digitalwriting

Sustainability-Themed Video Games Come to the Classroom | Edutopia

Sustainability-Themed Video Games Come to the Classroom | Edutopia.

Sustainability-Themed Video Games Come to the Classroom Educators hope gaming will animate pressing environmental issues. by Brian Libby

 From global warming to pollution to vanishing wildlife, children face a world profoundly threatened by environmental catastrophe. Luckily, they have video games to help them through -- sustainability games, to be precise. These are a new generation of educational tools designed to help students learn about environmental issues. Ironically, this learning comes courtesy of technologies that many once believed would sap our attention spans and remove us from the very outside world that now needs rescue. PowerUp, part of IBM's TryScience initiative, is perhaps the most sophisticated of these new video games. The game charges players with saving the imaginary planet Helios from ecological destruction by carrying out missions to supply solar, wind, and water power before severe storms wreak havoc. Students learn engineering and science principles by building solar towers or searching junkyards for parts to repair wind turbines.

Top News - Post video to eSN.TV--earn national recognition

Top News - Post video to eSN.TV--earn national recognition.

Post video to eSN.TV--earn national recognition Meris Stansbury,

Thanks to our Student Video Network (SVN) initiative at eSN.TV, your students can earn valuable video-production experience--and a shot at national recognition for their efforts. eSchool News founded the SVN to give students across North America the chance to experience what it's like to be real news anchors and reporters. Now, beginning this month, students can upload their own videos to eSN.TV for consideration.

We've upgraded our web site to allow users to post their own videos to www.eSchoolNews.TV. And we're encouraging students to create and submit video samples that illustrate how they handle breaking news coverage. Simply click on the "Upload Video" tab to get started. If your school's sample video is chosen, you might be invited to become an SVN affiliate. After that, not only will your students get to experience real deadlines and the fast pace of daily news programming, but their work also will be available for viewing by the hundreds of thousands of members of the eSchool News Network. They'll develop samples for their video portfolios--and, of course, they'll have loads of fun learning practical, real-world skills. If you submit a sample video for the SVN, we ask that you choose two or three stories from the "Top News" section of our home page and create a student newscast. This newscast should present a summary of the stories you've chosen, enough for a two- to three-minute video clip. If possible, the stories you choose should have a common theme or topic that ties them together. To view actual examples of SVN productions, go to www.eSchoolNews.TV, and in the category box, select "Student Video Network."

Micropayments: A rainbow for journalism...or a Hail Mary? | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Micropayments: A rainbow for journalism...or a Hail Mary? | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

Micropayments: A rainbow for journalism...or a Hail Mary? 4:44 PM, January 13, 2009

Here’s a funny question: Did you pay to read this? It’s funny because it has two obvious and opposite answers. If you’re at your kitchen table holding The Times’ Calendar section, then of course you paid. Everyone knows a copy of the daily costs 75 cents. On the other hand, if you’re reading this on your home computer or office workstation, then of course you didn’t pay. Everyone knows reading news online is free. It’s so rigidly free, in fact, that most newspapers (including this one) that have tried to charge for their content have found such efforts to be a bit like pulling the sword from the stone. One pretender after another has slunk away, amid derisive shouts from the crowd. But if there’s any lesson from the Silicon Valley mentality, it’s that failure breeds success. And now is certainly the time for some mad science. Newspapers’ print operations are becoming gaunt, shedding ever more staff in exchange for ever fewer readers — all while their online counterparts are breaking traffic and readership records with regularity. Last month, the Pew Research Center signaled the tectonic shift we’d been expecting had finally arrived. For the first time, more Americans were getting their news from the Web than from newspapers. Another Pew finding rang a louder knell yet ... ...among people under 30, the Internet is now tied with TV as the leading source for national and international news. Printed newspapers ran a distant third, even though they produce a substantial amount of the Web’s news content. The upward trend line of Web news and the downward slope of print suggest — strongly — that the right survival strategy for news organizations is to worry less about saving the papers and start getting creative about converting online success into real revenue. Although specialized publications like the Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports have successfully charged subscription fees, most analysts doubt that general circulation newspapers could get away with it — too much of what they write is available elsewhere. So instead of paying in advance for all of a paper’s online content, what if you paid a teeny tiny fee every time you read an online article or a blog post? Say you want to read last night’s Lakers story — when you load the Web page, The Times might bill you half a penny. Then, if you wanted to jump to the latest Washington politics story, you’d pay half a penny more. These kinds of small-scale revenues are called “micropayments.” Something sort of like it is the model behind iTunes, which just unveiled a sliding pay scale charging between 69 cents and $1.29 per song.

Percentage of kids solicited online drops, Harvard report says - Los Angeles Times

Percentage of kids solicited online drops, Harvard report says - Los Angeles Times.