We had a learning fair in our district last Saturday. A few sessions were on embracing the technologies students already possess. Some teachers are leery of this because they think students will be off-task. In fact, a few days prior, I had a VP call and report that a student was posting on FB during class, and what should be done about it... Well, I think this post answers that question. If a student is FBing during class, then what isn't the teacher doing to engage the student? Why do we immediately place the blame on the student? I'm the first to admit that I will check email, Twitter, FB, and chat during a speaker session if I am bored, so why should we assume any different for students? Where's the sense in that?

This says to me that teachers are no longer the fount of knowledge. Students are able to go out and find all the information they need. Everyone with access to the digital age can be their own teacher. Each learner is independent. If this is the case, what are the teachers to do? If we have no information to offer that cannot be found in the digital world, then what is our function? If each learner is capable of getting all this information him/herself, why are schools held accountable for student "achievement" scores?
I think the accessibility of information is irrelevant. My grandmother had a set of encyclopedias that were constantly available for me to look up information in and I often did. My brother never did. Just because the information is out there and available at any time does not mean that all people will take advantage of it. The format of the information is irrelevant. People who wouldn't pay attention to a lecture or look up information in a book aren't going to look it up with a computer. Some of the people will learn information that matters and some of the people will earn the highest score on Mahjongg Dimensions.

I just checked my own daughter's texts for the last month. She is a freshman in high school. She had close to 12,000 texts last month and has all A's and B's in her classes. I looked and half of these texts were during school hours. She is certainly managing to find the information she needs for her classes without listening spending all of her time listening to the teacher.

It was only a few years ago that I spent half of my time teaching trying to take phones away. This was until I realized that there was no use. I could take them all I wanted, but it never stopped anyone from texting in class. I found that I had to do something to engage the students. If the class is interesting enough to make the students pay attention and learn, they don't spend so much time on the phones. This doesn't mean that I am an entertainer. I just have to be a better teacher.

I love the question. Teachers need to figure out how to change up the class so students are engaged. Sure, there may be times for lecture, but they should be the exception and not the norm. Project based learning is one way to do this. Another strategy would be to put those Facebook users to work by having them use their network to learn. Students know how this networking thing works where most teachers are in the dark.

A teacher's function is no longer merely to deliver content. Teachers should teach critical thinking through the lens of their domains and offer practice in the specific skills of their domains. Bloom's taxonomy is helpful in teaching students to pose questions.

I agree with Linda. Teachers can see "the age of google" as an opportunity to spend more time teaching problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, and other high-level Bloom's taxonomy skills and less time trying to fill students' heads with information that they can pretty easily look up. Of course there is still important content knowledge that students should know, but I believe we better serve our students by helping them figure out what to do with this info, instead of just worrying about whether or not they can repeat it back to you on a test.

@mrkaiser208: I too think I must present engaging material and relevant information to my students. However, if they are texting and/or sleeping they don't hear anything I or other students say.