New book goes behind the scenes of Harry Potter: Page to Screen

For the first time, the story behind the making of the eight Harry Potter films is told in one complete volume.  Publisher is Harper Design. SRP: $75.00

Understanding What Youth Gain through Media Literacy Education Programs

In this National Writing Project "Digital Is" blogpost, we learn that young people are recording, interviewing, writing, rehearsing, editing, and presenting throughout media literacy programs...but, the essay asks, what else are they learning?

Keeping Literate in the Internet Age

Keeping Literate in the Internet Age is the theme of a recent issue of ASCD's Express newsletter. This issue examines the challenges of developing traditional literacy in an age of evolving new literacies.

Digital literature comes to the classroom

A news story about a senior-level English class at the University of Saskatchewan is broadly named Digital Literature and New Media. It's the first of its kind. The class is part history, part cultural studies and part literature studies, dealing with the advent of computers and the impact of the Internet on literature

Digital library aims to expand kids' media literacy

Excerpt: "We are in one of these rare moments in time where what it means to be literate today, what it meant for us, is going to be different from what it means to be literate for our kids," says DePaul University's Nichole Pinkard, who first envisioned the space. Just as schools have always pushed teens to read critically and pick apart authors' arguments, she says, educators must now teach kids how to consume media critically and, ideally, to produce it.

It's not so easy to establish the study of film in our schools

The UK's Cary Bazalgette pens this response to a recent op-ed (We're All Filmmakers Now). She says most teachers feel they don't have permission to use film and most haven't been trained. Sounds familiar. Can we change that in the US? I hope so.

How Animation & Poetry Can Improve Literacy

On this literacy blog, an educator reflects on how combining the writing of poetry and the film-making process could improve student's literacy skills

Learning in a Digital Age: Teaching a Different Kind of Literacy

Excerpt: "The literacy of the future rests on the ability to decode and construct meaning from one's constantly evolving environment -- whether it's coded orally, in text, images, simulations, or the biosphere itself. Therefore we must be adaptive to our social, economic and political landscape. Those of us living in this digital age are required to learn, unlearn and learn again and again." Full essay here.

Truth, Lies & The Internet: A Report On Young People's Digital Fluency

This is a free, downloadable pamphlet from the UK. Among the findings:

-too many digital natives don't apply checks on the info they access
- many consider the looks of a website rather than the caliber of the content
- few young people are being taught info literacy skills