This Saturday, students at Gulfstream Elementary in Cutler Bay, Fla. will receive the best Christmas-in-June present ever: a completely refurbished, kid-friendly, and wheelchair-accessible playground. About 1,200 miles north, students at Imani Education Circle Charter School in Philadelphia will also be receiving a playground ' something they have never had before.

Hundreds of volunteers will build both ' in just one day.

The projects are two of 13 nationwide that Knight Foundation has funded through a '$1.48 million grant to KaBOOM!, a nonprofit committed to saving play.

'The long-term intention is to get citizens to act in their own interest and get them engaged in their community through building the playground,' said Damian Thorman, national program director for the Knight Foundation.

Look for more throughout the year in Macon, Detroit and Akron.

At Gulfstream Elementary, the once-rickety, rusty playground that has been off-limits to students will be replaced with a shiny new one, equipped with monkey bars, swings, a rock wall, and chutes and ladders.

The Parent-Teacher Association at Gulfstream had raised $30,000 on its own; it would have taken the school three or more years to raise enough money for the playground, Jill Guarino, president of the school's PTA, told the Miami Herald.

Both playgrounds will also include an Imagination Playground in a Box, a breakthrough play space that encourages unstructured free-play, which is critical to social, intellectual and emotional development.

Students at Randolph Technical Center explain how their games promote education in civics

 

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the World Wide Workshop Foundation have just announced two West Virginia students as winners of the 1st Annual Globaloria Civics Games Competition. Team 'The Fox Racers' won first place with 'The Race to Justice,' a game that teaches about civil law in a fun, interactive way.

Globaloria, a Knight-supported program created in 2006 by the World Wide Workshop Foundation, teaches young people how to create educational games and simulations for their own academic and professional development. By creating these games, students are directly contributing to their communities in socially meaningful ways, while building Web 2.0 skills at the same time. By immersing students and teachers in a learning-by-doing framework, participants not only gain technical abilities, such as wiki formatting, multimedia production, programming, and game design, but also real knowledge of the actual issues they choose to base their games on.

"Globaloria provides the next generation of citizens and decision-makers with the 21^st-century literacy they will need to thrive in the digital age," said Jessica Goldfin, Journalism Program Associate at the Knight Foundation. "We are impressed with how well this approach to civics and news-literacy learning has been embraced by both students and teachers."

Salon.com has a new voice: Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.

Gillmor's blog will "provide media and technology coverage that looks beyond the gloom to ways we can create better, more trustworthy content,' he said. In his first entries, Gillmor has written about Apple's defense of its newer, sterner restrictions on app content, and expressed his skepticism with Facebook's ever-evolving privacy policies.

A former business and technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Gillmor is the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism, by the People, for the People, which focuses on the rise of citizen media and its impact. The Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, which Knight Foundation funds and Gillmor heads, strives to get young entrepreneurs to think outside the box and produce innovative, realistic and sustainable digital media.