Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53 percent of non-bloggers say the same thing.

Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further--and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class.

<a href="http://www.mhprofessional.com/product.php?isbn=0071592067"><i>Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns</i></a> predicts that the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.

The ability for teachers to understand and add value to the comment ‘back channel’ is a key skill for the ‘connected teacher’. Anyone can swap an writing pad for a blog, there is no value in that. The back channel is the conversation, and is the heartbeat of thought.

I can’t think of another way in which teachers can get such immediate access to the ‘thinking’ process that is playing out in front of them.

<p class="articletext">Researchers have found three consistent effects of using – and especially, emphasizing the importance of – letter or number grades:</p> <p class="articletext">1.&nbsp; Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.&nbsp;</p>

2.&nbsp; Grades tend to reduce students’ preference for challenging tasks.

3.&nbsp; Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.

<p>First, it helps to look at the typical process of technology adoption (keeping in mind, of course, that schools are not typical of anything.) It's typically a four-step process:</p> <ol> <li> Dabbling.</li> <li> Doing old things in old ways.</li> <li> Doing old things in new ways.</li> <li> Doing new things in new ways.</li></ol>

"What the animation does is it assists the children in visualizing the action," explains Mitchell, who teaches <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nuuanu.k12.hi.us/G-1/public_html/index.html" target="_blank">language arts enrichment classes</a>. "The animation is a way of them developing the picture so they relate that to the writing, to what they hear, what they see, what they feel." Technology, she adds, "gives you one more way of teaching something."

"Looking for real-world relevance has to do with students being interested in what they do, knowing that it's useful outside of school," says Kaninau. "The experiences are not contrived or in isolation, but they're a part of a larger learning activity. Without those connections, it won't be meaningful, and it'll be forgotten tomorrow."

"They love it," says sixth-grade teacher Geraldine Kajitani. "If you start with ... hands-on activities and things that are fun, their attention is focused." And once that happens, she says, it's a snap to get them to study some of the drier material because they'll relate to it and remember it.

According to the teachers, the games were effective teaching and learning tools because they (a) were experiential in nature, (b) offered an alternative way of teaching and learning, (c) gave the students reasons to learn mathematics to solve the game problems and progress in the games, (d) addressed students' mathematics phobias and (e) increased time on task.

When asked what they learn by using social networking sites, the students listed 'technology skills', followed by 'creativity', being 'open to new or diverse views' and 'communication skills'.

Our problem is not that we can't teach 21st century skills unless it is content specific, it is rather that <span style="font-style: italic;">we are content specific to begin with.</span> When we compartmentalize our content in an effort to put it on a pedestal, we compartmentalize our learning of it, so that it has no relevance to the larger picture. 21st century skills, like the term or not, have that ability.

One of those is threaded comments. This is rapidly bringing my blogs to the level I had always hoped to acheive–one where the students are talking to each other and not just talking to me.

"Media is the language of kids," Torres adds, saying that students who may not take to learning by reading a textbook or listening to a lecture often jump at the chance to understand complex concepts by presenting finished products in the form of a film or a Web documentary or a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.