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"Critical thinking is a skill that we can teach to our students through exercise and practice. It is particularly a skill that contains a plethora of other skills inside it. Critical thinking in its basic definition refers"  to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with evaluating information as well as evaluating our thought in a disciplined way ". All of our students think in a way or another but the question  is , do they really think critically ? are they able to evaluate the information they come across ? are they capable of going beyond the surface thinking layer ? Can they make connections between what they learn and the outer world? Can they question the status quo of their knowledge ?"

The Common Core State Standards for Reading call upon students in grades K-12 to read and comprehend complex literary and information texts independently and proficiently. But before students can learn how to tackle complex texts, teachers must be able to identify texts that meet this challenge. In Big Skills for the Common Core: Literary Strategies for the 6-12 Classroom Amy Benjamin and Michael Hugelmeyer outline six traits that can be used to identify complex texts and the difference between informational texts and literary nonfiction.

"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)

Nancy Blachman and Jerry Peek  have put together a very useful guide to Google Search Operators. You can find this information on Google's own help pages (http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861 ), but there is more information in this guide that can be quite useful including the syntax, the capabilities, and an example for each operator.

A well written post about content curation and the benefits it can offer teachers and students especially is part of the inquiry process. Discusses how it may be used to develop information literacy skills so they can become competent at locating, evaluating, and useing information

EducationEye allows the user to discover, explore and share new ideas. It maps hundreds of top educational websites, blogs, forums and case studies to provide up to date information about innovative ideas being explored in the education community. The information is then present in a visual format that is itself interactive. Type in your search term and let it find the relevant articles, websites or links. This is a innovative tool from Futurelab and well worth a visit

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future.  If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future. It is important to note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. More information at the end of this post.

"The nature of evolving technology sees the emergence of new trends and behavior among young people and new efforts by government and industry to combat harmful behaviors. FOSI provides periodic information to keep you informed about these issues."

EduFeedr is an educationally enhanced feed reader for blog-based courses. The project is currently in the design phase. This website contains information about the design and development of EduFeedr. All information from https://wiki.mozilla.org/EduFeedr_Blueprint will be moved to this site soon.

A teacher created these for her classroom so that she could share Bloom's with her kids in different ways that would make their classroom fun, but also give them a different way of viewing the information. Here she is sharing her Bloomin' Tree. As she started making her Bloom's re-imagines, students started coming to her with ideas of how to display the information. The tree was a student idea and the boy underneath is Lance, who made the suggestion.

The SPARKY Awards challenge you to illustrate in a short video presentation what you see as the value of sharing information. Use your imagination to suggest what good comes from bringing down barriers to the free exchange of information.

"As little as we know about the future for which we are preparing our students, it is clear that it will be a place that is governed by information. Accessing, processing, building with, and communicating that information is how we will all make our livings."

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Energy Kids is a website produced by the US Energy Information Administration for the purpose of educating students about energy and its many forms. Energy Kids provides a wealth of easily accessible information about energy which students can use to play games, solve riddles, and take quizzes about energy. Some of the games students will find include Energy Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and riddles. Energy Kids also provides students of all ages with ideas and outlines for science fair projects around the energy theme. The science fair projects are available as free PDF downloads.

Web 2.0 tools in the information skills process

The FlipInFocus site is all about the Flip video camera and associated peripherals. With a blog, videos forums and other aspects the site has lots of information for anyone who has a Flip camera. For $14.95 you can purchase a lifetime membership of the site which entitles you to access all of the workshops and other information.

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.

Mashpedia is a real-time, multimedia and social encyclopedia with millions of articles providing dynamic, fresh information; it's free to use and open for public participation, allowing users to discuss specific topics, post and answer questions, share relevant links or contribute in new creative ways. Mashpedia presents an organized mashup of results from Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, Blog Posts, and further contextual information, thus providing a quick, practical outlook for every topic.