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.

The Entertainment Software Association has put together a comprehensive web site on intellectual property geared for K-5 and middle school students. Through hands-on learning activities, students explore the significance of intellectual property in their everyday lives. There are suggestions for integrating content with classroom curriculum, teacher's guides, reproducible worksheets and Powerpoint templates. All of the activities are designed to raise copyright awareness and build respect for intellectual property.

The Creative Rights Education initiativewas developed to create awareness of intellectual property rights, to foster a better understanding of the rights connected with creative content, and ultimately, to instill in students a personal respect for creative rights in a way that changes their behaviors and perceptions about digitally delivered content. This program, sponsored by Microsoft, offers a comprehensive set of cross-curricular classroom activities designed for grades 8-10 (but easily adaptable for use in grades 6-12) and organized into thematic units.

The Vaughan Memorial Library designed this colorful and nteractive flash tutorial on plagiarism to help university students learn how to cite resources, but it is also suitable for younger students.

TRAILS-9, which stands for Tools for Real-Time Assessment of Information Literary Skills, uses multiple questions to assess the information literacy skills of students based on sixth- and ninth-grade standards. The free site, which is a project of the Institute of Library and Information Literacy Education, was developed to give library media specialists a tool to identify strengths and weaknesses of their students' information-seeking abilities.

Children are among the most frequent users of the Internet, yet searching and browsing the web can present many challenges. Studies over the past two decades on how children search were conducted with finite and pre-determined content found in CD-ROM applications, online digital libraries, and web directories. However, with the current popularity of the open Internet and keyword-based interfaces for searching it, more critical analysis of the challenges children face today is needed. This paper presents the findings of an initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home.

This wikipedia tutorial was produced by a group of librarians and present it from an academic standpoint. Good stuff!

High School's survey of student's technology habits, including cell phone usage

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

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.

You've gotta love this: A Twitter digital story created by 140 Elementary and Middle School Students Across the Globe!

Panwapa, which means "here on this earth" in the Tshiluba language, aims to foster the foundation for global citizenship and community activism in young children, ages 4 to 7. Featuring an entirely new group of Muppet characters, Panwapa consists of an interactive website, a DVD, and print materials that are available to children around the world in five languages -Arabic, English, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish. Sponsored by Sesame Street & Merrill Lynch.

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

The K12HSN Interactive Desktop Solution (KIDS) program provides free Polycom's PVX desktop videoconferencing software in order to bring videoconferencing into the classroom. The program is available for all K-12 educators working for a California school.

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.

Schools collaborating to engage student learners. A cutting edge innovative project that researches what can be done with eduction in virtual worlds. This teen grid collaboration project offers projects in different regions grouped by time zone.

"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.

How tech-obsessed iKids would improve our schools. One of the strangest things in this age of young people's empowerment is how little input our students have into their own education and its future. Kids who out of school control large sums of money and have huge choices on how they spend it have almost no choices at all about how they are educated -- they are, for the most part, just herded into classrooms and told what to do and when to do it.

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.

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.