Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

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.

SF Bay Area educator, Jerome Burg's Global Education Ning - a start on making global education a central "Standard" in all curricular areas. See also his Google Lit Trips for some excellent curriculum ideas.

2008 National Educational Computing Conference also touts collaboration as a key to 21st-century learning

Podcast from Dan Schmidt on developing student inquiry and articulation and the power of finding their voice and letting it resonate beyond the classroom. He uses The Question Game and Bloom's as a framework from finding questions that move us toward higher levels of exploration.

The real issues of digital citizenship include understanding identity online and the opportunities afforded to students when teachers teach students to be global citizens. More at http://ideasandthoughts.org

Inconvenient Youth, a new non-profit, non-partisan network for and by teens has started recruiting and training young people to fight global warming, according to an Aug. 15 press release. Today the group launched with a three-day workshop on climate change at Stanford University attended by youth from around the world.

This morning, a student sent me a link to an article describing the Internet crackdown occurring as official China has 'prepared' for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. "Looks like schools aren't the only place Facebook is blocked," read the text across my inbox.

A Microsoft study done last February found that teenagers between seventh and 10th grades are less likely to illegally download content from the Internet when they know the laws for downloading and sharing content online.

Accessing music online and via mobile phones has never been easier, but it does raise legal, security and ethical issues. This new guide for parents and teachers provides essential advice about how young people can get the best out of downloading and sharing music online and via mobile technology in a safe and legal way, as well as providing tips for discussion.

In 2005, over 20 billion music files was downloaded illegally. The music industry is trying to come to rights with the problem by working on new and better solutions for legal downloading. The purpose of this site [from Norway] is to work as an eye-opener and to raise a debate around the attitudes towards illegal downloading of music. The campaign site is a movie, especially made for the net, mixed with interactive exercises. In addition to the movie, there are 11 clickable myths & facts.

First installment of a three-part video "The Ballad of Zack McCune." from Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Zack McCune's story - how he got sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and what happened as a result.

Second installment of a three-part video "The Ballad of Zack McCune" from Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
What do you do when you're sued by the recording industry? And how do kids and teens reconcile the law (and corporate interests) with a culture of illegal downloading? Last year, Brown University student Zack McCune was faced with both of these questions.

A computer admin at the school I attended bought a new proxy server to stop our file sharing. It was supposed to block "bad" Web sites in addition to filtering out some of the ports that P2P programs use. Trouble was, all we had to do was use a service such as Proxify to get around it.