Global Kids' Online Leadership Program

We are pleased to invite you to Global Kids annual Winter Gala, held at the illustrious Council on Foreign Relations on February 24th. This is Global Kids' twentieth year serving New York City's at-risk youth with our innovative combination of global issues, community engagement, and academic achievement.

The Winter Gala is Global Kids' main fundraiser event for the year, and one of our few public events where anyone can meet directly with some of our Global Kids teen leaders.  This year we are honored to be joined by VIP guests Craig Hatkoff, co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, and Sergio Galvis, a Partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.  

Head to the GK website to register and contribute.  The "young professional" ticket is just $125.  All contributions are tax deductible. If you have any questions, please contact Arti Sheth at asheth@globalkids.org, 212-226-0130 ext. 106.

Posted by Rik at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many of us know about the deadly conflicts that have devastated the North African country of Sudan. What you may not know about is what you can do in your own community to support peace in this wartorn country. On February 12th, you can take a virtual stand for peace in Sudan at the "Salam Project" kick-off event!

On Friday, February 12, you are cordially invited to a virtual presentation by Nisrin Elamin, a Sudanese peace activist, and two Global Kids youth leaders, talking about their work to educate others about the conflict and support peace in Sudan. The event will take place in the web-based virtual world of SmallWorlds, at both 4pm PST and 4PM EST. This talk will be the kick off of a month of service all around the United States in solidarity with Sudan.

Continue reading "Join the Salam Project: Virtual Service to Support Peace in Sudan Starting February 12!" »

Posted by Rik at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On behalf of Global Kids, a leading nonprofit in the field of virtual world education, we would like to invite your organization to apply to participate in a series of free professional development trainings in virtual worlds for nonprofits. Supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the Virtual Worlds Capacity Building for Nonprofits Program aims to facilitate nonprofit organizations in developing an informed strategy on how to integrate these new media tools into their missions.

Over the month of March 2010, Global Kids will be working with a cohort of 5-8 civic and cultural organizations to introduce them to the myriad applications of virtual worlds for the public sector. The "Virtual World Capacity Building Program," now in its 3rd semester, is a three-week crash course in virtual environments, specifically tailored to the interests and needs of nonprofit institutions. Participating organizations will get to explore different virtual worlds, test out different tools and applications, and learn about cutting edge projects run within these 3D, online spaces.

For the first time, Global Kids is soliciting applications for the Winter 2010 session from any civic or cultural organization, anywhere in the world. All interested organizations are encouraged to apply. Selection preference will be given to organizations that are mostly closely associated with Global Kids' core values of education, youth development, civic engagement, human rights and international affairs. Unfortunately, we are only able to accommodate up to eight organizations for a given semester. Applications are due by February 8, 2010. We will inform selected participants by February 15 via email.

Sample topics of the Winter 2010 Capacity Building Program:

• How organizations are using virtual worlds to enhance their real world conferences and events
  
• Why educational institutions from K-12 to university are interested in virtual worlds
  
• What networks and communities of practice can help your organization get started in virtual worlds
  
• How to budget and plan your first virtual project

Posted by Rik at 3:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week I was out of the office for four full days, all consulting in one capacity or another for Global Kids. It has been an amazing journey over these past ten years working to support NYC youth while developing a broad range of expertise in the process that a wide variety of organizations now know they can call upon.

Tuesday & Wednesday - Serious Gaming at the New York Public Libraries
For the first two days, my colleague Rafi Santo and I ran a two-day long training for youth or young adult librarians from three branches of the New York City Public Library system. Over the next few months they will incorporate our Playing For Keeps program into their branches, a 20-session program to support their youth to identify as global citizens, develop game design skills, and learn to combine the two into a prototype for a serious game design. The final designs will be presented in a competition format at our annual collaboration with area youth media and technology organizations - Emoti-Con - in June at the 42nd Street branch of the NYPL. These days brought together our expertise on serious gaming and game design while supporting civic and cultural institutions to implement curriculum that was once designed exclusively for Global Kids Youth Leaders.

Thursday - Exploring Professional Developed for Technology in Schools at the Cooney Center
This was one powerhouse of a meeting. The educational heads of WNET, WGBH and others gathered with the nation's lead teacher support organizations, and a few .com's like Apple, to explore the big picture for best supporting educators to use media and technology in their classrooms. This is the sort of meeting that might take me hours to get my bearings straight and determine my role: what do I have to offer to this discussion? On the other hand, the room was filled with people with whom we’ve had the pleasure of having worked: Shelley Pasnik from the Center For Children and Learning, Lynette Guastaferro from Teaching Matters, and Brigid Barron, fellow MacArthur grantee and Stanford professor, who authored an excellent piece of research to inspire the meeting and move the agenda forward, not to mention the Cooney Center. What impressed me most in reflection was that our previous relationships with each had little to do with the other as the projects were so diverse.

In the end, it was easy for me to see we were one of the few organizations at the table running programs in the informal learning spaces (after school in libraries, museums, community centers, etc.) and could bring that perspective into the room, as well as familiarity with the MacArthur Grantee research that underpinned the briefing (and excites me the most!). Global Kids has been around for twenty years and I am proud to represent our history and reach at a table like this, and little can jazz me more than taking part in bringing MacArthur grantee's ideas into other settings, normalizing and applying them, as it were.

Friday - Supporting Youth Voices at the iZone Conference
Friday I worked with my colleague David Velasquez to support about thirty youth from the ten iZone schools (some of the most technologically sophisticated public schools intentionally disrupting the nature of learning). While staff from their schools met in a different room, the youth focused on identifying and articulating what "good learning" means to them, how their schools currently innovate to meet those needs, and how they can improve further. It was an exciting day. At times it felt like a press briefing, as I had never led a training with so many cameras and flips wielded by the participants, recording my every move.

More importantly, these sixth and ninth graders were on point, so easily able to talk about how they learned best (in groups, listening to heavy metal, etc.) and how their school met their needs (differentiated learning with online language courses, games-based learning, etc.). I talk about this stuff all the time, and wonder how far digital media can push the norms within traditional schools, but here were actual youth living it and experiencing it every day, on the front lines, and it showed. By the end of the day we edited and showed a seven minute video of footage created completely by the youth over the course of the day. It was one of those races against time, with some content naturally dropped along the way, but the process seemed powerful for the youth in attendance and served as a good example of what these youth can do and how they think.

And in the context of this post, it's why I work at Global Kids. I loved everything I had done all week, but nothing could match working with youth like this, learning from them as I supported their voices through digital media to create work to influence education back in their schools. This event called upon what makes our work within the Online Leadership Program so great: our twenty year history as youth development experts addressing social issues and our ten year history using digital media in innovative ways to support youth voice (and often without a net!).

Posted by Barry at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Cooney Center Fellows Program has begun it's 2010-2011 application cycle! This program is a professional development opportunity designed to foster new leaders in the field of digital media and learning.

The fellowship involves a one-year, part-time commitment at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center here in New York, and includes a $50K stipend. The selected Fellow will pursue projects based on his/her personal interest, and take the lead on some of the Center's current initiatives.

To find out more, check out the attached description here.

Posted by Krista at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are excited to announce that Barry, Amira and Rik of Global Kids will be attending the "Diversifying Participation" conference from February 18-20 in sunny San Diego, California.  This digital media and learning event will draw some of the top thinkers and practitioners in the field, from Henry Jenkins to Sonia Livingston, danah boyd, James Paul Gee and many, many more. 

Global Kids is honored to be involved in four different presentations:

• "Breaking Boundaries with Virtual Worlds in a Science Classroom and a Teen Jail: Two Case Studies"
• "Meeting of Minds: Cross-Generational Dialogue on the Ethics of Digital Life"
• "Data Visualization for K-12 Learning"
• and "Mad Skills: Making New Media Literacy practices accessible to educators and students alike"

There are many other amazing panels and presentations planned over the three days, making it hard to plan your day! Check out the full program here. 

Here's the good news: registration is free and open to the public!

Posted by Rik at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past Monday, January 18, Barry Joseph and I got the opportunity to conduct three intensive trainings for Jewish educators in Teaneck, New Jersey. The occasion was the "Jewish Day School Leadership Conference" which brought together some 500 jewish educators from 300 different institutions to the Marriot in Teaneck. It was a really interesting experience and exposure to the unique educational setting of Jewish day schools.

Our first training was a roundtable discussion with a dozen early childhood educators and directors, specifically focused on how they can use social media to better serve the community of teachers, parents and young children they support. It was a very dynamic and free-ranging discussion about various social media and social networking tools, touching on several of the practical, ethical, and programmatic challenges of using these technologies in a school setting. Rather than simply lecture them on what Global Kids has done, Barry and I did our best to lead a discussion about how to navigate these tools themselves and come up with strategies that they themselves can implement after the workshop.

It was a really fun way to start the day.

Continue reading "[conf] Three Social Media Trainings for Jewish Educators" »

Posted by Rik at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight blog recently featured a video story on the "I Dig Science" program conducted by Global Kids and the Field Museum of Chicago this past summer. Produced by Benjamin Wolff.

See the complete video on the MacArthur Spotlight Blog.

Posted by Rik at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As anyone who has participated in a Global Kids' program knows, we have three fundamental guidelines that are the bedrock of all our workshops that we run:

1. One Mic
2. Safe Space
3. and Participate

I created this short animated video of two dogs talking about the guidelines.  Just because.

Made using the awesome Xtranormal animation program.

Posted by Rik at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This Friday, January 22, in Brooklyn is the Haiti Solidarity Benefit, a really cool youth-organized fundraiser for Haiti. Global Kids is one of the organizers of this event, through our partnership with the High School for Global Citizenship. Performers will include :

• Andre Rousseau and Alove Saint Surin
• Haitian Musician Tiga Jean Baptiste and Tchaka
• Ase Dance Theater Collective
• Haitian Musician Oneza Lafontant and Kongo
• Zing Experience
• and Chris Rob

Doors open at 5pm with an art show and food available. Then the show runs from 6-8pm. Just $10 suggested donation.

The benefit will be held at the Prospect Heights Campus at 883 Classon Avenue, between Union and President Ave, just across the street from the Brooklyn Museum (Google maps.)

For more information, contact haiti@hs-gc.org. 

Please spread the word!

Posted by Rik at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)