Digital Natives: Teens, Tweens, & Digital Media: YOUmedia Toolkit Now Available

A new toolkit now makes it easier to plan, build and sustain a digital learning lab in your school, library or museum space.

---

Filed by Sarah Jackson

If you’re an educator, librarian or museum professional and are spending time this summer looking for new ways to engage teenagers, you might want to check out the newly released YOUmedia Network Toolkit.

The YOUmedia Network is a group of libraries, museums and community-based organizations that invite young people to create, learn and build skills with traditional and digital tools at new digital learning labs.

The toolkit includes resources to help organizers plan, build and sustain a digital learning lab in a school, library or museum space. The toolkit is organized into sections like: Getting Started, Physical Space, Online Space, Programs, Staffing, Research, Operations, and Documentation and Evaluation.

YOUmedia first started in Chicago with the digital space for teens at the Harold Washington Library and is now expanding to other libraries and sites around the country. Its core philosophy is that youth are best engaged when they’re following their passions, collaborating with others, and being makers and doers, not passive consumers.

In Chicago this summer, teens are busy recording their own podcasts, gaming, sharing original music and poetry, and collaborating with sound designers from the Steppenwolf Theater as part of a citywide anti-youth violence campaign called “Now is the Time.”

You can view more of these projects in action at Spotlight, and read about how other community organizations, museums and libraries are creating their own digital learning labs.

The project is a collaboration between the MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, IMLS and the Pearson Foundation.