Relationships among Parents, Students, and Teachers: The Technology Wild Card

Parent involvement and home-school partnerships have gained the status of a self-standing research area in the past three decades. While continuing to intrigue researchers and practitioners alike, a wild-card factor has been added that has changed the known dynamics, and has presented parents, teachers, students with a challenge that has neither been researched nor systematically addressed in everyday practice. The wild card is the explosion of technology use, and parents and schools are scrambling to find ways to monitor and control the influence of online interactions, often falling short on both fronts. The paper discusses the relationships of technology and cognitive, social and emotional processes, as well as the impact of electronic media on families and schools