Grant from CITF Supports Launch of Chicago Youth Interactive

In a time when schools are struggling to keep students invested in their education and engaged in endeavors of social awareness, learning, and purpose, in 2011 CYVN will carry out Chicago Youth Interactive (CYI), a public education and civic engagement project that brings powerfully compelling stories, documentaries, and media products made by Chicago youth to an expanded audience of students and teachers in the Chicago Public School system. This exciting initiative is made possible by a grant from Chicago Instructional Technology Foundation.

While young people today grow up in a media saturated culture, they rarely experience media created by their peers about the issues that most impact their lives and communities. CYI aims to harness the power of youth generated media as a tool for cross-disciplinary learning, civic engagement, and critical digital literacy. By combining innovative social media and interactive tools with youth-generated media, CYI will raise awareness among youth and mobilize them to better understand and take action on community issues. This project will also evidence the power of youth and social media as an effective pedagogical strategy for teachers and educational leaders.

CYI begins in Spring of 2011 with the curation/organization of a youth media education and distribution package. The package will include 10 exemplary youth-produced media projects across a variety of formats and genres (spoken word, digital games, written stories, radio pieces, and video documentaries) generated from youth media programs in Chicago. One featured work will be CYVN’s NUF SAID project, a citywide data gathering and multimedia production project that examines how the economic crisis has impacted youth in the City of Chicago.

Then during the Summer 2011, CYVN will design and prepare a suite of learning resources to accompany the compendium.
Each youth media project will be accompanied by a suite of learning resource materials including:
• Original media in high quality digital form as well as written transcript of original story.
• Interactive Voice Thread Prompt by the youth author/creator invited student responses and interpretations.
• Ideas for lesson plans – linking the story to themes and subject areas, including the increasingly relevant area of media literacy.
• Toolbox Handouts – downloadable printouts to help facilitate discussions.
• Standards Alignment – linking the story to content standards through a “synthesized” standards listings.
• Links to further resources -connecting and extending story, as well as links to guides for students’ creative media-making projects.

During the final phase of the project, participants (including schools, teachers, and youth media groups) engage with VoiceThread and other interactive tools utilized in the project. VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in five ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). VoiceThread will enable two-way conversations to take place between the creators of the youth media and the student participants in the classrooms that view their works. It will also facilitate a built in evaluation system for assessing the impact of the media on its audiences.

Chicago Youth Interactive (CYI) falls on the heels of Nuf Said, CYVN’s model project of citywide youth media collaboration, open source information sharing, and peer-to-peer data gathering. During Nuf Said, 40 youth pollsters from ten youth media groups, using social and mobile networks, collected 850 survey responses from their peers, aged 12-23. The responses yielded illuminating findings, much of which would be difficult for adult and professional journalists to access on their own. The survey also provided a totally unique jumping off place for youth created media, providing insight into how youth think and feel about some of the key issues in their lives. Dozens of youth media products were created and are shared on the www.nuf-said.org website, that was launched at the end of October 2010.