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In the chapter "Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences" from Marina Umaschi Bers book, Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, the author claims that online games, such as Zora, help our youth engage in community and civics. Zora allows it's players to create their own individual avatar, with physical, mental, and emotional traits that the players choose. Bers argues that Zora is a great way for children to think about their identity and civic life by making choices that will show them how to acquire certain sills and attitudes to become good citizens. Like many other researchers, Bers agrees that it is easiest to learn by doing, and games like Zora are helping to improve the youths social awareness. This chapter describes engagement in society not only by voting and being political, but by forming communities and volunteering.

In "Civic Identities, Online Technologies: From Designing Civics Curriculum to Supporting Civic Experiences" by Marina Umaschi Bers, Bers discusses a scenario that is being used all across the country. Zora is a three dimensional multiuser environment that students use to think about identity and civic life. Students make avatars and are in charge of everything going on in the city or summer camp. This came to life after identity construction environments (ICEs) were found that creative things to do on the computer make children learn better. The students work mostly with different civic identities like police, Jewish people, etc. along with real life, controversial community related issues which the students try to solve. Many of the tools used in Zora can then beused in real life and the moral values can be used both on the computer and in real life. Zora is different than traditional learning because "Children are put in the role of producers, instead of consumers, of information, knowledge, and habits of mind."

in this article, Anderson and Balsamo spreads the idea of our digitalworld and how we are surrounded with the use of this digital technologies since we live in a digital generation. The whole idea of technology can be used for educational goods or bad depending on how responsible the students use it and with the support of teacher helping the students to understand technology use for useful purposes.

The book "Must-See Websites for Busy Teachers", by Lynn Van Gorp, deals with integrating technology into the classrooms and how it affects student learning. The article points out how using technology in the classroom not only benefits the students but also benefits the teacher.

In this article, Annette Lamb focuses on the importance of the students' use of social technologies. Although students have the right to free speech and expression, they are encouraged to be responsible for their own actions online. Decision-making practices will help students improve on their moral reasoning to make better use of social technologies.

This is a blog about a book by Sherry Turkle called "Alone Together." Her book is about why the use of technology has made us alone. She focuses on technology has change our way of interaction.

Heres a video and article where sherry turkle expresses her thoughts of how 'we are alone together' with the idea that we need to control technology and pay attention to people around us.

In the article Technology and Media Literacy: What Do Teachers Need to Know?, by Dana L. Grisham, the author poses many questions about how well teachers are able to understand, teach, and learn about media literacy. The author believes, "When considering the proliferation of technology and its instructional applications, teachers need to focus on both hardware and software, but move beyond the simple "how to" focus into the whys, when, and for whom issues of curriculum." She also discusses the need for students to learn the history behind multimedia literacy to learn the importance it poses in society today.

In the video, "Evolving Technology", created by cre8tivem, on January 07, 2009, he brings up many facts about technology that many have never even thought of. It questions your knowledge and makes you wonder about things that you didn't even know were issues or existed. It makes you realize just how fast we are evolving. (It's a good video to get you brainstorming and think about different issues you would like to do a research and has many interesting facts that are useful.)

In the article Technology In The Classroom, author Jamshed N. Lam stresses the importance of technology used with children. He states in the beginning of his article, "Currently, there are at least twenty-five million illiterate people in this country and this number is increasing rapidly." He begins to give readers more statistics of how populations will increase and how some cultures struggle and will continue to struggle in school with their literacy practice. Lam then talks about how children growing up in poor homes have a difficult time reading. Since they do not have the money to buy materials to start them early, then they start to fall behind before they even start. "In school, they fall behind at an early age and can never catch up and thus the cycle continues (Bennett, 2002)."

As I was looking for articles to do more research on my topic, I came upon an article that seemed to have a good amount of information that could be helpful to my research. A question that was asked in the article was whether or not all this technology that is being used in classrooms could be giving kids anxiety.

In this article I have read was Understanding Multimedia Learning: Integrating multimedia in the K-12 classroom. I came across this article when I was messing around on the Brain Pop site. As I was reading through this article they pointed out that the students in K-12 are different in the way that they are "Digital Natives." They use this term as to describe who has grown up with technology verses people that have not. This describes the people who have never known of a world without technology.

Kindergarten teacher Chris Gathers tells about his experiences integrating technology into the learning experience of his students. He first teaches the children how to use the mouse and eventually progresses to making simple art projects and writing on the computer. The kindergarten students gain independence and confidence in themselves and their use of technology

This article talks about how teachers are uncomfortable with the advancements in technology, and how long it could possibly take them to get caught up.

For those of you who are thinking about theories of "play" and how they relate to technology, this is really interesting: "A professor at USC shares video from a recent meeting that brought together artists, educators, researchers, and technology experts to discuss "tinkering" for learning in the digital age."

This article talks about how young adolescents are constantly trying to find their own identity. They are always trying new roles to find out who they are. In this day and age many people are doing this by the use of technology. It talks about how people shape their image through myspace and other social networks. One girl named Isabella makes her site very elaborate and full of colors while boys of her age usually base their site around sports heros and masculine things. It further goes on to describe how adolescents shape their identities through technology.

This little article talks about the new art of this time. The new art now and day are done with digital technology that create picture or anything desire.

This Article reveals the idea of how technology has changed and how we use these type of technologies to enhance our creativity and imagination.

In this article it talks about how a study in the UK was done regarding technology and children. They share their results and analyze them. They conclude that digital media and technology is now a daily part of their lives. They also conclude that schools should make an effort to try and connect the way children are taught outside of school with the way children are taught in school.

In The Future of Thinking, Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg question the typical learning practices that we've grown accustomed to today. Before delving into the chapter I planned on writing about, I read a bit of the books introduction and overview, titled The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. One particular line that stuck me was "How do laptops change the way we learn? And how should they change the way we teach?"(2). Their main focus here was to discuss how technology, and our sources of information has changed drastically, but that our education system hasn't.