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"21st Century Learning" is currently the hottest catchphrase in education, but what it means has yet to be fully determined. Technology is a part of students' everyday lives, and substantial advances in technology have profoundly affected the way they learn. As a result, educators are working hard to meet the ever-evolving needs of 21st century learners. Translating the ongoing technological revolution into a learning experience is a fundamental part of that challenge.

In collaboration with several content area organizations, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills developed a series of ICT Literacy Maps illustrating the intersection between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy and core academic subjects including English, mathematics, science and social studies (civics/government, geography, economics, history). The maps enable educators to gain concrete examples of how ICT Literacy can be integrated into core subjects, while making the teaching and learning of core subjects more relevant to the demands of the 21st century.

Alex Hayes, Janet Hawtin and other members of the TALO list are mobilizing a "Learning in the 21st Century" f2f round table and discussion on Safety and Privacy online. It will hopefully involve not only educators but also parents, students, IT staff, management and other members of the community. It is extremely important that people listen and become aware of the different perspectives.

It's no surprise that Elliot Soloway would be behind this idea, given his passionate interest in Palm handhelds as educational devices for the past decade.

Teens who build and frequent social networking sites are learning 21st century skills (tech skills, creativity, diverse viewpoints and communication skills), according to a University of Minnesota study. This page takes you directly to video interviews with the researchers from U of M.

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 the first decade of the 21st century was about data driven instruction and assessment, can we make the next decade about realizing potential of the student behind the data and publishing to authentic audience as part of student's school lives? Some great examples are given here of "Hand it In Teaching" vs. "Publish It Teaching"

Brilliant and meaty post from Alex Couros about what "digital citizenship" encompasses and really means for pedagogy.

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.

The Digital Hero Book Project aims to integrate hero booking into the learning activities of IT-enabled schools in Cape Town, South Africa, and other sites around the world, and put paper-based hero books into the digital arena. The project, currently in its pilot phase, will enable youth in these schools to create digital hero books, and publish them on this site

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.

The primary goal of the Digital Youth Network Program is to develop a model program that enables urban youth to become discerning new media consumers and fluent media producers.To be full citizens today, youth must be engaged, articulate, critical and collaborative. Youth must become creators - designers, builders & innovators - who can envision new possibilities. Youth must also be able to organize, navigate and judge the large amounts of information and media to which they now have access. Full citizens today must be reflective thinkers who are committed to personal and community improvement.

On April 23, 2008, public forum, "From MySpace to Hip Hop: New Media In the Everyday Lives of Youth," reported on the interim findings of the ethnographic project funded by the MacArthur Foundation, "Kids' Informal Learning through Digital Media," conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Southern California. This event addressed how digital technologies and new media are changing the way that young people learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life. The forum was presented by Common Sense Media, the MacArthur Foundation and the Stanford University School of Education.

A range of research reports suggest that digital literacy should be a key part of curricular developments in both primary and secondary schools. Digital literacy is about far more than functional ICT skills: it requires support for children to access, create and communicate using ICT, as well as to be evaluative and critical about the influences and impacts of new media.

Revised to include use of Web 2.0 collaborative tools and 21st century skills in the communication spectrum.

UC Berkeley study administered by the Institute for the Study of Social Change and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The complete findings on three years of ethnographic work [22 different case studies of youth engagement with new media] will be published in Summer 2008. The project has three general objectives. The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media, rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids innovative cultures for schools and higher education, and engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software. The research focuses on learning and cultural production outside of schools: in homes, neighborhoods, after school, and in recreational settings.

Thinkquest Award Winner 2008. Digital Cooperative is a global exploration of censorship in the digital age. This winning team studied the topic from academic perspectives, analyzed five countries in in-depth case studies, conducted exclusive interviews with industry experts, and created interactive quizzes. Their goal is to raise awareness and increase understanding of this often invisible issue.

Howard Gardner, the founder of multiple-intelligences theory discusses the challenges ethics and education face as digital media become more prevalent. Through his GOODPLAY PROJECT, he examines the ethical sense of young people. He ooks at five elements related to what it means to be ethical with new media: sense of identity, sense of privacy, sense of ownership/authorship, trustworthiness and credibility, and what it means to participate in a community.

Internet2 is a non-profit membership organization of 208 universities working in conjunction with government and industry to operate a private national Internet Protocol (IP) network reserved for the exclusive use of the US research and education (R&E) community.As the national R&E backbone, the Internet2 Network provides connectivity between institutions and connectivity to international research and education networks thereby providing access to the global research and education community. While there are many benefits of using Internet2 in the classroom here are the top three for K12:
1. Immediate access to experiences and expertise
2. Access to rich multi-media digital collections and resources
3. A truly global education network at your fingertips.

In California, we have a localized statewide version of this effort called K12 High Speed Network/K12HSN

Schools are starting to embrace iPods, portable digital media players, as teaching tools. While some teachers have dabbled in podcasting -- like posting snippets of news broadcasts on school websites for students to download -- K-12 on iTunes U is billed as a way to bring content to a place where it can be searched and shared.