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This blog is about teaching Digital Literacy at Journey School, a progressive public charter school in Aliso Viejo, CA, that utilizes Waldorf teaching methods. The administrator and teacher at Journey agreed to turn a weekly civics class into CyberCivics, so that students enter cyberspace as well-prepared digital citizens. This is their journey!

Why teach search? Google understands the importance of finding the right information at the right time. We create tools to let you find the information you need, of the kind you need, when you need it. In most cases, a simple search works really well. But for more specialized questions, a bit of instruction in how to search improves all searcher--from middle school students to trained professionals--and lets you discover and use more, higher quality sources than ever before.

Welcome to educators, parents and carers everywhere. This is the first and best UK directory to locate quality podcasts from over 300 carefully selected podcast channels for educational use - ideal for teaching and learning activities with children, young people and educational professionals.

Professional Development Overview Professional development is not just something that is important for teachers. It is important for all those involved in education from the support staff right up to the administrators. Professional development that includes participants from support, teaching and administration at the same time can help to bridge the divisions between groups. When differing groups work together, there is a greater chance for understanding each others work and also for forging bonds between the groups to work towards a common purpose. Developing a culture of continuous learning and modeling the use of personal learning networks will be key to engaging students and the community. Below we focus on professional development for teachers; on the page following, we talk about professional development for administrators.

Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss's book Reinventing Project Based Learning is a wealth of information about digital tools, the internet and Web 2.0 and how these tools can be used to meet the essential learning needs of 21st century students.  Here are some ideas taken from Chapter 3 of the book, all of which I've used with primary students and which I have tried to align with the new ICT in the PYP strands.

Web 2.0 is about users and content instead of surfing on the Internet. It's more like what can the Internet do for me as a creator, a collaborator, an active participant, rather than a passive viewer of what is out there on the web

In this video, we wanted to try to get into the heads of some of our favorite curators to understand what makes them tick.

Wiki-Centric Learning High school teachers use wikis to manage their classrooms and create online collaboration opportunities. With wikis, their students can complete assignments, learn from each other, and communicate with their peers from around the world.

Within networks are passionate affinity-based spaces that are learner-determined.  Important literacies are learned through play in such spaces. For example in massively multiplayer online games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, learners have the ongoing opportunity to participate in complex systems, which in itself is a critical skill.  I have previously written about my son, his play in Minecraft and the learning he is composing with his guild and have come to see how powerful and socially complex the learning among these players can be. (I discuss this here, here, here and here). 

In NYC a school has funding to do a short vid on each of the 342 parts of the IB Chem sylabus - they have done about 140 so far - but these are IB specific (and some have zombies too...)

 When you present your lesson to your students and need to share a link, you could give them a shortened URL or have the log in to a social bookmarking site like Diigo, but instead all you will have to do is create a bookmark on your browser.  The bookmark will sync with all of the other computers in the lab tied to that class account. You could even do this on the fly in the middle of class (the students might need to hide and then show the bookmarks bar to refresh it). Even better, you could have one student share a link quickly with the rest of the class.  If you wanted to take it to the next level, set up bookmark folders for different units/subjects, classes, or even students.  This is social bookmarking without the extra log in for our students.

Welcome to the Wikispace for 21st Century Learning Specialists

The following files contain some useful tips to help you become more comfortable using SMART interactive white boards and SMART Notebook software.