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This week, the Paris Review let us in on a little secret - an illegal, speakeasy-style bookstore right here in our fair city of New York.

Might help create a blended classroom, even when you have to share the blender.  Common sense advise for the real world of underequipped classrooms and stretched thin teachers.

All new students go through quite a lengthy induction process in the first three weeks at the University. The library is slotted into that - how much time we get with the students varies between departments - and so it's a good opportunity for us to make contact, promote our services, and try and embed ourselves in the academic culture, but also tricky because the students are overloaded with information as it is. I wanted to give each of my departments an interactive map with all the library info relevant to them specifically - the idea being that it's easier to navigate an actual map of the library than it is to just search for stuff on the library website. Because each department would have a bespoke map it would mean the students had all the info they needed in one place, and because I created the maps in Prezi they could also be used as a presentation tool (as well as a stand-alone web object, later; I give students the URL of the Prezi itself and tell them not to worry about writing down any of the other URLs it contains).

Blog post on teaching information literacy to high school students

Pinterest is a digital pinboard application which started just last year but has quickly become one of the top 10 most trafficked social networking websites according to Hitwise. During the second week in December the website had over 11 million visitors. This is pretty impressive considering that the site is still in the invite-only stage.

Unfortunately, too many people consider libraries as mere rooms full of books and computers, and librarians as mere functionaries in charge of the rooms and their contents. When district leaders look for savings in a budget, too often they see the most important teacher in a school as the most expendable. California schools have seen a marked decrease in the number of teacher librarians in recent years. New York City has about 50% more schools than it did in 2002, but more than half of the district's libraries have closed in the past decade. In California, New York, and anywhere else cutting libraries, it's a classic example of a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to budgeting: there's no shortage of evidence that libraries and librarians - both, together - have a strongly positive impact on student learning.

Teachers should embrace the idea of students choosing their own books, even if they are too hard, Barbara C. Wheatley says.