Hiroshima Day, 6 August

This day commemorates the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The message of Hiroshima, as reflected in the lives of the survivors, is ‘Never Again!’

The promise on the Memorial Cenotaph at Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park reads: ‘Let All Souls Here Rest in Peace, For We Shall Not Repeat the Evil.’ 

See the Hiroshima Peace Memorial site: http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html and also the Peace Building section of edna's Global Education website: http://www.globaleducation.edna.edu.au/globaled/go/pid/554

The wrecked framework of the Museum of Science and Industry as it appeared shortly after the the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945.  City officials decided to preserve this building as a memorial though they had at first planned to rebuild it.  The dome has come to serve as a symbol of the destruction of Hiroshima.

Credit: Donated by Corbis-Bettmann
Source http://aboutjapan.japansociety.org/content.cfm/hiroshima_peace_dome

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myfuture Video Competition

myfuture is Australia's career information & exploration service, supported by funding from the Australian Government, and is a joint initiative of Australian, state and territory governmnets.

The myfuture Video Competition - Best School Entry category opened on 30 July and will closes on 29 October 2010. Individual students and groups are encouraged to enter.

The aim of the competition is to assist young people (aged 12-25) to explore career ideas
by producing a 2-3 minute video on an occupation that interests them.
To assist educators and students with creating videos, the competition is supported by a wide range of complimentary educational resources. These valuable resources are relevant to career education and video production.
This is a motivating and exciting opportunity for students Australia wide to explore their future in a creative and innovative way.

New categories for the 2010 competition include the myfuture Youth Video Award (non secondary school) that offers a cash prize of $7500.
This category commences on 1 August and closes on Friday 28 February 2011.

All entrants will also have the chance to win an additional $5000 with the myfuture Viewers’ Choice Video Award.
Voted by myfuture visitors, videos entered into the Youth and School categories will be automatically submitted into the Viewers’ Choice category.

Visit the myfuture website (http://www.myfuture.edu.au) for further information
and to sign up to receive regular competition updates that will provide helpful tips for producing a video entry.

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Students need education in media literacy

This is probably not news to educators, but a new study of American college students has found that students will often choose a website simply because it tops a Google search result. In addition they seem to lack the ability to determine the credibility or the authoritativeness of what they've found.

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others. source

The Partnership for Twenty-First Century Skills has identifed the following as one of the important elements intwenty-first century student outcomes.

Information, Media and Technology Skills

    * Information Literacy
    * Media Literacy
    * ICT Literacy

Critical Thinking is listed under Learning and Innovation Skills.

Critical Literacy is defined in a Wikipedia article as

an instructional approach that advocates the adoption of critical perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and it offers strategies for uncovering underlying messages. There are several different theoretical perspectives on critical literacy that have produced different pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. All of these approaches share the basic premise that literacy requires the literate consumers of text to adopt a critical and questioning approach.

The new Australian curriculum gives explicit attention to ten general capabilities (literacy, numeracy, information and communication technology (ICT), thinking skills, creativity, self-management, teamwork, intercultural understanding, ethical behaviour and social competence), and the development of critical literacy is recognised in more than one syllabus.

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