Andrew Marcinek's List: Digital health and wellness

• According to the report, almost a quarter (24%) of admissions officials at 359 selective colleges say they used Facebook, up from 6% the previous year, and 20% used Google to help evaluate an applicant. Of course they do.
• The report indicated that of the survey takers who went online, 12% say what they found “negatively impacted” the applicant’s chances of admission. That’s down from 38% in 2008, when 10% said they consulted social networking sites while evaluating students. Among offenses cited: essay plagiarism, vulgarities in blogs and photos showing underage drinking.
• For those who have aspirations to attend college please take heed. Many university enrollment officials say such checks are not routine — it’s too time consuming, for one thing. But “if ever a post is brought to our attention, you can be certain we’ll check it out,” says Ray Brown, admission dean at Texas Christian University. He says he rejected one applicant who, he discovered through an anonymous tip, had posted pornographic image of herself online.

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• Classrooms adopt “emotional literacy charters”—agreements that the whole community agrees to concerning interpersonal interactions—and kids use “mood meters” to identify the nature and intensity of their feelings and “blueprints” to chart out past experiences they might learn from.
• In one New York City school that serves a high number of special needs students, administrators attribute a 60 percent reduction in behavioral problems to the RULER approach. “One teacher used to go home with welts on her body because these kids were so emotionally challenged that they were kicking and hitting her,” Brackett says. “Since she’s been doing emotional literacy for two years, she’s had no incidents.”
• “Emotional literacy should be taught from womb to tomb, because the emotional challenges we meet vary as a function of our age,”

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