Anne Bubnic's List: Digital Citizenship/Digital Literacy

Why is media literacy important? Here's a beginning list of reasons from thinkers and leaders in the field.

More netiquette tips for kids from the Boston Public Library.

The efforts are few and far between right now, but as the world of blogs, wikis and podcasts grows, an increasing number of Canadian educators are finding new ways to enrich the learning experience for their students.

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 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. <br>

An academic research team -- joining people from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland -- is hosting and working on the core of this wiki, which illustrates the beginning stages of a larger research project on Digital Natives. The site offers a wealth of information in 10 topic areas:<br>\nDigital Identity, digital safety, digital privacy, digital creativity, digital opportunities, digital information overload, digital information quality, digital piracy and digital education. <br><br>

Children may be net savvy but their critical reading and research skills are not finely honed. They don't understand that they shouldn't believe everything they read. To kids, WIKIPEDIA is still the gospel.

<b>Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection</b><br>In this lesson plan, students explore a class inquiry project, collecting Web-based resources that can be used for further study during the course of the class or for more in-depth projects. Students use Internet search engines and Web analysis checklists and questions to find and evaluate online resources then write annotations that explain how and why the items they have found will be valuable to the class.

With the increasing popularity of e-mail and online instant messaging among today's teens, a recognizable change has occurred in the language that students use in their writing. This lesson explores the language of electronic messages and how it affects other writing. Furthermore, it explores the freedom and creativity for using Internet abbreviations for specific purposes and examines the importance of a more formal style of writing based on audience.

<b>Propaganda Techniques in Literature and Online Political Ads</b><br> In this lesson, students draw conclusions from an analysis of propaganda techniques used in a piece of literature such as the novel Brave New World, the play The Crucible, or the movie Dr. Strangelove and political advertisements posted on the Internet. Students also make connections to their own world by looking for examples of propaganda in other media, such as print ads and commercials.

n this activity, teenagers explore online names by looking at sample e-mail addresses to determine what they can tell about the person who uses the account. After this exploration, teens choose a screen name or e-mail address for themselves as well as decide on personal details to include on a safe online profile.

With Photoshop's ease in alteration of photos, students need to be taught to authenticate visual and textual information as part of any good digital literacy program. A recent photograph of Iranian missles was displayed by many prominent news organizations (including the BBC, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times) before it was noted that portions of the dust clouds beneath the missiles were identical. Online news sites have been abuzz all morning, engaged in a debate over what, exactly, this means. As the New York Times notes, this is not the first time Iran’s state media has altered photographs for political ends.

Phenomenal global collaboration project involving students from 15 countries. Teaching assignment is replicated across continents. Last year's project, Rock n Sol, was featured in the California K-12 Technology Showcase. This year's project, "Are You Game" focuses on digital storytelling. Students collaborate to compose music, make movies, podcasts, and experiments and met in face to face video-conferences. Using Garage Band, kids annually create a collaborative song that has been touched in every continent in the world. Each week, each group contributes 30 seconds with a specific musical instrument. Even blind students are involved in the project.

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

Except for the occasional plagiarized passage or unattributed reference in student research papers, most veteran K-12 educators have had little experience dealing with copyright issues in their classrooms. With the advent of the Internet, however, their need to know about copyright law and to understand its implications for such activities as Internet research, downloading programs and documents, creating class Web sites, and installing software on school networks has increased dramatically.

From the Center for Intellectual Property, University of Maryland. The Center for Intellectual Property provides education, research, and resources for the higher education community on copyright, academic integrity, and the emerging digital environment. The Center accomplishes its mission through the delivery of workshops and conferences, online training, consultations on campus, and electronic and print publications, and it provides continuous updates on legislative developments at the local, state, national, and international level.

Based out of NYC, the Global Kids Digital Media Initiative is a series of interrelated programs designed to support teenagers to think critically about the role of digital media in their lives and document their experiences in various media. It is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Teacher's idea on how to make bullying awareness important and exciting for third-and fourth-grade students by having them create comic strips using Comic Life, one of the new programs available for Macs. With the aid of ready-made templates, word bubbles, pictures, etc., users easily create a comic strip.

Cyberethics curriculum from the eMINTS project. These sites highlight the debate about downloading music from the Internet for free. Watch videos of musicians expressing their thoughts on the issue. There is also information about copyright law and explanations about why these types of downloads are considered illegal and unethical. The sites are helpful for teachers who want students to debate the issue. There are links to eThemes Resources on Internet safety and computer basics.

Excellent bi-monthly publication with articles from experts in the field. Two of the recent issues have been devoted to cyberbullying topics. Each issue covers the topics from multiple views.