This is a valuable idea because of the way students move from being game players to game masters, and are engaged in critical literacy. I could easily see a students' selections taking a social justice bent related to race relations in the US.

At the beginning of the speech, Davis said that racism is a dying culture. I'd like to believe this is true but I also know that Trump supporters at the polls were either willing to overlook his overtly racist statements, or they embraced him for his racism- often termed "political incorrectness." In either case, anti-racists must explore what an anti-racist platform would look like. The sentence I've highlighted is a great place to start in drafting such a platform.

We have a long way to go and so much work to do.

http://dmlcentral.net/a-triptych-on-changing-language-changing-minds/

"...decolonizing is cool, except when I really think about it really hard..."

I love how the informality of this prose, this blog, belies the powerful press on a learning community's thinking.

What is interesting to me is that this data analysis was built on Vonnegut's thesis. What can this tell us about algorithms, coder's bias, and confirmation bias?

Facts matter. Data matters. Strange how we never hear this type of data in public schools even though our school leaders are usually keenly aware of community satisfaction or lack thereof.

This should read: "11th grade English teacher and instructional coach at Rangeview High School"

Fiscally conservative-minded school leaders in my district point at spending practices and budgeting as the reason for the $31 million hole.

We could annotate this publicly and invite all APS principals to join a hangout after.

This sentence resonates with me and should lead to a syllabus that is required reading for anyone in ed tech in public schools.

Hard to build for whom? I appreciate Maha's voice about the messages we send women about digital tools. I imagine it is much harder to build confidence as a women doing something that has been historically perceived as a man's domain.

These texts provide a vital critical lens through which we must read the "practical" texts listed above. We can no longer accept purported "best practices" as such. We have to think about the marginalized communities we serve and we have to interrogate the historical failure of "best practices" to close equity gaps.

This line in particular might need revision. "A study about marshmallows said..."

At a time when the Common Core standards demand that we develop students' use of evidence, this stands out as a school policy with a very weak use of evidence, attempting to stretch well cited psychology research far beyond its real implications. It is noteworthy how convenient this policy is for adults averse to change.

Also, the Common Core standards demand that we support our students with digital writing but this policy, with its claims about digital tools and learning, effectively argues against digital writing. That, too, seems convenient for adults averse to change.

This photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 2014. The men in the picture are African migrants standing on a shoreline in Djibouti City hoping to use a cell signal from neighboring Somalia in order to connect with their relatives. It just seemed to belong here in the margins as this school writes about its concerns for parents and families.

Speaking of minority parents and families, another issue of equity is that Latino and African American families are more likely to use cell phones at home for Internet access than their white counterparts, who are more likely to have broadband access. By vilifying cell phones, the school unwittingly condemns the mode of access that most of the families they serve use.

In "Mobile Phones and America's Learning Divide," S Craig Watkins from the University of Texas at Austin- an education researcher- poses powerful inquiry questions about mobile devices and their potential for closing achievement gaps. Here's hoping that this school identifies inquiry questions to supplant the over-reaching and poorly supported claims of this policy. Watkins' work should be required reading for these (unnamed) authors. They can ban cell phones all they want but citing popular press and tangential research to do so is a dubious act for a learning institution in the 21st Century.

Here, too, a learning organization has cited a popular magazine instead of education research.

I would recommend reading the important text, "Psycholinguistics of Literacy in a Flat World,"by Alice Horning.

Here we see an example of particularly poor hyperlinking: the author has used a Google URL shortener in a space where the character count doesn't matter. This serves to confuse the reader about the sources cited. This should be revised to preserve the original web addresses of the sources cited and to help the reader establish the credibility of these claims.

I think the sources used in this policy are questionable because they are popular media articles making claims about learning. It is interesting to me that a learning institution would cite the Huffington Post, for example, when real educational research, and researchers are at their disposal. Here's just one example.

This has real potential because of the research base that supports the instructional approach.

I appreciate this because I can see CRE themes.

Is there a root cause analysis that determined a mismatch? This seems to privilege software developers as the supermen ed is waiting for.

This is a vital step in tool development. Does it go past tool development to looking at student work and shifting practice?

What gaps? What apps? What is the relationship between the app and practice? So often our assessment of the tools remove teachers and instructional decision making from the conversation. I would hope to see a model with a learning goal, a tool or technology specified and some instructional practices outlined. Does this type of an approach- finding apps for gaps- starts with the premise that a software tool will address a gap and education's role is to pair apps to gaps? In our short techquity work, elementary teachers interested in learning more about ed tech expressed frustration at the press for them to use skill building software that isolated students in their experiences and decreased student talk opportunities. Not having an answer, I have a bias toward powerful practices like paired programming that privilege discourse. I also know that language learners who are challenged to build houses together in Minecraft struggle over vocabulary and stretch their language production while they laugh and strategize about design.

Three aspects of implementation. All of these are complex and multi-faceted. For example, usage depends on teacher access and capacity. Teacher partnerships depend on the flexibility of support and the opportunities for teachers to participate. Student experience is dependent on pedagogy.

So important to know why you're using this data. This article reveals that if we read data to identify gaps and deficits, it can reinforce negative biases of teachers and youth. If we read data to identify short-term wins, we can include data in asset-focused work.

I think you're doing an important critical read of this event. I've looked at the Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week in a similar way. There is usually some industry influence behind this but it is also heartening that both of these events put issues of equity at the center of their promotion. How can we use events like these to champion equity?

How can this happen in open spaces, in a way that invites other interested educators to join and support the effort?

Great point and important one, too, as we acknowledge the path is not all rosy and flowing optimism .... we still got work to do ...

Somebody somewhere has to test these tools IRL and that means they have to take the risk of failure. We just need to make the risk small and safe. We need to protect the early adopters.

Cringe worthy phrases of the day "just having fun" and "rigorously learning". If you got rigor, you not learning. You dead.

all students? one sized equitable tool fits all?

I am ok with quantifying this and even making a rough matrix/rubric of techquity, but I am unwilling to say unequivocally as best practice (shudder...) that a pencil is 'better' than an app. Each has its charms and the user's mileage may vary.

I appreciate the way they've shared the process- group brainstorm, the tool- Padlet, and the results of the activity.

I appreciate this question because it engages teachers in critical thinking about specific tech uses as opposed to simply asking them to learn a tool. Ultimately, they're asked to identify a strong classroom practice that "supports all students talent development."

This tweet of the article showed that it captured the interest of our Ed Tech coaches. In the retweets and likes, we also see a loose connection with the author, Mica Pollock, and a participating teacher Kim Douillard from the San Diego Area Writing Project.

These participatory online platforms are used by a small number of youth, who engage with the web to pursue their interests. Most youth, studies show, use the web for friendship-driven practices and aren't familiar with learning platforms. That's an equity issue, especially if youth learn about the potential of the web for self-directed learning at home and in "third spaces."

I think Sarigianides, Petrone, Lewis and ultimately Nancy Lesko's work on the constructedness of youth and all the adult investments in maintaining particular positions for youth deepen the conversation about WHY this happens and continues to happen throughout history.