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Reading articles that extol the negative aspects of students and technology, the unbridled evil that is use without strict monitoring and filtering, brings my blood to the proverbial boil. This is another symptom of a society and educational system gone terribly awry, failing to teach individual responsibility for one’s actions while understanding the imperfect nature of the real world we live in.

“Schools are fighting a war,” says Robin Raskin, who, as founder of Raising Digital Kids, has been studying the effects of new media on society for the past 25 years. “Every school in the country is grappling with the same issues.” According to Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, we have seen the enemy, and it is us. Adults simply don’t know how to model appropriate digital behavior, he believes, so kids are making up the rules on their own. Is it a case of bad technology leading to bad behavior or good technology with not enough role models?

I’m with Will on this one. There’s no question in my mind the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the parents and teachers in educating students in the right and wrong ways to treat others using technology and in general. Often the expectation is the IT department will put in filters and firewalls to prevent students from going where they shouldn’t (no matter how hard they try) and if they do manage to transgress the Acceptable Use Policy will resolve every situation.

“Back in the day” if a student was caught paging through the National Geographic magazines looking for topless native women the reaction wasn’t, “Oh, we must protect the children! Get the scissors! Cut out the pages!” Or better yet…”This is our new library policy…if you are found to be in violation and viewing material deemed inappropriate you will be suspended, the offending material will be sealed and hidden, the librarian strictly disciplined, and we will alert the media!”

Why are we teaching kids the correct way to handle situations is to eliminate any possibility of them happening just because “they might?” Why not take away pencils and paper because “a student might write a nasty note [cheating test answers, obscene cartoon, bomb threat, insert your panic phrase of choice here]?” If we are expecting our students to leave school and remain as safe and insulated from every bad thing that could happen as they are in school (and don’t kid yourself…no matter how bad you think your school is, the real world is worse. Much, much worse.) we are doing them a disservice and need to let someone take our place.

Earlier this year, a teacher at Milwaukee’s Pulaski High School ducked out of the classroom for just a few moments and left her ninth-grade students unattended, at which point a scuffle broke out. Not long afterwards, 52 seconds of this “eyewitness” school news ended up on YouTube. Although no one was hurt, it was “a very serious issue,” says Ada Rivera, the school’s principal. But her school faces bigger problems than YouTube coverage. “Our issue is not pictures,” Rivera says. “Our issue is kids calling in parents, friends, and others to do physical harm to people in the building. That’s the real reason we have our cell phone policies.”

Why was this a “very serious issue?” Calling in others to do harm in the building? Don’t you have security policies about visitors on your campus? Why blame the phones for poor planning and administration?

So, for instance, a fight such as this one, caught on a cell phone and sent to a buddy outside the school, is likely to lead to further violence.

There is no way to say that this is “likely” to lead to further violence. Possibly yes, likely…your guess is as good as anyone else’s. Rather it leads to embarrassment to the school administration in far, far more cases than it contributes to the problem. If schools such as Virginia Tech can put policies in place to leverage cell phones to protect their students, where’s the rationale for banning them?

Technology is only the tool for bad behavior, and teachers have been teaching right from wrong since the days of Plato. Educators are also brilliant at holding children accountable—more so, at times, than parents are. To Richardson’s eye, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and stop thinking about policies that limit technology, and instead focus on what we do best. “It has to be a K–12 curriculum in which we model good behavior,” Richardson argues. “We have to be consistent in our own behavior, and hand out real consequences for abuses to the procedures.”

Stop blaming technology for the failings of people. Spend your time teaching students how to be good people by lesson and by example. Stop teaching them others will protect them from bad decisions and poor choices. Start teaching them (again, since we used to do this) if they do something irresponsible or stupid (yes, I said it) they have to take responsibility for it, not that they should have been prevented from making the mistake in the first place so it’s not their fault.

At some point in the future the following will “likely” be heard in a courtroom:

Judge: “Why did you commit that crime?”

Defendant: “Because nobody stopped me.”

Judge: “Didn’t you know what you were doing was wrong?”

Defendant: “If it was wrong, I wouldn’t have been able to do it in the first place. That’s the way it was in school.”

Stop the insanity. Stop worrying about the technology. Do right by the kids. Teach them how to live in school and after.

One of the toughest aspects of any system for personal management is sticking with it. I don’t care what magical solution is being pitched this week, if you don’t do it consistently then it’s nothing more than another time-sucking task. So how do you keep your butt on the wagon and make progress?

Habits

We all have habits, some good, some bad. The trick is they’re just that…habits. In many cases we do them without thinking or if we don’t do them it nags at the back of our mind until we do. Trick one is to get your productivity tasks to be come habits. You want to feel incomplete without completing them. It usually takes things a few weeks of frequent repetition to become a habit so be prepared to remind yourself often. You can bribe yourself with some small reward for maintaining your habit if it helps or chastise yourself if you fail. The most important part is…find something that works for you.

Testing the habit

“How do I know when it’s a habit?” I hear this one a lot. The easiest way I know how to test this is to see how hard it is to break. If you’re working on capturing everything in a single notebook see if you can make yourself not use the notebook and use a post-it instead. If it feels “wrong” you’re getting close. If it’s easy, you’re not ready grasshopper.

Habits go everywhere

Your habit needs to follow you wherever you go. If your habit is to capture your gas purchase for mileage tracking (yep, something I do every fill up) you have to set things up so you can facilitate your habit rather than skipping it. I keep a pen in the glove box so I never have an excuse to not write down my mileage on my receipt and then I log it in a Google Spreadsheet. I know it’s a habit because if I don’t do it, it bugs me until I do.

Expanding your habit

Try to cultivate habits that can expand and encompass other aspects of your life you need to manage. If you’re working on managing your finances and your habit is “capture everything” find a way to capture your finances so you work on that at the same time.

Keep looking for something that works for you…discard what doesn’t…and work what does over and over again.

Far too much of the focus in the edtech space is placed on the tool with the biggest hype at the time.  Twitter, tumblr, blogger, wiki, whatever’s getting the hype is the one that we’re trying to figure out how to teach our students to use to  better their educational experience.

GET OVER IT

Teach students real skills.  Teach them how to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively regardless of the tool or the medium.  A well written concept, carefully thought out and shared, is powerful whether it’s in a wiki, on a printed page, or in an email.  We can spend time teaching them how to use Wordpress or Drupal and for the time while those tools are en vogue we will have done them a service.  When those tools fall away to others the truth remains that we have saddled the students with knowledge they can no longer use.

I’ll draw a parallel to the world of computer programming.  A programmer who is an absolute guru in Cobol can be viewed the same as your scholar in Sanskrit.  They will succeed in a very narrow, specific niche.  A programmer who has learned how to program well using sound techniques and methodologies will be successful regardless of the language(s) they need to learn.

Stop wasting time debating which is the best blogging tool, the best wiki, the easiest twitter clone.  Get to reading, digesting, and producing content.  Let the tools settle themselves out.

If you’re gathering photos for use on the web or a blog then optimizing and resizing those pictures is a common task.  Webresizer.com gives you an online tool to reduce the file size, crop, sharpen, and resize the images to your liking.

I’m of mixed opinions when it comes to using wikis as an alternative to the traditional school textbook.  While I’m all for using web based technologies to enhance the learning experience we always need to keep in mind we haven’t reached 100% connectivity for our students.  Until that happens we need to provide access to our materials in an offline mode as well as online.

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom

In one Boston College professor’s classroom, however, wikis have become a primary learning tool, replacing textbooks and allowing improved collaboration among students. The wiki is even used to let students submit possible questions for examinations, many of which actually appear on tests. Gerald Kane, assistant professor of information systems at the Chestnut Hill, Mass., school, has been using a wiki from SocialText Inc. as the primary teaching tool in his classroom since October, relying on the technology to integrate content from other Web 2.0 technologies like social book-making tools, RSS systems, and Google for his “Computers in Management” courses.

There will always be a need for access to learning materials off the machine as well as on.  Use the tools…but remember your audience.