Is tech saturation good or bad for the modern teenager?

Arguments can be made either way, but there’s no debating that today’s teens are more wired than ever. And digital permeates the lives of young people in general, too.

People aged 18-34 have an average of 319 online connections, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. That’s compared to an average of 198 connections for the 35-46 group, and the numbers continue to decrease from there.

Pew also recently reported that 63% of teenagers text message with friends on a daily basis, compared to 39% who speak on the phone daily and just 35% who interact face-to-face outside of school. Other research has found that text-happy teens send more than 100 messages per day.

But the digital revolution comes with drawbacks. A 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation study found a correlation between media consumption and poor academic performance. The study found that 21% of young people between the ages of eight and 18 consume at least 16 hours of media per day, while 17% consume less than three hours per day. 47% of the heavy users reported typically earning grades of C or below in school, compared to just 23% of the light users. Twice as many heavy users as light users reported getting in trouble frequently. More…

Image via Mashable.com

To be fair, the teachers did their best when comparing the worst criminal in history to a playground tormentor. By combining Chrysanthemum, a story about a young girl bullied because of her unusual name, with the forest-animal tale Terrible Things: An Allegory About the Holocaust, no traumatic detail was ever uttered. Nobody mentioned concentration camps filled with emaciated prisoners and flesh incinerating ovens. And that’s a good thing, because 5- and 6-year-olds just can’t grasp the complexity of the Holocaust.

A reading passage included this week in one of New York’s standardized English tests has become the talk of the eighth grade, with students walking around saying, “Pineapples don’t have sleeves,” as if it were the code for admission to a secret society.

The passage is a parody of the tortoise and the hare story, the Aesop’s fable that almost every child learns in elementary school. Only instead of a tortoise, the hare races a talking pineapple, and the moral of the story — more on that later — is the part about the sleeves.

While taking the test, baffled children raised their hands to say things like, “This story doesn’t make sense.”

Antitesting activists have taken up the cudgel, saying that the passage and the multiple-choice questions associated with it perfectly illustrate the absurdity of standardized testing. And by Friday afternoon, the state education commissioner had decided that the questions would not count in students’ official scores. More…

Image: Suzanne DeChillo for The New York Times

Franz Kaftka wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.

We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”

But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate. More…

Image Domitille Collardey for The New York Times

We are happy to announce a 2:30pm (14:30) option for the Enlightenment Tour of the British Museum. 

Discover the remarkable collection at the British Museum with a private tour, created especially for the delegates of the International Learning Conference!

Meet fellow Conference participants as a tour guide takes us through galleries and collections, “discovering the way the world was understood by Europeans in the 18^th century, tracing the beginning of the British Museum and its collection.”

Before or after the tour, feel free to explore the museum and all its wonderful collections, visit the gift shop, or relax over coffee in the café.

Originally built in 1759, the British Museum houses a collection of nearly eight million works, including world-famous pieces like the Elgin Marbles (or Parthenon Marbles) and the Rosetta Stone. The original British Library, now referred to as the Round Reading Room, is housed within the walls of the museum, and was once the library of choice for figures such as Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, and many more.

The tour will last one hour.

Cost for the Enlightenment Tour, created specifically for delegates of the International Learning Conference, and an experienced tour guide: $20

Very limited space available for this and the 1:00 tour – be sure to book today!

To book, email us at support@thelearner.com

Image: Andrew Dunn via Creative Commons

Washington, DC (April 9, 2012) – The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), today joined with 13 other leading education associations in releasing a new report aimed at helping inform and guide education decision makers as they revise policies related to the use of mobile technologies and social media in schools. The report, Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media, was produced by CoSN and the FrameWorks Institute. Collaborating national partners include the American Association of School Administrators, Common Sense Media, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Association of State Boards of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Education Association, the National Writing Project, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the Student Press Law Center and the Technology Leadership Network of the National School Boards Association.

Read the Entire Press Release

If you want to feel optimistic about the state of things for unemployed, disengaged, and dissatisfied youths in America, here’s a way. Spin a globe. Stop it with your finger. If you touch land, the overwhelming odds are that the young people in that country are doing much worse.

There are 1.2 billion people between 15 and 24 in the world, according to the International Youth Foundation’s new Opportunity for Action paper. Although many of their prospects are rising, they are emerging from conditions of widespread poverty and lack of access to the most important means of economic mobility: education. In the Middle East and North Africa, youth unemployment has been stuck above 20 percent for the last two decades. And in the parts of the world where youth unemployment has been low, such as south and east Asia, young people are overwhelmingly employed in the agriculture sector, which leaves them vulnerable to poverty.

The report is a crackerjack box of interesting facts — e.g.: the probability that a 15-year-old Russian male will die before he is 60 is higher than 40 percent, the highest in Europe; among women 15 to 24 years old, only 15 percent are working in the Middle East — but some of the most surprising stats are the closest to home. More…

Image via The Atlantic

Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.

This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child’s academic and intellectual development.

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. More…

Image: Harriet Russell for the New York Times

The modular fenestration of this school building in western Switzerland was inspired by shapes from 1980s computer game Tetris.

Designed by Swiss architects ipas, the four-storey block is an extension to an existing secondary school and a glass bridge connects it to the main building at second-floor level.

More…

It is Republic Day in Mumbai, and an elderly nun addresses 1,000 silent schoolgirls gathered in the playground of Mary Immaculate Girls’ School. If the writers of India’s constitution could see the state of the country today they would weep, she cries, but this school offers hope. Local parents in the tatty surrounding district agree. They will do almost anything to get their children into the oversubscribed school, even though it charges its primary pupils $180 a year when the state school across the road is free. From the Mumbai slums to Nigerian shanty towns and Kenyan mountain villages, tens of millions of poor children are opting out of the state sector, and their number is burgeoning.

Despite a rapid rise in attendance since 2000, 72m school-age children across the world are still not in school, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa and a quarter in South and West Asia. The United Nations reckons it would cost $16 billion a year to get the remaining stragglers into class by 2015—one of its big development goals. Yet a free education is something that many parents will pay to avoid.

In India, for example, between a quarter and a third of pupils attend private schools, according to the OECD, a Paris-based think-tank (and others have private tutors). In cities the proportion is more like 85%, reckons Geeta Kingdon, who conducts research in Mumbai and elsewhere for the Institute of Education in London. More…

Image: Gillian Blease via The Economist