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Pocket Guide to Social Media & Kids: “To adults, cell phones are a communications device. To children, they are a lifeline.” That statement, from a Nielsen article on teens’ use of social media and technology, should come as no surprise to anyone within sight of a teenager. The article, however, is filled with numbers on usage that may impress you. Consider these stats:

“By age 10, roughly half of children own a mobile phone. By age 11, six in ten own a mobile phone. By age 12, fully three-fourths of all children have their own mobile phone. [...] Two-thirds of tween mobile phone owners took pictures with their camera phones in the last year. Half spent time playing the pre-installed games. Four in ten activated the speakerphone feature. Twenty-eight percent filmed a video clip, and 24% listened to the MP3 capability.”

Read on for more information about kids’ use of technology and parental controls.

Think Globally, Learn Locally: Students around the world are using virtual education programs alongside books that promote social justice, reports School Library Journal.

In one example, students are logging in to Google Earth to follow the trek of Greg Mortenson, author of the adult bestseller, “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time” (Viking 2006), which has been adapted for younger audiences.

“These Google Lit Trips, as they’re called, allow students to map Mortenson’s travels, build wikis to share what they’ve learned about the countries the author has visited, and discuss his work as a virtual book group using Skype,” writes SLJ’s Lauren Barack.

Google Promotes Online Safety: To help parents and educators become more involved in kids’ online activities, Google and the Internet Keep Safe Coalition have teamed up for a safety tour, writes Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou.

Kicking off the tour, Google sponsored a panel discussion on Capitol Hill this week “to address some of the key issues around digital media literacy, including how to talk to kids about maintaining their online reputations.” Google has also posted instructional videos about how to stay safe on the web.

Plus: At a conference on online safety, National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow said digital media literacy should be a focus of broadband stimulus funding.

“Congress should direct that the agencies managing distribution of broadband stimulus funding allocate $500 million during the next two years for the development of digital media education tools,” McSlarrow said in a speech to the 2009 Annual Conference of the Family Online Safety Institute. “With a substantial portion of stimulus funding yet to be allocated, and with the broadband adoption rate continuing to increase from coast to coast, we must vigorously renew this call to acknowledge as a national priority digital literacy for children and families.”

Behind the Scenes at Breakthrough: Nafiza Akter, one of nine students who attended last month’s Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age forum at Google headquarters in California, writes about her experience. Besides the wonder of Google snacks and the campus T-Rex, Akter offers her impressions of Google co-founder Sergey Brin (he’s smart) and describes a skit in which “Misunderstood Media Teens” talk about adults not understanding how teens use technology in their lives.

It’s a very detailed post, and Akter, who takes part in the New York Cityafter-school program Global Kids, delivers a great behind-the-scenes account. Unfortunately, one of her souvenirs didn’t make it back home, but Akter keeps it all in perspective:

“The only sad part of the entire thing was that we got Lava Lamps that we couldn’t bring back to New York City due to airport restrictions on carry-on luggage. But hey, physical things can’t compensate for experience and knowledge [...] The experiences we came back with definitely outweigh the ‘stuff’ we came back with, since stuff will eventually get thrown out or lost, but the experiences contribute to who we are and have/will become.”

Previously at Spotlight: Read Akter’s blog post about her work in Global Kids’ virtual video project, and watch her in action in her Digital Generation Youth Video Portrait.

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The work builds on successes students have had playing the computer game “Urban Science,” whose development was supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

In the game, middle- and high-school students learn about mathematics, science and technology by working as urban planners. Watch principal investigator David Williamson Shaffer and students discuss their experiences playing Urban Science here.

For more details on the planned work, read University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Elizabeth Bagley’s blog post on virtual mentoring and assessment.

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Collier, founder and executive director of Net Family News, Inc., and co-chair (with Hemanshu Nigam of News Corp.) of the Obama administration’s Online Safety & Technology Working Group, says these new definitions of online safety can be “empowering as well as protective” for youth today. 

The article includes information on what we know about youth risk online and how youth use social media.

This week, Collier, along with technology journalist Larry Magid of SafeKids.com, will be releasing a paper, “Online Safety 3.0: Empowering and Protecting Youth,” at the Family Online Safety Institute’s annual conference. In it they argue that instead of filtering out access to social media, schools should be incorporating the technology to enhance learning.

Plus: European advocates also met last week at the Safer Internet Forum 2009 in Luxembourg. The theme was “Promoting Online Safety in Schools.” Collier summarizes the highlights of the meeting in this blog post.

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“The Power of Youth Voice: What Kids Learn When They Create With Digital Media” is scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 18, from 6 to 8 p.m. Experts including Renee Hobbs, Nichole Pinkard
and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl will discuss how digital media is used to create powerful learning experiences for young people both in and outside of the classroom. Program information is available here.

For those not able to attend in person, the event will be both streamed live on the web and broadcast into the virtual world of Second Life. Participants, including online attendees, should register here for the free event. 

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Ito, who has a new book out—“Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software” (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning)—notes in the paper that “gaming can become a powerful vehicle for self-directed, interest driven learning that results in collateral learning related to technology, engineering, and knowledge seeking and exchange.”

So what’s BettrAt? Glad you asked. Founded at the IIT Institute of Design as part of a grant from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning Initiative, BettrAt aims to “help you get better, faster by helping you create a playlist of how you want to improve, share your playlist with others, and follow others who share your interests.”

The more information you share with BettrAt, the more suggestions you’ll receive on how best to achieve your goals. If that sounds intriguing, sign up for a private beta invitation to learn more.

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MySpace Pics Lead to School Punishment, Lawsuit: Two high school sophomore girls are suing their school district after they were punished for posting sexually suggestive photos of themselves on MySpace. The ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit on their behalf, “claiming that Churubusco High School violated the girls’ free speech rights when it banned them from extracurricular activities for a joke that didn’t involve the school,” reports the AP.

“From the standpoint of young people, there’s no real distinction between online life and offline life,” said John Palfrey, a Harvard University law professor and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “It’s just life.”

Media Literacy Week Goes Digital: Canada’s 4th annual Media Literacy Week kicked off yesterday. This year’s theme, Media Literacy in the Digital Age, emphasizes “the multiple literacy skills needed by today’s youth for accessing, evaluating, repurposing, creating and distributing media content to successfully navigate their digital media world.” Questions that will be explored include how kids make sense of online information, and how they can be “good digital citizens.”

Plus: The Calgary Board of Education is encouraging students to use their iPods. And in Spring Hill, Fla., an elementary school has 80 iPods available for students and more on the way.

Bridging the Divide: That’s the theme of this year’s K-12 Online Conference. This free conference is open to educators around the world interested in integrating Web 2.0 tools and technologies into classroom practice. Educator Kim Cofino of International School Bangkok will deliver the pre-conference keynote, “Going Global: Culture Shock, Convergence and the Future of Education.” Between Dec. 7 and Dec. 17, more than 50 presentations will be posted to the conference blog and conference Ning for participants to view, download and discuss.

School Library Journal has more information about the conference, now in its fourth year.

“Breakthrough” Coverage: Writing at Fortune magazine, Elizabeth Corcoran comments on the undercurrent of last week’s ‘’Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age’’ conference: “The Internet has changed most of the business world and lives—but for the most part, it hasn’t touched public education.”

A former Forbes editor who is now leading a start-up company devoted to sharing best practices for technology in education, Corcoran goes on to note that “as policymakers, educators and philanthropists debated the different approaches, a handful of speakers shared inspiring stories about individual projects that are working”—including Nichole Pinkard, founder of the Digital Youth Network in Chicago, and Geoff Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City.

Internet Reaches Middle Age: The Internet turned 40 last week (happy birthday!). In this Duke University press release marking the occasion, Cathy Davidson, co-founder of HASTAC, an open network of individuals and institutions interested in technology and learning, reflects on how interactive technology has changed our behavior.

Photo by: Mehfuz Hossain

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“After years of watching technology transform the way children play, socialize and learn, a range of academics, foundations and now start-ups are working on games that will put the passion children have for the genre to good use,” writes the Times’ Stefanie Olsen.

“Gamestar Mechanic, for example, is part of the curriculum of Quest to Learn, a New York City public school focused on game-based learning that opened in New York City this fall. A nonprofit group called the Institute of Play set up the school, and its executive director, Katie Salen, helped design the game with financing from the MacArthur Foundation.”

“The difference in many of today’s educational games,” continues Olsen, “is that they are online and social, allowing children to interact and collaborate to achieve common goals. Unlike the stand-alone boxed games of the 1980s and 1990s, the newest educational games are set up like services where children can enter a virtual world, try on a character and solve problems that may relate to the real world.”

Gamestar Mechanic‘s designers previously have shared their ideas for the project with Spotlight. You can read their posts here.

The Times also mentions Quest Atlantis, a critical-thinking game with an environmental science component. Spotlight recently covered the learning gains attributed to Quest Atlantis and provided tips for teachers using the game. Here’s a short video of Quest Atlantis creator Sasha Barab discussing why he designs games.

Photo by: emjameson

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University of California at Irvine has launched a new research initiative, Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, and website—http://www.dmlcentral.net—to study the impact of digital media on young people’s learning. The new center, supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative,  was announced this week at a leadership forum hosted by Google in cooperation with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Common Sense Media, and the MacArthur Foundation.

The new site features a database of resources and projects, as well as a group blog with posts from researchers, educators and foundation leaders such as danah boyd, Cathy Davidson, Liz Losh, Howard Rheingold, Raquel Recuero and Connie Yowell. Bios are available here.

In their first posts, Hub Research Director Mimi Ito reflects on how far this emerging field has come, and danah boyd unpacks language teenagers use to explain the divisions between MySpace and Facebook.

Plus: The L.A. Times Technology blog covered the two-day Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age forum and speech by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who says kids need more computers in schools. 

“It’s important for students to be put in touch with real-world problems,” Brin said. “The curriculum should include computer science. Mathematics should include statistics. The curriculums should really adjust.”

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“It’s up to the kid to demonstrate why they believe creating a movie or a game is better than actually just doing the traditional essay,” said Pinkard. “So the teacher decides whether they accept the different forms of media or not but the kids are held accountable to learning how to use those skill sets either in the media arts classes or in the after school setting.

“A nice side effect is that these skills are now helping some students get into highly competitive selective enrollment schools. Their media portfolios are their calling cards.”

Read or listen to the full interview.

Pinkard has previously written for Spotlight on preparing urban youth to be multiliterate. We also recently covered the Digital Youth Network’s new collaboration with the Chicago Public Library. Pinkard speaks tomorrow at the forum on Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age.

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The invitation-only forum opens today (Tuesday, Oct. 27), but you can still sign up to join the webcast both Tuesday and Wednesday. The forum’s blog—http://breakthroughlearning.blogspot.com—is also worth a visit.

Forum founders, including The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Common Sense Media and the MacArthur Foundation, have charged attendees with no small task of creating a “breakthrough strategy” to help “refresh and reboot” American global leadership in education.

In addition to the keynotes and panel sessions (“Recapturing Our Innovation Edge,” “Literacy 2.0,” “Teachers for a Digital Age” …) invitees will get to romp in a Tech Playground demo space to test out the latest and greatest in innovations designed to enhance learning in the 21st century. Fortunately for them, youth from Global Kids, MOUSE and the Bay Area Video Coalition will be on hand to give guidance.