myshadow.org provides a good introduction to digital footprints/shadows, offering some tools that can be used to control one's footprint and a substantial knowledge-base of how-to's and information on subscriber agreements.

Hall offers a detailed theoretical and semiotic analysis of the processes by which messages are encoded into media by the creators and decoded by the consumers. He provides a vocabulary for naming the different phases of message production and reception, and a theoretical framework for understanding how they operate. While this text might be considered too dense for many high school students, the ideas themselves are not, and a shared familiarity with these ideas creates a firm foundation on which to build future discussions of how media operates and how to discern even the most deeply coded messages and biases.

(Please note the link to a Free Demo download on the right hand side of the linked page) Orwell is an episodic indie game that puts players in the role of an analyst working for a fictional surveillance state in the wake of a bomb explosion in a public square. Players are tasked with scouring news sites, social networking sites, message boards, blogs, text chats, and the like for clues as to the identity of the bomber and possible motivations for the bombing. Potentially relevant information is highlighted, but it is up to the player to decide whether each piece of information is worthy of inclusion in a report to be passed up the chain of command. The items selected create the narrative that law enforcement will act upon, but the player has no say as to what actions are taken beyond selecting what to include in the accumulated data. The story unfolds through the narrative that player-selected data constructs and the actions that result. Mistakes can result in the detention or prosecution of innocents. This forces the player to exercise research and critical thinking skills, particularly evaluating data as relevant or irrelevant, reading between the lines, and maintaining awareness of how each piece of information contributes to an overall narrative. Embedded in all of this is a clever critique of the surveillance apparatus and how it relates to our conceptions of freedom, safety, and privacy-a critique, I would argue, worthy of the game's name. I selected Orwell for this critical thinking post because it is essentially a gamified exercise in research, or, put another way, research with training-wheels. All of the pieces of data that the user can include are presented in context, and players must evaluate how a clue relates to both its context and to the investigation as a whole in order to make useful selections. That kind of consideration is essentially what we are doing as we research material for inclusion in an academic paper, and so I believe the game doe

Paste is a new piece of presentation software designed to make the creation of simple, elegant presentations as easy as possible. It supports drag-and-drop from almost any source, and its automatic formatting creates good looking slides with minimal to no tweaking necessary. If you like flashy transitions and tons of formatting options, this probably isn't the software for you. Paste's strengths lie in its minimalism and the speed/ease with which you can create slides. Paste also allows for online group collaboration, commenting, and editing. For the artists out there who enjoy creating their own clipart, Paste also integrates seamlessly with Paper, a simple but powerful drawing app by the same developers.

coggle.it is an online, collaborative mind-mapping application, ideal for students who think "visually", as in the langue of flowcharts and diagrams. coggle.it allows users to graphically map out concepts and their connections, and to easily remap and rearrange those ideas as the project evolves. Fellow collaborators can comment or make changes.