The efforts are few and far between right now, but as the world of blogs, wikis and podcasts grows, an increasing number of Canadian educators are finding new ways to enrich the learning experience for their students.

From TICAL - Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership.
These are short presentations to help busy administrators and teachers gain a better understanding of the variety of tools on the World Wide Web.

Fictional blog of Harriet Tubman! This blog is the product of a collaboration with a fifth grade class at Dowell Elementary School.

Excellent bi-monthly publication with articles from experts in the field. Two of the recent issues have been devoted to cyberbullying topics. Each issue covers the topics from multiple views.

Teacher's idea on how to make bullying awareness important and exciting for third-and fourth-grade students by having them create comic strips using Comic Life, one of the new programs available for Macs. With the aid of ready-made templates, word bubbles, pictures, etc., users easily create a comic strip.

Educational partnership with I-Safe. OnGuardOnline.gov provides practical tips from the federal government and the technology industry to help consumers be on guard against Internet fraud, secure your computer, and protect your personal information. This site also includes three PSA's that can be shown in the classroom.

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? It turns out that the short messages you find on Twitter have proven wildly useful for some writers penning larger pieces.

Could there be some classroom applications here?

[April 08, Journal of Higher Education]
An assistant professor in Northwestern University's sociology department, has discovered that students aren't nearly as Web-savvy as they, or their elders, assume. Ms. Hargittai studies the technological fluency of college freshmen. She found that they lack a basic understanding of such terms as BCC (blind copy on e-mail), podcasting, and phishing. This spring she will start a national poster-and-video contest to promote Web-related skills.

April 2008 : THE Journal. Students see a distinction between the writing they do for school and the writing they do in their personal lives. While the vast majority of 12- to 17-year-olds (85 percent) engage in some form of electronic writing--IM, e-mail, blog posts, text messages, etc.--most (60 percent) don't consider this actual writing.

Anybody can post information on the Internet, making it possible to find "proof" of any ideas or beliefs you can imagine. Yet to many students, "If it's on the Internet, it must be true." Alan November has put together some very cool examples of web sites to use when teaching students to authenticate information that they find online.

What to do with all those cell phones, PDAs, and iPods tucked away in students' backpacks? Forward-thinking administrators have found a 'smart' solution: Load them with educational content and welcome them into instruction.

More netiquette tips for kids from the Boston Public Library.

In his article, Thompson offers an exploration of the meaning and application of Web 2.0; evaluates how Net Generation students, who will enter the classroom with Web 2.0 expectations and experiences, will reshape institutions of higher education and their practices; and examines what some of these IHEs are specifically doing to meet the needs of the next generation of students. Thompson suggest that in order to move our educational practices forward, it is incumbent upon us to recognize and react to our changing student population.

[CoSN Conference, Mar 2008] Author Daniel Pink discusses what it will take for students to succeed in an outsourced and automated world--and how schools should change their approach to education accordingly.

Slick video made by the Pearson Foundation for COSN that explains the shifts that need to happen if we are going to enable students to become fully digital literate.
\nThe Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) provides a voice for K-12 education leaders who use technology strategically to improve teaching and learning. CoSN provides products and services to support leadership development, advocacy, coalition building, and awareness of emerging technologies.

With Photoshop's ease in alteration of photos, students need to be taught to authenticate visual and textual information as part of any good digital literacy program. A recent photograph of Iranian missles was displayed by many prominent news organizations (including the BBC, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times) before it was noted that portions of the dust clouds beneath the missiles were identical. Online news sites have been abuzz all morning, engaged in a debate over what, exactly, this means. As the New York Times notes, this is not the first time Iran's state media has altered photographs for political ends.

Analyzing and assessing sources is an essential part of all inquiry-based learning projects, but our multimedia world means that we have to teach kids not just how to assess data and arguments, but also how to discern emotional appeals made through pictures, music and video.

We are facing a new frontier in the ever growing challenge to close the skills gap impacting many of us in business. The deficiency in digital literacy has created a need for companies to evolve in the understanding that literacy in technology has become equally as important as literacy in the English language; our workforce must be technologically fluent to compete in a global economy.

Teaching literacy-reading and writing-is a core mission for schools, but today's young people increasingly "read" 3-D computer simulations and "write" via social networks such as Facebook. A growing chorus of experts say schools should add these forms of communication to their literacy mission as "technology literacy."