Did you know that the cast of the ’60s sit-com Green Acres barbequed Arnold (the pig) Ziffel at the final episode wrap party?

Or that you can buy a penguin from Penguinwarehouse.com?

Can you believe that having children lowers the I.Q. of both parents?

I read it today on the Internet, so it must be true. Right?

Through their ever-increasing connectivity to the Internet, our kids have access to more information than has any generation before them. What’s more, as “digital natives”—at home with technologies they have grown up with—they can find this information with growing ease.

What they’re not so good at, it turns out, is recognizing what to believe and how to ethically use all the information at their fingertips. When it comes to media literacy— the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in all its forms—our kids still have a lot to learn.

Media Literacy
Media literacy is a key 21st-century skill because it provides a framework and method to think critically about the media and technologies people use for information and entertainment. According to the nonprofit Center for Media Literacy (CML), media are so ingrained in our lives that even if you keep kids away from TV and computers, you still cannot escape today’s media culture.

As early as 1996, researchers noted that adolescents are aggressively targeted as a profitable consumer market by advertisers. That means they need to be taught specific media literacy skills that allow them to be active, critical consumers of media’s messages. Media literacy is not about memorizing facts or statistics about the media, but rather about learning to raise the right questions about what you are watching, reading or listening to.

Digital Citizenship
Our kids also need to learn how to use the Internet and other technologies ethically. Digital media allow children as young as age 7 or 8 to become part of much larger community. The question is, do they behave as good citizens or not?

Harvard University professor of education Howard Gardner—the one who taught us about multiple intelligences—has been studying ethics and citizenship in American society for many years. His “Young People, Ethics, and the New Digital Media” project asks five questions about ethics in digital media:

• What is your sense of identity and how do you portray yourself to the rest of the world?
• What’s your stance on privacy—your own and that of others?
• Should the issues of ownership and authorship be respected or ignored in digital media?
• Whom should you trust and why should you be trusted?

• What does it mean to belong to a digital community?

  “Whether or not they realize it, the online roles youth are assuming—blogger, Facebook ‘friend,’ filmmaker, citizen—carry responsibilities,” Gardner concludes. “Online participation … involves conscious choices on the part of participants.

  Gardner believes young people have a responsibility to consider the implications of their actions online. He calls on schools, libraries and families to monitor access and teach the skills that can nurture ethical conduct in the digital community.

  Preventing Plagiarism
  One place for schools to start is preventing plagiarism by students who find it all too tempting to “cut-and-paste” their way to excellence—whether it’s in a term paper or in a “borrowed” Facebook profile.

  “The Internet offers a host of downloadable text for nefarious cheaters and desperate procrastinators alike,” writes Harvard professor Rebecca Moore Howard, along with colleague Laura J. Davies, in a recent article in Educational Leadership.

  “And because text can be easily appropriated through cutting and pasting, it is easy for well-intentioned students to overlook the boundaries between what they themselves have produced and what they have slid from one screen (their Internet browser) to another (their word-processed document).”

  Little wonder, they say, that educators are turning to a combination of severe punishments for infractions and automated plagiarism-detecting services such as Turnitin.com to discourage cheating.

  But instead of legislating the wired world, they call instead for teachers and parents to actively teach young people how to make use of the extensive sources they can find on the Internet.

  So…about the pig, the penguins and the parent’s I.Q. It’s all a lie, according to Snopes.com, the Internet’s number one resource for verifying rumors and debunking urban legends, some that have persisted for years.

  Now, if only I can convince my kids about that last one.