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How a student spends their Two Million Minutes - in class, at home studying, playing sports, working, sleeping, socializing or just goofing off -- will affect their economic prospects for the rest of their lives. How do most American high school students spend this time? What about students in the rest of the world? How do family, friends and society influence a student's choices for time allocation? What implications do their choices have on their future and on a country's economic future?
This film takes a deeper look at how the three superpowers of the 21st Century - China, India and the United States - are preparing their students for the future. As we follow two students - a boy and a girl - from each of these countries, we compose a global snapshot of education, from the viewpoint of kids preparing for their future.

\n\nThe complete DVD is available for order on this web site. The web site also offers a preview version.

ThinkQuest Newswire Announcement: Students from 13 countries took top honors in this year's ThinkQuest International 2008 Competition. The competition is utilized by teachers to engage their students in developing critical skills for life and work in the 21st century.This year's winning teams collaborated in the research, writing and creation of websites on educational topics ranging from mathematics to promoting tolerance and preventing bullying.

ThinkQuest International 2008 included 972 teams from 60 countries and the winning entries included students from Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Tunisia, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. Each team had approximately eight months to complete their final websites. The submissions were then reviewed by an international panel of volunteer judges who selected the winners in each of the three age divisions. The judges also awarded the "Global Perspectives" prize to the team best exemplifying respect for diversity and recognition of global interdependence.

Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco-three technology giants that last year vowed to increase their efforts aimed at global education reform-have banded together to develop the next generation of assessments: tests that measure 21st-century skills and provide a global framework for excellence.

Parenting in the 21st century presents a new set of challenges that require new solutions. Like their parents before them, today's parents have to help their kids navigate school, friends, crushes, extracurricular activities and sexuality. But they also face a bewildering new world, driven by technology and media. In this excerpt from "What Every 21st-Century Parent Needs to Know," Debra W. Haffner addresses what parents can do to help their kids navigate the Internet.

A commericial solution to social networking in the classroom. ConnectYard enables schools to leverage popular social media for teaching students where they live and socialize, online. The platform offers K-12 schools their own private learning communities with controlled access that are integrated with popular social networks like Facebook, which serves to make course work more social and collaborative by keeping students involved and engaged both in and outside of the classroom. Only users approved by the school are permitted to join the community and interact with other users. This eliminates a primary concern of both parents and administrators.\n\nConnectYard also provides teachers with the ability to audit student groups, walls, etc. This serves to ensure that both the interactions and information being shared are appropriate, which helps to guard against cyber bullying or posting of copyrighted materials. Thus fostering safe and secure learning communities, or Yards, that improve the student educational experience and chances for success.

TED@Palm Springs presentation on game-based learning. Teachers become mentors, students become engaged.

Author James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, explains how the decision-making ability of a diverse group of people is more effective than that of individuals.

Teachers wishing to foster digital literacy in their classrooms and states wishing to demonstrate it in their students face a common challenge: no comprehensive, established approach exists to guide the teaching, learning, and assessment of specific digital literacy skills. To begin addressing this challenge, we have developed this website, which was part of a two-year project funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. The site articulates the skills comprising digital literacy with the goal of helping schools and districts implement a new approach to digital literacy teaching.

Writer, tech consultant, and educator Clay Shirky just gave a talk at the State Dept. explaining the media sea change we're experiencing globally. Keeping participatory media, the most fluent though not necessarily most literate users of which are youth, out of school only solidifies the firewall between formal and informal learning and holds school back from 21st-century relevance. Isn't the idea of adults unidirectionally disseminating to students info that the latter have actually never encountered before beginning to sound quaint?

In June 2008, the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) released an update to their technology standards for teachers. The revised National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Teachers mark a significant overhaul of the group's original teacher technology standards, which ISTE introduced in 2000. The new ISTE teacher standards begin with the assumption that every teacher recognizes the importance of technology and how it can transform teaching and learning. The revised framework focuses on what teachers should know to help students become productive digital learners and citizens. "NETS for Teachers, Second Edition" includes five categories, each with its own set of performance indicators:
1.Facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity
2. Design and develop digital-age learning experiences and assessments
3.Model digital-age work and learning
4. Promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility
5. Engage in professional growth and leadership.

If you made a list of sounds you might hear at your local library, the rumbling of explosions and the loud hum of race-car engines probably wouldn't rank high on it. But in a darkened room at the Quincie Douglas Branch Library, about 20 preteens and teens gather around two screens. It's a mostly soundproof room, to make sure their efforts to rack up points on Nintendo's Wii and PlayStation 2 don't bother the consumers of decidedly more static media. It's a sight that could become more frequent at a library near you.

This article offers new research results regarding the academic benefits of students use of social networking sites.

Nortel LearniT is an initiative of Nortel Community Relations to prepare teachers, students, and learners of all ages to develop 21st century skills that will provide a basis for their ongoing engagement in learning and personal achievement. Their lesson plans and guides include several lessons on cybersafety, covering topics like spam, hoaxes, cyberbullying, online predation and analyzing web sites to determine validity. The site is translated into multiple languages, including Spanish.

From Andy Carvin's PBS Blog. Many advocates of filtering policies insist than an educator may ask to have a site unblocked when it needs to be used in the classroom. But very few teachers have the ability to either get this done promptly by the filter's administrators, or the authority to do it themselves.

Connecting education, learning & living in the 21st Century: How, why, and what we need to do differently.

The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros' Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century.

As school leaders prepare to spend billions of dollars in federal stimulus money, the American Library Association (ALA) is lobbying to have some of those dollars used to keep school libraries up to date during hard economic times.

World Book Student's "How to Do Research" feature provides tutorials and exercises for students and educators on 21st century information literacy skills.

Standards-based lessons are aligned with national and state technology and information literacy standards. CyberSmart! prepares students to use the Internet for communication, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving-the new basic skills for 21st century learning

Environments such as SECOND LIFE can both stimulate and educate, experts agree. Online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity.