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The author raises a good point: is there really a way to teach information literacy in a transferrable way?  Or does teaching it in a particular enviroinment (i.e., backing up concepts with hands-on experience) go further to illustrate the subject?

Tynker is a new computing platform designed specifically to teach children computational thinking and programming skills in a fun and imaginative way. The cloud hosted system is now available to teachers, schools and districts

Superheroes (and enthusiasm) make everything better.

Good tips on learning transfer. Teach for transfer!

We have to get these! We can create our own little MOBIUSbots!

http://littlebits.cc/ Ayah Bdeir is from the MIT Media Lab. I love the Media Lab - it produces the coolest of cool ideas. I'm not sold on using these to make a bot, but I'm definitely going to get some for Freya.

Wow, I cannot wait until Henry is old enough to play with these!

Librarians may find this paragraph interesting: The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

Normally I'd link to the article itself but the comments on the slashdot page are worth a read. "Will they ban 3D printers?" "Knowing our congress they'll try to ban teaching Geometry in schools... you can't print illegal shapes if you don't know shapes!" Sad but true. These are really the kinds of discussions that we will have to have as a society in the very near term. Libraries should be at the forefront of this discussion - they've always had to fight to protects peoples rights to access information. If they have public access 3D printers it's only a matter of time before the government comes knocking wanting to see the shape files that their patrons have been printing just like they do with circulation records and internet history.

An article that makes the case (not surprisingly) that despite the emotional satisfaction in finding something at random from wandering the stacks that teaching students to be good searchers is better.

A Berkeley port of Scratch, a tool for teaching kids to program with puzzle piece like functions/operators/etc.

It's not work related, but since we're all friends here and most of us have kids I wanted to share it here. You all know where I'm at when it comes to food and health but after watching this I'm compelled to go talk to the principal at Grant, share this video, and see if there's anything I can do to help.

Also, there's quite a few other really great TED talks about food, and food as it related to kids.

Like this one: http://www.ted.com/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches.html

Google has a new site called Google Search Education with different lesson plans for picking the right search terms, understanding search results, narrowing a search, and evaluating credibility of sources.

Google is offering formal (free) courses about to power search, with lectures and tests, to be completed over several weeks. I imagine these are useful skills librarians should know and be teaching their patrons. (Apparently, it is more than an intensive Google ad. John's doing it, and has found some of it interesting.)