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The Teach, Learn, Share database is a national platform where educators and systems can share their effective approaches to literacy and numeracy teaching and learning in Australia. Once established, the Teach, Learn, Share database will be the 'go-to' site for information about effective literacy and numeracy strategies for individual teachers, schools, systems and the wider education community. The database will include descriptions of successful literacy and numeracy initiatives in a diverse range of school settings, capacity for targeted searching and links to relevant and appropriate research in the areas of literacy and numeracy.

"The simplest acquisition of literacy can have a profoundly empowering effect personally, socially and politically.  Literacy gives people tools with which to improve their livelihoods, participate in community decision-making, gain access to information about health care, and above all, it enables individuals to realize their rights as citizens and human beings. Literacy is not just about reading and writing; it is about respect, opportunity and development..."

"As educators look for new ways to teach digital literacy or the use of digital technology to find, organize, comprehend, evaluate, and create information, some are turning to social media to help advance the concept in the college classroom. BUT.....colleges leveraging social media to improve digital literacy must focus on students' current use of social media and then find ways to interface those activities with the curriculum."

"Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. DIF involves knowing how digital information is different from print information; having the skills to use specialized tools for finding digital information; and developing the dispositions needed in the digital information environment. As teachers and librarians develop these skills and teach them to students, students will become better equipped to achieve their information needs."

reducing our aims just to types of skills risks boring everyone to death with short lived, tool specific training which doesn't address the social and political context of people's lives or their reasons for engaging with technology.

Information literacy is a human right, according to the Australian Library and Information Association. I found this incredibly moving and inspirational fact out while researching the follwoing presentation on lifelong learning.

Post from Ed Tech and Mobile Learning. "Some of the great resources I learned from Howard Rheingold himself about how to detect crap information and the literacies we need to develop and teach to our students to make them better internet users "

Looking at the New Directions for school leadership and the teaching profession discussion paper, the only evidence presented to support the assertion that Victoria's education outcomes are not improving is the report "Challenges in Australian Education: results from PISA 2009: the PISA 2009 assessment of students' reading, mathematical and scientific literacy" Specifically the New Directions paper focuses on reading literacy, where in 2009, 14,251 students were given a two-hour pen and paper comprehension test. To get an idea of what types of competencies the reading test is assessing we can look at the sample test , with questions range from comprehension about a letter in a newspaper, the ability to interpret a receipt, comprehension around a short story, an informational text, and interpreting a table. While it doesn't seem unreasonable to want our students to be able to accurately perform these kind of tasks, these tests are not a true or accurate representation of the skills and competencies our students need in today's technology driven world.

"A workshop for classroom teachers and teacher librarians which: defines information literacy, introduces tools for developing problems, tasks and questions that involve higher order thinking; and identifies opportunities for embedding technology in the information literacy process." (ran in 1999)

A good overview by Debbie Abilock

What is news literacy? It's considerably broader than the field of journalism education, where young people get a professional orientation to the field as a means to consider career opportunities. News literacy aims to address the needs of all young people, preparing them to be citizens who use news and information to guide their decision-making

A good short piece about how users search, and the importance of teaching information literacy in schools. One problem with search engines is that they are too good at finding information. The users see them as "answer engines" but the users may then do less critical analysis and rely on simple strategies only

This handbook has been informed by the work of fourteen teachers who are interested in how technology is used in classroom teaching and who took part in Futurelab's digital participation project. Rather than being prescriptive, it aims to provide information which will help teachers to make the best use of their own expertise to support students' emerging digital literacy.

Information literacy skills poster

Slides from Buffy J. Hamilton.

From Dan Russell. Abstract:  What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it-knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition-these are all critical parts of being literate as well.