I grew up in an analog world.

As a child, my world consisted of corded phones that only extended the length of one room, a distinction between local and long distance rates, and pay phones as the only method of calling home.  In this world, if people wished to message friends or relatives, they would hand-write letters and drop them in mailboxes on street corners; such messages might reach their recipients in two days.  All news in this world was reported either via morning newspapers found on doorsteps, televisions that used dials, or the man behind the butcher’s counter at the neighborhood market.  Finally, if students in this world wanted to create impressive research papers, they would thumb through drawers of card catalogues at the library, walk the aisles to retrieve dusty volumes, and create finished reports produced by typewriters.  How 20^th Century!

As we approach the second decade of the 21^st Century, technology constantly evolves and continues to increase its presence in our lives.  How many of you could go through a single day without receiving an email, text message, or tweet?  Do you acquire most of your news from a paper or from a website?  Have you noticed your mailbox becoming emptier and your inbox becoming fuller over the past year?  Are you guilty of Googling, or have you wiki-ed recently?  Does the word “spam” cause you to become angry, or to become hungry?  The world has become digital.

Technology is part of our everyday lives – and in no group is this truth more prevalent than in the lives of today’s students.  Most teenagers are very familiar with technological wizardry than us not-as-cool adults. Most teens have their own cell phones and can be reached at all times.  Also, text messaging, for instance, has become like a second language to most high schoolers. Finally, social networking, such as Facebook, allows students to express themselves and communicate with other teens online.  Literally a new dialect of the English language has evolved from this culture.  Words such as “text” and “friend” are now verbs as well as nouns.  “Text me later,” and “He friended me,” are part of this vernacular.

While these examples demonstrate the accessibility of technology to students, they also bring to mind potential dangers

that accompany this level of their accessibility, as well as the potential distractions to the classroom during school they steal students’ attention away from the curriculum being taught.  While these dangers and distractions are real and they must be considered, I wish to offer an innovated idea.  If educators incorporate some of this technology into their lessons, not only can they recapture the attention and motivation of these young men and women, but they also offer the ability to model safer and more productive ways in which these innovations can be used.

With the possession of technology comes the need for responsible use of that innovation.  With cyberstalkers and identity thieves lurking in the dark recesses of the internet superhighway, students need to be mindful of the information they share with others and post on social networking sites.  Additionally, teens need to use great discretion when sending text and picture messages, even to those people they trust most – not because of these acquaintances themselves, but because anything transferred digitally has the potential of being viewed or accessed by third parties.  Am I suggesting that teen students not use Facebook, cell phones, or iPods?  Certainly not!  I merely think it is crucial that safe and discrete uses for technology be modeled by the adults in their lives – teachers are prime candidates for implementing such modeling.

I know there are several people out there who believe social networking, cell phones, and iPods are just toys that distract students from “real learning”.  I used to completely agree with this line of thinking myself, having seen iPods and cell phones covertly – and almost – hidden from my view as a substitute teacher.  Why did the students hide their gadgets from the teacher’s line of sight?  They felt guilty – guilty of being caught using items that weren’t part of the curriculum – in a school that didn’t see them as appropriate curricular tools either.  It was modeled to these kids that technology serves no effective role in the learning process.  I would like to end that idea here.

Digital and web-based devices can indeed be modeled as safe and educationally relevant tools in the classroom.  Allow me to expound on this revolutionary claim.  First, let’s look at cell phones.  The iPhone by Apple, for instance, is more than just a simple cell phone.  This product can be used to send text messages and to use applications.  Google provides a text messaging service that supplies information for local news, weather, sports scores, and locations of certain businesses.  By texting a question to 466453 (G-o-o-g-l-e), Google will answer with a reply text message within seconds.  Through the Apple Store, thousands of phone applications – for any use or purpose you can imagine – are within your students’ reach.  And most of them are free of charge!  Such applications include Google Maps, which can be used in the myriad ways traditional maps can be used.  Also, there are GPS applications that can be used to teach about geographic information systems (GIS) in the social studies classroom.  Next, weather applications can be used to study climate in specific world locales.  Finally, the iPhone itself contains a web browser, which turns the device in essence into an additional classroom computer, for researching information over the web.  The iPod Touch, while not being a cell phone, can still utilize this application and web technology, thus serves as a classroom computer as well.

Finally, web-based social networking tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, make for great ways to acquire news and other academic curriculum, while also connecting with other students around the world – making our increasingly global community more so.  Twitter is a social networking website that provides information, posted by members, in small statements of 140 characters or less.  One of the most useful applications of this tool is the posting of web links for such things as news stories, discussion boards and article related to specific topics.  As such, Twitter makes for a great real-time, technology-based research place.  Personally, I gain much of my world news and information regarding cutting edge education issues by utilizing my network connections on Twitter.  Facebook is another tool useful in the classroom.  Facebook contains member pages, but also “groups” and “fan pages” for almost any topic a person can imagine.  Many of these pages contain topic-related discussion boards and links to related web articles.  One relevant use of fan pages could be the establishment of private fan pages – where all member requests are approved to the discretion of the creator of that page.  Within such a private page, a discussion board could be set up as an online debate site.  By having the debate site online, students could weigh in on their sides of a particular issue when convenient – thus it would not be necessary for the entire class to be present at the same time.  Students could also use the page to post link they find online which are relevant to that topic of debate.  There are many other effective uses as well.

In sum, we weren’t raised in the same world as our students.  The ways in which the majority of people receive their information is not the same as they did when we were kids.  However, many classrooms and schools are just now moving forward from the antiquated methods we used so long ago.  Our students are on the cutting edge of technology and its use, but haven’t adequate guidance in how to safely and constructively use that technology.  We can’t take this innovation away from our children – nor should we – but we need to teach them how to use it and not get hurt doing so.  Part of that responsibility should fall on parents, but not all of it.  As teachers, we often spend more time with students than any other adults, so the responsibility of modeling safe and effective technology usage falls just as much on us.  Our world is only going to innovate faster and faster over time – we need to keep up if we truly care about the next generation of leaders.