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Very specific tips for classroom

With digital data burgeoning, helping students make sense of information is more challenging now than ever. Infographics -visual representations of data- can play a critical role in developing students' information literacy so they can make sense of their world

What if we applied the psychology of what makes technology attractive to students...to our practices in the classroom? Using this idea, in addition to using more technology in the classroom, why not design the traditional human / face-to-face classroom experience to be more like what makes technology so engrossing to modern students? Do these principles sound familiar... Deliver information in bite sized chunks, Create mental models, Use short stories to help process information, Learning happens and is remembered through repetition, People are motivated by Progress and Mastery, Sustained attention lasts 10 minutes, and the use of Progressive Disclosure. Here are 100 little articles that could have big implications in the classroom.

"Evernote is a tool for keeping track of, well, everything. At least everything as far as digital information goes, or information that can be digitized. Evernote comprises a Web-based service and clients for Windows, Mac OS X, mobile devices, and extensions for Web browsers. It's a service I've been using for years, and over that time I've picked up a few tips and tricks for getting the most out of the tool."

Alan November Information Fluency Quiz

"An infopic is a photo with text layered on top that is designed to communicate a message. The message might be a summary, quote, definition, notes, data, weblink, hashtag, or other informational tidbits. The information might come from a conference, workshop, activity, lesson, video, book, a conversation, etc. Your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Plus are great places to share infopics." Tony shares how to create infopic in a great video. He is an amazing teacher!

" Most of the strategies described below have been developed and tested by teachers in Princeton, Madison and elsewhere. They are offered as practical, effective activities that help shift the focus of classrooms from teacher orchestrated mastery and memory of information to student processing of information to create understanding and improve problem-solving."

Some great ways to stop killing curiosity and stimulate questioning in science and technology. An oldie but a goodie.

"School librarians are information professionals, who can support and teach information, critical and digital literacy skills. Research skills from finding books via your school library catalogue to researching academic online resources such as Science in Context, helping students to navigate those online tools that can't be searched with a question (like they like do in Google), explaining and using keywords, creating good research questions and guiding them onto the internet searching with the knowledge and skills about how to do this safely."

"As a parent, I have always been able to help my children find good sources of information in order to do their homework. How do I know where to find the best information? Do I have some inside knowledge that most parents don't? Yes! How? I am a librarian… I have long believed that if parents knew about the resources available from their school library to support their children's homework they would be relieved and happy. They would be able to guide them to use these good tools without worrying about quality or reliability. Many of our resources go unused for two reasons, firstly, many teachers and students do not know about these resources, how easy they are to use and reference and secondly, parents don't know they exist."

"This is an interesting history site about explorers… except it isn't. If you look at the information it is wildly wrong and the site is designed to teach about fact checking and to show children that not all information on the Internet is trustworthy."

The modern workplace's vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. An office setup for generating ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren't flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting. Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management, far from that madding crowd. He has a contrarian management technique that's peculiarly old school - write it down.

"I love patterns, diagrams and pictures. Ask me to record information and it gets plastered over a page in bubbles, a mind map or random boxes. I'm not particularly artistic but I find I like to store information in this way. Even with telephone numbers - I remember the pattern the digits make, not the number itself."

"Gradually, an important and growing evidence of the impact of understanding neuroscience in terms of learning and education has started to inform pedagogy, along with a better appreciation of how we learn. Yet, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding to what neuroscience science is, and many within the education sector would struggle to explain the principles, science and research to recognise how the brain processes information. Fundamentally, neuroscience literally means the 'science of the nervous system', making use of the principles and many techniques from the main science disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology."

The Race is a 30-minute weekly newscast meant to give Americans the information they need. Short topic specific information.

Great suggestions and link for helping students learn how to critically evaluate web delivered information.