“YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens… This study also explores the frequency with which teens are on each of the top five online platforms: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Fully 35% of teens say they are using at least one of them “almost constantly.””
“McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content; it’s the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd.”
“While both low- and high-stakes group assessments offer broad accountability and transparency, parents can still get a sense of their child’s learning if they know what to look at.”
“Reading success requires much more than foundational skills. There are other factors critical for literacy development, including those that address language, meaning, and communication. Among the most important is knowledge. Knowledge is necessary to comprehend what we read. Foundational skills are literally meaningless unless readers can make sense of words and texts. This sense-making requires knowledge that must be systematically built (not just activated!) through instructional experiences and curricula that evoke curiosity and the desire to learn more. In short, knowledge matters.”
“Don’t mistake dilemmas for problems. A problem has a solution; you fix it. A dilemma is built into a situation; you cope with it.”
“Debate reinforces the idea that all issues only have two polar opposite viewpoints and that you must choose one.”
“You can practice an us-and-them approach in other ways, too. Try co-browsing — looking together through a social media feed and sharing your reactions with each other as you browse.”
“In my research, my thinking was that as schools consider removal of bans or enforcement, they should also consider often overlooked dimensions of school culture that could play a role in educational productivity and student wellbeing. That is not to say academic achievement is not important — it is — but there are other potentially important inputs that contribute to educational productivity such as school discipline and culture.”
“Good teaching is about more than lesson plans. Focusing on relationships, reflection, and resilience can help new teachers thrive.”
“Over the weekend, ESPN broadcast a replay of a recent esports event that saw the world’s most advanced Microsoft Excel users go head-to-head in a knockout tournament.”
“I started playing word games as a way to stop reading the news first thing in the morning.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson