"One of the reasons that some teachers like to create their custom search engines is so that they can control which websites appear when their students search. You can also control how many sites appear in a search result by building a custom search engine. This can be useful with young students who are just learning to search and can be overwhelmed by the number of results or confused by content that is far above their reading levels. "

"The Learning Futures programme was established in order to find out more about how best to make schools more engaging places to learn. Engaging learning involved good leadership in learning environments. This document is well worth exploring as it positions schooling within a culture of 21c learning

"Encouraging young people to read has never been harder - on the one hand. Recess and lunchtimes at our school attest to a full-to-bursting library, but on closer inspection our boys are socialising around the games on their ipads. On the other hand, the technology we sometimes blame for a drop in an interest in literature could also become our saving grace in bringing the passion back in reading."

"Digital literacy is the topic that made the etmooc learning space so irresistible to me… I think as educators we spout off about wanting our students to be digitally literate, but not many of us (myself included) have a firm grasp about what that actually means, and quite a number of us are still attempting to become digitally literate ourselves."

"create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad's camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme."

The 7 rules for creating effective slides include 1) slides are not documents; 2) picture superiority effect; 3) slides should be simple; 4) slides must have unity; 5) display data clearly; 6) use multimedia wisely; 7) don't forget your audience.

"Share and discuss your ideas, documents and concepts visually in one place rather than exchanging endless e-mail attachments."

"Pinterest is straightforward and doesn't require a lot of technological experience to get started. Educators should review their school district's policies to make sure they are in compliance before opening a Pinterest account as it is a public site and any ideas that are "pinned" may be re-pinned to another user's site. In order to create a Pinterest group for a course you are teaching, you will need to do the following:"

"Project-based learning (PBL) is a method used to cultivate learning and teach students 21st century skills. The idea is "built upon authentic learning activities that engage student interest and motivation," and "generally reflect the types of learning and work people do in everyday world outside the classroom" (pbl-online.org). During project-based learning, students are approached with a complex question, problem, or challenge, which they respond to through a lengthy process of analysis and reflection. These projects are carefully planned, managed, and evaluated-and in the end students have created a high-quality, meaningful product."

"Similar to Facebook, you must be 13 or older to sign up for Goodreads, which helps to explain why it's a useful tool for recommending books to young adults. It's also a great way to stay in touch during the summer, because students can see what their librarians or teachers are reading. And since kids can write reviews for the site, it also offers them opportunities to offer an in-depth analysis of the titles they've read."

"We bring technology and great people together to get kids reading."

"School library and information technology programs are a vital resource for student learning. This video to highlight the essential role teacher librarians play in information and technology literacy instruction, reading advocacy, and information management. More information available on our website: http://WLMA.org"

"Over the last month I've started using Diigo as my primary tool for bookmarking links. Yesterday, Diigo released a new version of their browser extension. The updated extension includes some features that are quite handy. The most significant of the updates is a streamlined screenshot process. Now you can click the browser extension to take a screenshot of the page that you're viewing. "

"It took four years to hit 21 billion tweets. Now Twitter users generate nearly half a billion a day, and the Library of Congress will be archiving and indexing all of them."

"A blog about search, search skills, teaching search, learning how to search, learning how to use Google effectively, learning how to do research. It also covers a good deal of sensemaking and information foraging."