Forget about turning your cellphone off before you enter class.

Forget about having it confiscated for texting during lectures, or for browsing the web while you should be listening.

Your cellphone is now part of your classroom experience, so you better make sure that your battery is fully charged before you head to school.

Many school districts have bans on cellphones in classrooms, citing them as learning distractions or tools for social harassment.

Schools in the Toronto area have lifted the ban on cellphones in the classroom and are looking at the different ways that cellphones and other hand-held technology can be harnessed to make class time interactive.

Across the US, school boards have been have been researching the effectiveness of iPads as learning tools for students of all ages.

Classrooms already using personal electronic devices (PEDs) to teach and learn all report success:

• improved student engagement
• increased literacy
• ongoing student communication outside of the classroom

Cellphones—or other PEDs—are tools to access social media, which can be harnessed as a benefit to the classroom, and might help students who might be too shy to interact in the classroom otherwise.

Universities are already using personal technology and social media to interact with students.  A recent study shows that up the 30% of profs use social media regularly.

And other studies are showing that social media site Facebook can actually help increase grades.

It will take a few years to implement a district-wide cellphone policy in Toronto, but certain teachers are embracing the technology ahead of schedule and engaging students using the technology—and the ability to learn—that they already have in their hands.

Read more:

How iPads will change textbooks forever

Media literacy and your child

Online safety tips for children

We already know why it’s important to make learning part of your holidays, so, we’ve compiled 12 ideas to keep your kids mentally engaged over the holiday season. Check in often for new ideas, and if you have your own idea, we’d love to hear it!

Day 9 Go Online
Let’s face it: even the most novel of Christmas presents loose their appeal after a few days. So, why not task the kids with doing some sort of online research project? Any topic goes, whether it’s a favourite animal, or what model of snow blower is the best value. Ask the kids to locate the information for you, and then have them tell you what they discovered.

This is also a great opportunity to have important conversations about online safety and evaluating information sources. Have kids take note of where information comes from and ask them to analyze the quality of one site or another. Media literacy is a skill that will become increasingly important as kids age. If you can combine important thinking and learning skills with holiday fun, then everybody wins.

Tip 1: Get Crafty Together
Tip 2: Snuggle Up With a Book
Tip 3: Take a Hike
Tip 4: Play Video Games
Tip 5: Roll the Dice
Tip 6: Use Your School Agenda
Tip 7: Go to the Library
Tip 8: Keep a Holiday Journal

The answer is that kids between the ages of 8 and 18 are using media approximately 7 and half hours a day, which is up since the last time this study was done five years ago.

At that time, researchers thought that teens’ media usage was at an all-time high at 5 hours a day. But, today’s technology is increasingly mobile. It can, and does, go anywhere that kids go. The breakfast table. The car. The park. Kids don’t have to plant their butts in front of the TV or the desktop computer to be plugged in.

The mobility of media means that kids are constantly connected, which is how they are spending almost 1/2 of their waking day online. And they’re not just plugged in—they’re using multiple media simultaneously.

Kids today are the ultimate multi-taskers: walking and texting. Listening and surfing. Gaming and chatting. Watching and texting.

For tween and teens, technology is ubiquitous.

It’s au courant.

It’s also problematic.

It can lead to obesity. It can cause social disconnection, focus issues, and dangerous online habits. And, most importantly, it can cause communication problems in the classroom.

Whether you are a supporter of teens’ usage of technology, or worried about potential impact it might have on users, one thing is sure: the techno-savvy teen generation is raising a lot of very important questions about how media usage is changing the way that we think and learn, both in and out of the classroom.

Media watchdogs, educators, and parents alike are concerned about the amount of time that children are spending online, their abundant usage of instant messaging (IM), and how the new technologies can and will affect their educational and social development.

What appears to be the consensus is that children of all ages are very receptive to new technologies—they are the biggest users of IM, either through messaging services or text messaging on cell phones.

These new communication technologies are being touted as the newest evolution in communication: language continually evolves and so does the way we communicate. IM, text messaging, and computer communication are the newest incarnations and deserve recognition as the latest ways that humans communicate.

However, there is some concern that IM use among young children may hamper proper language development—that children should not learn abbreviated forms before they learn essential skills like spelling, grammar usage, and punctuation. The new technologies may present new communication methods, but they can also present new hazards to children while online—spending too much time online may make children (and adults) susceptible to online predation.

Here are 10 tips to help ensure Internet safety for every age.

1. Keep online profiles simple, and don’t reveal too much: first name but last initial, city but not address, grade but not what school attended, etc.
2. Use a screen name instead of a real name—develop a name to use when online, like cat_girl06 or likesfido21.
3. Use kid-friendly search engines or browsers. They have built-in parental controls and cool designs that children like.
4. Install your Internet provider’s parental-control features—this can restrict the sites that can be accessed, and prevents salacious pop-ups.
5. When using an IM, change the preferences to contacts-only or invite-only—this way only get messages from people in the contact list will appear, and no outsiders can make contact.
6. If necessary purchase parental add-ons that can log all online activities.
7. Make your default page a kid-friendly one, such as Yahooligans.
8. When surfing around for fun, only follow links from trusted sites.
9. Limit online time. Agree with all computer users in your house to a set computer schedule.
10. Always act online as though someone might be watching!