed material as vast quantities of information is instantly available via these search engines. For many students there is no need to personally study anything as reports on any topic can be acquired and regurgitated with ease. Missing in this educational process is the development of the mental agility to engage in any in-depth analysis

Quotes comprised from whole cloth

Use of partial truths then departing into falsehood

Denial of facts is a common practice in willful ignorance

Prevalent among the nefarious tactics are some of the following: - The use of questions as if a statement of fact

Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective

Internet users need to learn that our attention is a scarce commodity that is to be spent wisely

four simple principles:1. Stop.2. Investigate the source.3. Find better coverage.4. Trace claims, quotes and media to the original context.Otherwise known as SIFT.

The question we want students asking is: Is this a good source for this purpose, or could I find something better relatively quickly

We’ve been trained to think that Googling or just checking one resource we trust is almost like cheating,” he said. “But when people search Google, the best results may not always be first, but the good information is usually near the top

The students are confused when I tell them to try and trace something down with a quick Wikipedia search, because they’ve been told not to do it,” she said. “Not for research papers, but if you’re trying to find out if a site is legitimate or if somebody has a history as a conspiracy theorist and you show them how to follow the page’s citation, it’s quick and effective, which means it’s more likely to be used

Use Wikipedia for quick guidance! Spend less time torturing yourself with complex primary sources

instill a reflex that asks if something is worth one’s time and attention and to turn away if not

The digital deficit, they suggest, isn’t a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don’t realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book

It wasn’t the screen that disrupted the fuller synthesis of deep reading; it was the allure of multitasking on the Internet and a failure to properly mitigate its impact

We need to be aware of the effects of deeper digital immersion, Wolf says, but we should be equally cautious when we draw causal arrows or place blame without adequate longitudinal research

Deep-reading skills, Wolf points out, may not be emphasized in schools that conform to the Common Core, for instance, and need to meet certain test-taking reading targets that emphasize gist at the expense of depth. “Physical, tangible books give children a lot of time,” she says. “And the digital milieu speeds everything up. So we need to do things much more slowly and gradually than we are.” Not only should digital reading be introduced more slowly into the curriculum; it also should be integrated with the more immersive reading skills that deeper comprehension requires.

Digital reading is becoming an increasingly important part of children’s literacy lives. It gives children new and exciting ways to access a wide range of reading materials and is particularly effective at getting disengaged groups of children excited about reading

The readers’ awareness of how they read on screen (and the calibration process they engage in when reading on screen), might be the sources of the print-versus-screen difference

The chain of influences is an essential piece of understanding for the debates on reading on and off-screen. It is a continuation of a long argument in media studies where one camp of researchers focuses on metacognition and another camp of researchers on the inherent characteristics of the medium.

The screen introduced hyperlinks, large collections of e-books, automatic possibility for translation, multimedia representations of meaning

children are less aware of the disconnect between a digital and non-digital reading medium than any generation of children before them. It follows that they have different preferences, different resources for calibration, different lived examples of reading around them

The ‘home sweet home’ for reading in the digital age is the provision of, and the practice in the use, of high-quality texts on and off screen

Almost every single teenage boy in America — 97 percent — plays video games, while about 83 percent of girls do

promote “healthy gaming habits” and develop students’ science and technology skills

Parents aren’t telling their kids at 6 years old, ‘Keep your clothes on online

It had nothing to do with gameplay

Parents aren’t telling their kids at 6 years old, ‘Keep your clothes on online,’” Mr. Halpert said. “But they need to.

Minecraft, said it planned to release software early next year that could recognize some forms of grooming and sextortion. The company said it would offer the software to other tech businesses free of charge

a 26-year-old Ohio man was charged with sexual exploitation after claiming to be 13 on Yubo and luring a 12-year-old girl, the authorities said

But the solution many game developers and online safety experts return to is that parents need to know what their children are playing, and that children need to know what tools are available to them. Sometimes that means blocking users and shutting off chat functions, and sometimes it means monitoring the games as they are being played. “‘Literacy’ is the word I say a billion times a day

the scale does not distinguish between TV and other types of screen use

no child had a vocabulary score in the impaired range

misleading

The study was not pre-registered, making it hard to know how many analyses were conducted but not reported

The study does not provide credible evidence of an adverse effect of screen time on child development, but could serve to stoke anxiety in parents who may worry that they have damaged their child’s brain by allowing access to TV, phones or tablets

an association between screen time and brain wiring says nothing about causation: you can speculate that an apparent delay in brain development might be caused by high screen time but it is equally possible that lower brain developmental status increases screen time