Giving Compass' Take:

•  Reclaiming Digital Futures toolkit is a resource guide to help educators connect out-of-school-young people to digital learning and technology.

• The author mentions that offering digital learning skill sets to young kids now will benefit them for the future workforce. What other workforce development innovations are happening to prepare young people? 

• Here are three ways to help students become better digital citizens. 

When kids first join the Maker Foundations program at Digital Harbor Foundation, a technology-focused out-of-school organization in Baltimore, they are given a pile of everyday items such as an electric toothbrush, a plastic cup, a few markers and some rubber bands.

Then they are told: Build a robot that draws. “It’s sort of sad to see the panic on their faces when they realize that’s all the direction you’re giving them,” says Shawn Grimes, the Center of Excellence Managing Director at Digital Harbor. “But that’s what we do—we remove support structures from them so that they’re learning on their own. If they have a question, the facilitator—they aren’t called teachers here—will say, ‘Did you Google it?’”

Prodding kids to become agile digital-media autodidacts is one way Digital Harbor fulfills its mission of preparing youth for a future that will have jobs and careers that don’t yet exist. Another way is through its student-staffed 3D print shop, where more advanced kids learn digital design and fabrication skills as well as workplace protocol all while making products—ranging from braille rings to wheelchair joysticks—for paying clients.

“We’re really trying to make the students leaders,” says Grimes, “to make them feel like they have experiences that they can legitimately list on a résumé before they even graduate high school.”

Digital Harbor’s dedication to providing kids with the tools to pave their own future paths is one reason it was chosen to partner with the Susan Crown Exchange and researchers at the University of California Irvine and New York University. The collaboration produced the Reclaiming Digital Futures toolkit, a free web-based guide designed to help educators at out-of-school youth organizations integrate technology and digital learning into their programming and practices.

Read the full article about digital learning can connect youth to opportunity by Kelli Anderson at EdSurge.