Youth Media archive
A Blueprint for 21st Century Engagement
This week, PBS Teachers rolled out its curricular guide for the 2008 election. It offers teachers a range of online tools created by the public broadcasting community to encourage civic engagement, embracing social media with each lesson plan....
Students Produce Podcasts Addressing Global Challenges
A teacher at a private school in the San Francisco Bay area is inspiring students to become more civically engaged by having them produce podcasts about global policy challenges. The podcasts tackle international issues from a local perspective, and are...
Collaborative Writing, 140 Characters at a Time
A teacher in suburban Washington DC has launched a collaborative writing initiative using the messaging tool Twitter. Prepare to be concise!...
Teaching Jeff Corwin a Lesson Through Student Video Blogging
What do you do when you notice a TV personality could use a bit of help speaking Spanish? For a group of South Carolina sixth graders, the answer is to create a video blog and offer up some language lessons...
One Story, 50 Tools, Infinite Possibilities
Educator Alan Levine has proven the adage that there’s more than one side to every story by demonstrating 50 multimedia techniques to present the same tale. The result is an extraordinary collection of online creativity tools, with demonstrations of how...
Social Media vs. Social Diseases
A group of nonprofit reproductive health organizations has launched a video blogging contest that challenges young people to talk about their experiences with sex education in the classroom, or their lack of it. The results are a collection of frank...
Overcoming Media Illiteracy among Media Literacy Educators
Now I know I have a habit of examining a lot of research reports in this blog. Yeah, I realize I overdo it sometimes. Today, though, please bear with me, as there’s a new report that examines what I believe...
FactCheckEd.org: Teaching the Art of Persuasion
The 2008 election cycle provides us with an excellent opportunity for students to improve their media literacy by examining political messaging and the persuasive arts. So if you’re shopping around for lesson plans, look no further than FactCheckEd.org....
YouTube 101 - Yes, It’s a Real Class
It’s one thing to use YouTube videos as reference tools in class, but what about teaching an entire course on YouTube? One educator is taking a crack at it this semester, and everyone seems to have an opinion about it...
It’s Never Too Early to Plan for OneWebDay
September 22nd marks the second annual celebration of OneWebDay, when volunteers around the world will do their part to make the Web a better place. What will you and your students do to mark OneWebDay?...
It’s Never Too Early for Student-Generated Political Videos
With the election kicking into high gear, there’s no doubt we’ll see some interesting uses of student-generated content in the classroom over the coming school year. But that doesn’t mean that some students aren’t getting a head start....
Getting Out the Message on Online Safety
I’ve often heard from educators and parents that there’s a lack of powerful messaging out there to help students understand the impact of cyberbullying and online safety in general. While it may sometimes seem like that’s the case, there are...
Cardboard Camcorders Take Playground by Storm!
There’s a short video floating around the Net right now telling the story about a school where all the students started to make toy cameras out of cardboard and pretended to film each other, YouTube-style. It paints a fascinating, and...
Achieving a Consensus on Fair Use and Media Literacy
As more teachers began teaching students how to produce video and other multimedia content, the specter of copyright looms large. That’s why the Center for Social Media is trying to spread the gospel on fair use - and help develop...
The Student Becomes the Spy Master
A video of a recent tasering incident by a police officer against a college student gets posted on YouTube and creates a public outcry. With more and more students having access to camera phones, how do you balance maintaining discipline...
Connect the Dots: Students, Blogs and the Nobel Peace Prize
The Seattle Times ran a nice introduction to how educators are embracing blogging in the classroom. Elsewhere in the world, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps these two stories have nothing to do with...
Should Educators Encourage Online Student Political Activism?
Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak at a forum hosted by George Washington University on the impact of online social networks in politics. It was the last place I expected to be talking about teachers and media literacy,...
What Can Students Possibly Learn From Danger Mouse?
Today I’d like to talk about Jay-Z, Danger Mouse, Beck and Muppet Hunter D. No, you haven’t gone to the wrong blog. Even if you don’t know any of these names, I guarantee your students will. What they represent is...
Encouraging Student Creativity with Creative Commons
I’m often amazed by the lack of discussion in education technology circles about copyright. Sure, people talk about it occasionally, but given the increasing number of young people (read: millions of them) uploading their own content to the Internet, it...
City Voices, City Visions
Last week I had the opportunity to attend an education technology institute at WNED public television in Buffalo, New York. The purpose of my trip was to deliver a conference keynote, but I feel I got the better end out...
