[press] Global Kids' Digital Leadership for the Real World

Global Kids' work online was featured in this Cable in the Classroom article regarding "sites to excite leadership potential in and beyond the classroom.".

Digital Leadership for the Real World
Through after-school programs and web resources—from youth-led dialogues to virtual worlds—Global Kids’ online leadership director Barry Joseph works to create experiential models with global issues to help develop youth leadership. Here, he gives tips for finding, using, and expanding on digital media for youth-engagement lessons.

What skills are you trying to encourage?
We want youth to be able to learn that education isn’t something that other people give to them, but is something they get to be in charge of. It’s not a burden, but it’s actually something that opens opportunities in their life and can be fun.

What should educators look for in Internet resources for lessons in leadership?
Look for something that truly engages young people—something [they] would want to do if you weren’t there making them do it. At the same time, make sure the thing that is engaging them is truly educational. That means looking at things that are explicitly developed for education and making sure they’re something that a young person would truly be engaged around, and at the same time, considering things that were not created explicitly for educational purposes and seeing how they can be used to teach.

How can educators promote these skills in their everyday lessons?
Give youth opportunities to create things, to work in groups... Create an environment that understands, for example, that with traditional education, if you ask somebody for help while you’re taking a test, that’s called cheating, but in the workplace— or playing a massively multiplayer game— collaboration is the name of the game. Talk about who took on leadership skills, who did not, and what that process was like.

Download the document here.