Why Read? Understanding the importance and value of reading in our daily lives. by Jacqui Denaro on 21 January 2013"

"AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life."

"Books are in a conflicted state. Should they still exist in a digital era? Will they all be replaced by Kindles and Nooks? These questions dominate the discussion of books in our time. A select group of artists, who use books as their medium, engage this discussion from another angle. From pop culture pop-ups, to surreal sculptural stories, to reformations of antique sacred texts, these creators re-envision what the experience of a book can be. At times playful, and other times profound, this episode explores the boundaries of one of the most important human creations. "

Welcome to the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st-Century Learner Lesson Plan Database, a tool to support school librarians and other educators in teaching the essential learning skills defined in the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner. Users can search the database for lesson plans by learning standards and indicators, content topic, grade-level, resources used, type of lesson or schedule, keyword and much more. In addition, registered users can bookmark lesson plans in a portfolio for future use, rate and comment on lesson plans in the community, print to PDF and socially share lesson plans on the web, and create and publish their own lesson plans in the database. Submissions to the Lesson Plan Database are vetted by AASL reviewers to ensure lesson plans published are of the highest quality. The lesson plan template was developed using the Action Example Template from Standards for the 21st-Century Learner in Action. All lesson plans published are aligned with AASL's Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and are crosswalked with the Common Core Standards.

Use engaging videos to create customized lessons. You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube. Watch the video to learn how.

Information Literacy Skills Groups and Accompanying Assignments Created by Librarians from the Kern High School District and Bakersfield College

Help your students become better searchers Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

From the site: "I've been completely obsessed with Google's new mini-site devoted to finding better ways to incorporate proper web searches into the classroom. Dubbed 'Search Education,'Google's new site has an array of lesson plans, videos (check a sample out below), concept maps, and other tools designed to help any educator properly integrate Google." This is just the logical next step for the search (and basically everything else) behemoth as Google pushes its way into the classroom. As part of Search Education, Google has shared a bunch of lesson plans that are organized by degree of difficulty. So, if you consider yourself and / or your students Google experts, you should try out the more advanced plans. If you don't know what 'boolean' means, then you probably should start with the more basic stuff. The following are just some of the many lesson plans brought to you by Google. Check out the site for more info!

"Learning to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically." Curated by Dennis T OConnor

Fact & Issue Sheets A fair and sustainable Australia The fact and issue sheets provide short summaries of issues associated with the achievement of a sustainable society - a society where citizens' wellbeing and their human and cultural rights are fully and equitably protected; where their material standards are supported through a productive economy; and where the physical environment is maintained in a healthy condition over the long term. The topics have been chosen because of their significance to Australia.

Free game to teach Microsoft office skills

Abstract Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind (Mar et al., 2006). We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two other important individual differences: the tendency to be drawn into stories and gender. Even after accounting for these variables, fiction exposure still predicted performance on an empathy task. Extending these results, we also found that exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support.

See section "Reference List" (students required to identify parts of a work to complete a reference entry). "Citing" section may also be useful. The site has Havard style focus but good for generic skills.