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Complying with, and teaching young people about, copyright in an educational setting often feels burdensome. That's because copyright laws were not designed to facilitate the sort of sharing and collaborating that has become widespread in the digital age.

"As long as media literacy education was about television, it was perceived to be fluff," she said. "But when the Internet came along, kids didn't know how to cite sources online, and they were creating publicly visible content in their own homes without their parents' knowledge...which sparked serious safety concerns."\n\nIf Thoman and her colleagues' work over the past half century can be credited with establishing media literacy as an academic subject, it's possible that the digital media revolution will catalyze this subject's introduction into the mainstream curriculum.\n\nThat reality seemed closer when, in May, my former boss Sen. John Kerry, along with Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, introduced the "21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act" into the Senate. The bill recognizes that, in order to prepare students for the modern workforce, education must go beyond core curricula and teach "critical thinking and problem solving skills, communication skills, creativity and innovation skills, collaboration skills, contextual learning skills, and information and media literacy skills."

in high school courses, 'media' is often taught by visual artists or English teachers. Very rarely by those who have worked in media, the web or technical capacities (as production based degrees are not counted towards core curriculum areas: history, english, math, computer science, french, phys ed, etc).

From keeping track of grades to sharing lesson plans, from helping students collaborate to communicating with parents, teachers now have a host of web-based tools at their disposal to help them stay organized and make their jobs easier.