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This documents students using Google Lively to teach other students about digital citizenship

For our project, we chose to create a virtual room, called Digiteen World, on Google Lively. Our main objective of this project is to get people more aware about Digital Citizenship. We will be allowing kids from our school to get on Lively, and react in the virtual world. We have created nine superheroes. Each superhero has a lesson to teach abut the nine aspects of Digital Citizenship. By teaching the lessons in a virtual room, the kids get to have a great time and still learn very important lessons. The goal of this project is to educate people on how to act online. In allowing kids to be a part of this project, we hope that they will learn how to be good digital citizens.

If a young person wants to experiment with running a business, they're not just engaging in thought experiments and case studies; they're actually working with real people and real money," says Joey Seiler, editor of VirtualWorldNews.com, an industry news source that's part of Virtual Worlds Management, a company that provides trade events, media, research and online services.

Dizzywood, a virtual world and online game for children ages 8-12, today announced that it has been selected by the YMCA of San Francisco to enhance the youth program's technology curriculum. The YMCA is using Dizzywood's virtual environment to reinforce its program emphasis on activities that promote values such as caring, honesty, respect and responsibility. Children also learn about important issues relating to virtual worlds, such as digital citizenship and online safety, as well as complete storytelling and team-building exercises that emphasize creativity, writing and reading skills, and working together to achieve goals. The YMCA program is similar to the elementary school program that Dizzywood recently completed with the Reed Union School District (Marin County, CA). The highly interactive workshop, which ran from April through June, used virtual activities to reinforce the school's character pillars, which include caring, citizenship, fairness, respect, responsibility and trustworthiness, among other core values.

SecretBuilders is a virtual world for children 5 to 14 years old powered by a web 2.0 community of children, parents, educators, writers, artists and game developers. On SecretBuilders, kids explore virtual lands, undertake quests, play games, maintain a home, nurture a pet, and interact with their friends.

In 2006, following extensive research into the educational potential of virtual worlds, Global Kids became the first nonprofit to develop a dedicated space for conducting programming in the virtual world of Teen Second Life (TSL). Within TSL, the organization has established Global Kids Island, which hosts interactive, experiential programs for teens from around the world. Specifically, Global Kids is conducting intensive leadership programming for youth, bringing youth from its New York-based programs into the space, and streaming the audio and video of major events into the world.

With fewer lockers around to be stuffed into, many adults are under the impression that their days of being bullied are well behind them. Unfortunately for the meek, bullying is still going strong in the virtual world of 'Second Life.'

With nearly 13 million online users, the rapidly expanding virtual world Second Life is a risk for children, who could be sexually exploited, U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) said Monday."This Second Life is a new scare, unchartered territory," Wilks said at a news conference Monday with Kirk at the Mt. Prospect Police Department. "It hits home." Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.

According to a new report from OTX and The Intelligence Group, teens actually prefer real world interaction to the virtual worlds offered online.

Global Kids became the first nonprofit to develop a dedicated space for conducting programming in the virtual world of Teen Second Life (TSL). Within Teen Second Life, the organization has established Global Kids Island, which hosts interactive, experiential programs for teens from around the world.

Anne Collier [NetFamilyNews] reports on the Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users - as relayed by Sharon Duke Estroff, who spent a couple of weeks on Club Penguin observing what her 8-year-old son might experience there.

Students in the digi-teen project had to teach others in their school about digital citizenship. They chose the Woogi World virtual environment and to work with fourth grade students, showing them the importance of safety, balance and respect on the Internet.

"Today's child has a digital footprint the size of bigfoot (especially compared to us) and their online life is just as important to them as their "real" life. How do we keep our children safe in this brave new world? By educating them how to make the right decisions online and by modeling appropriate behavior on the internet. Yes that means we need to exist in the virtual world so we can see, hear, and participate in the main street of the 21st century."

It is becoming generally accepted that virtual property has real value and virtual crimes have spawned a whole new class of crime in real life.

Quest Atlantis is an international learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-15, in educational tasks from the Center for Research on Learning & Technology at Indiana University. QA combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities (known as Quests), talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae.

This week, the Hoover Board of Education is holding a technology training seminar to help teachers get up to speed for the new school year. On the agenda - a powerful and somewhat controversial website called "Second Life".

Parents today have responsibilities in both the real world and the virtual world, Kane County Regional Office of Education Director Phil Morris told the Elgin Academy community Tuesday.

Schools can teach basic principles of good citizenship to help shape students' behavior in the virtual world.

Anne Collier's collective thoughts on attending her first NECC and her immersive experience in Second Life for education.

Five part lesson from Doug Johnson with classroom scenarios to explore.

Subscription-based virtual world with some free activities and content for kids. Click on the video to learn how sixty GR 4-5 students in Marin County, CA used Dizzywood to learn about core social values and digital citizenship in this environment. More info about the school project is provided in this podcast, starting at 4:30 minutes into the broadcast.