LibrAdventures is a neat use of Google Maps that displays the place and the events that influenced famous authors and their works. LibrAdventures also includes some artists and film directors. You can explore LibrAdventures by selecting a name, a location, or an event from the drop-down menus at the top of the LibrAdventures homepage.

"Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research. "

"Tsundoku" From Open Culture, the best free cultural and educational media on the web. It's a great place to find free ebooks, videos, online learning resources.

These YA coming-of-age novels will make you cry, laugh, and appreciate life. Okay? Okay.

Fear and uncertainty about copyright law often plagues educators and sometimes prevents creative teaching. This course is a professional development opportunity designed to provide a basic introduction to US copyright law and to empower teachers and librarians at all grade levels. Course participants will discover that the law is designed to help educators and librarians.

With the amount of content that is shared on the Internet every minute, it's no surprise that many people feel overwhelmed by the quantity of information out there. This is why content curation is becoming an essential digital literacy skill for teachers and students.

"Storify harnesses curation's role in telling a story by providing a linear platform and the opportunity to link related content with the curator's own text. (Mihailides and Cohen, 2013). Making a story out of linked multimedia content requires media literacy skills of analysis, evaluation and creation."

The Book Girls are only partly real; like most heavily marketed-to demographics, they only sort of exist. Every Book Girl is something else, too - a sportsy girl, a scientist, a nail-art aficionado, a poet, a prodigy, a patient. But the force they are exerting is real. They have created a market for what they love, and they insist upon it. They have allies in boyfriends and boy friends, in parents and other adults, in librarians and book critics. The world of their books is much more complicated than just them, and they are more complicated than just their books.

Expanding Our Wikiverse Save the books. And the film reels. The photos, the manuscripts, the letters, the maps. These artifacts that fill our libraries threaten to sink into oblivion. But the good news? You can save them.

Retracing Our Steps Although now a remote, dusty city at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in present-day Mali, 700 years ago Timbuktu was a bustling commercial and academic center. Traders exchanged salt and gold, while Muslim scholars collected and wrote texts on Islam, medicine, astronomy, math, politics and more.

"Storytelling has been around since the start of Mankind. Storytelling was the basic communicational strategy through which culture, traditions, mores, ways of life and early literature was transmitted from one generation to the other. With the advent of internet and web technologies, storytelling has got some new and wider dimensions. The journey of storytelling from its early beginnings to its actual state is the subject of this wonderful graphic below. It documents the major periods and forms of storytelling that was pervasive during each era. It is really amazing to take a pause and take a look back into history to see how storytelling has evolved to be what it is now."

Text and audio from NPR reporting on a roundup of studies put together by Common Sense Media.

Beautiful and amazing juxtaposition of then and now. "Using Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony as a sort of sonic mortar, Smith bricks the present day onto the British Film Institute's recent restoration of Parkinson and Miller's work. Actually, it's more of a keyhole effect, through which viewers can peep into the past." Beginning at 1:03 "The Strand, by the way, is as cosmopolitan a street as any we have seen, for here are housed our Colonial Brethren..." (Dominion of New Zealand building and Australia House).

"So, when The Wire sat down with Green-a YA superstar who has amassed a fervent following through his novels and his online antics with his brother, Hank-thoughts of fandom and Green's own cultural loves were in the air. "

"Paper books were supposed to be dead by now. For years, information theorists, marketers, and early adopters have told us their demise was imminent. Ikea even redesigned a bookshelf to hold something other than books. Yet in a world of screen ubiquity, many people still prefer to do their serious reading on paper." And this: "People tended to read slowly and somewhat inaccurately on early screens. The technology, particularly e-paper, has improved dramatically, to the point where speed and accuracy aren't now problems, but deeper issues of memory and comprehension are not yet well-characterized."

Half a century before e-books turned publishing upside down, a different format threatened to destroy the industry.

"I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing," said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain."

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

Great way to help teens find the right read. There are many ways to modify the event and make it something you can do anytime classes come in to select a book.

To raise awareness of the educational challenges that many children face, a non-profit organization called LitWorld has designated the first Wednesday of every March "World Read Aloud Day."