ISTE Season Pass for Webinars & More

The International Society for Technology in Education offers a Season Pass for all the Webinar sessions throughout the year, along with use of ISTE resources and archives. If you sign up, you’ll have access to all the Webinars that have been held since August 2009 in addition to the rest of the Webinars for this year.  Past Webinars have tackled topics such as: Screencasting, Project-Based Learning, 21^st Century Skills, Assistive Technologies, Open Source Software, and New Media Literacy. A list of future Webinars includes: Battery-Powered Computers, Emerging Technologies, Podcasting, MMORPG (What it is and how it can help students), Twitter, Math and Technology, and many more. The Pass is available to members for $200 and to non-members for $500. Admittance to individual Webinars is listed at $50 for members and $125 for non-members.

Common Sense Media Toolkits for Educators

Common Sense Media is a valuable resource site for parents and educators. It’s a place where you can get the help you need to evaluate media and its impact on children. If you appreciate the resources and guidelines offered by Common Sense Media, you may want to order hard copies of the Common Sense Tool Kit for Schools and the Early Childhood Toolkits.  The school toolkit ($50) features grade-by-grade guides, tip sheets, a presentation with talking points, parent communication materials, a DVD with 22 videos, a CD with electronic versions of all parent education materials and more. The Early Childhood Toolkit ($50) provides ideas and templates for helping educators work with parents of children five-years-old and younger. It includes suggestions for a parent workshop, PowerPoint slides, an educational DVD, and handouts. The school DVD can be purchased separately for $20.

Amherst Middle School Morning TV Shows

Amherst Middle School has a morning TV club, which produces daily shows for the school and SchoolTube. The innovative program has become a model for other schools and has received many awards for excellence. At Amherst, student Tech TV Interns and Senior Producers work in a studio that tech teacher Rob Zdrojewski built with funding from a Best Buy education grant. Students use Adobe's Visual Communicator software as they write scripts, select graphics and music, operate camcorders, format graphics, set up lighting, etc. Each show is recorded live. Amherst Middle now offers workshops ($175 fee) and training DVDs (about $40) for other school leaders. Workshops on creating school newscasts and video projects across the curriculum are available at the school during February 2009.

Music, Movies, Software—Digital Citizenship

It's a must that we integrate digital citizenship into school curricula today, but finding appropriate materials that fit into our classrooms is difficult. Microsoft has just launched its Digital Citizenship and Creative Content curriculum, which is free of charge. Targeted to students in Grades 8-10, the curriculum addresses real-world issues related to use of creative content in music, software, and movies. Included are lesson plans, reproducible materials, and classroom-based assessments. Students explore the meaning of intellectual property through the backdrop "Battle of the Bands". They dive into research as they learn about their own rights, rights of their peers, and rights of others who develop creative products. Using the site MYBYTES, students are able to publish original creative material and learn more about what professional writers and musicians have to say about this topic.

Don't Forget Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media is a site that can help educators keep up with what's happening with media for kids. It's also a great site to recommend to parents of your students.  There they can get the scoop on the latest movies, books, DVDs, television shows, video games, and Web sites so that they can decide what is appropriate for their children. Some of the advice articles on the site include helping kids understand political advertisements, learning about addictive behaviors, helping parents understand social networking sites, learning about food marketing for kids, and providing parents with what they need to know about cell phones, video games, and MP3 devices. Signing up for the Common Sense Newsletter is easy. Just enter your email address and zip code.

Who's Supposed to Teach Kids about Property Rights?

According to a Microsoft survey, kids give parents, television programs, the Web, and newspapers more credit for informing them about property rights than teachers. Even so, only 11% of the students surveyed said they had a "clear" understanding of property rights.  The result of this survey is a new curriculum that's currently being testing by Microsoft. It's designed to target Grades 8-10 but can be modified for use by students in Grades 6-12. If you are interested in working with the testing of this curriculum or just getting copies of the free materials, you'll want to browse the Teacher's Guide to Intellectual Property Rights Education. Those who wish to be part of the testing can sign up for one of three levels of participation.